ous damage. The treaty Indians of Rogue River sickened in the reservation, and the agent permitted them to roam a little in search of health. Some of them being shot by white men, their chiefs demanded that the murderers be brought to justice, as had been promised them, but it was not done. Few of such cases ever came into the courts,[1] and it was as rare an occurrence for an Indian to be tried by process of law.[2]
So great had been their wrongs during the past five years, so unbearable the outrages of the white race, that desperation seized the savages of the Klamath, Scott, and Shasta valleys, who now took the war-path toward the country of the Modocs, to join with them in a general butchery of immigrants and settlers.
In the absence of a regular military force, that at Fort Jones, consisting of only seventy men, wholly insufficient to guard two hundred miles of immigrant road, the governor was requested to call into service volunteers, which was done. Governor Davis also wrote to General Wool for troops. Meanwhile a company was sent out under Jesse Walker, who kept the savages at bay, and on its return received the commendations of Governor Curry, Davis having in the mean time resigned.
This expedition was used by the dominant party for many years to browbeat the influential whigs of southern Oregon. The Statesman facetiously named it the "expedition to fight the emigrants;" and in plainer language denounced the quartermaster-general and others as thieves, because the expedition cost forty-five thousand dollars.[3]
- ↑ In Judge Deady's court the following year a white man was convicted of manslaughter of an Indian, and was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. Or. Statesman, June 2, 1855.
- ↑ The slayers of Edward Wills and Kyle, and those chastised by Major Kearney in 1851, are the only Indians ever punished for crime by either civil or military authorities in southern Oregon. U. S. H. Misc. Doc. 47, 58, 35th cong. 2d sess.
- ↑ Grasshoppers had destroyed vegetation almost entirely in the southern valleys this year, which led to a great expense for forage.
