of the outlying settlers or to avenge the unprovoked and brutal crimes against them. Many immigrant families were totally destroyed, the women and children suffering every outrage which fiendish imagination could devise. The amount of property destroyed by Indian attacks upon immigrants, settlers and government supplies, was enormous, and almost none of it was ever repaid to the people who suffered.
It has been the fashion among a class of persons, absolutely ignorant of conditions on the frontier, to prate loudly of the wrongs visited upon the poor Indian. No one, with any knowledge of the facts, will deny that the Indians were oftimes wrongfully treated by the whites, but as General Sheridan wrote in 1870, "So far as the wild Indians are concerned, the problem to be decided is, 'Who shall be killed, the whites or the Indians?' Since 1862, at least eight hundred men, women and children have been murdered within the limits of my present command in the most fiendish manner, women ravished, and they and their little children horribly tortured, and then after suffering the pangs of a thousand deaths, killed and scalped." General Sherman also wrote strongly against the Indian apologizers and sympathizers, referring in the most vigorous language to the great number of persons butchered in the department east of the Rocky mountains.
The first Indian war in Oregon was with the Cayuses, mostly with its scene of operations in what is now Walla Walla county, this state. The great war period was a few years later, from 1855 to 1858. during which there was a general uprising of the confederated tribes of Oregon and Washington, in Eastern Oregon and Washington, in the Rogue River region of southern Oregon, and along the eastern shore of the upper Puget Sound.
Individual acts of violence and oppression on the part of white men, from time to time, induced acts of retaliation, but the criminal procrastination and indifference of the general government was responsible for most of the troubles between the settlers and the Indians. The policy of the government was to encourage a vanguard of settlers to cross the constantly receding frontier. This began almost immediately after the close of the war of the Revolution. The government never provided protection for these people, but after most of them had been impoverished by frequent attacks from the Indians, accompanied by murder and outrage, an insufficient army would be sent out to overawe and perhaps punish the savages. While I am no
