amboat, which I had sent back to
Vancouver, returned, bringing to my assistance from Vancouver,
Captain Henry D. Wallen's company of the Fourth Infantry and a
company of volunteers hastily organized at Portland, but as the
Cascades had already been retaken, this reinforcement was too late to
participate in the affair. The volunteers from Portland, however,
were spoiling for a fight, and in the absence of other opportunity
desired to shoot the prisoners I held (who, they alleged, had killed
a man named Seymour), and proceeded to make their arrangements to do
so, only desisting on being informed that the Indians were my
prisoners, subject to the orders of Colonel Wright, and would be
protected to the last by my detachment. Not long afterward Seymour
turned up safe and sound, having fled at the beginning of the attack
on the Cascades, and hid somewhere in the thick underbrush until the
trouble was over, and then made his way back to the settlement. The
next day I turned my prisoners over to Colonel Wright, who had them
marched to the upper landing of the Cascades, where, after a trial by
a military commission, nine of them were sentenced to death and duly
hanged. I did not see them executed, but was afterward informed
that, in the absence of the usual mechanical apparatus used on such
occasions, a tree with a convenient limb under which two empty
barrels were placed, one on top of the other, furnished a rude but
certain substitute. In executing the sentence each Indian in turn
was made to stand on the top barrel, and after the noose was adjusted
the lower barrel was knocked away, and the necessary drop thus
obtained. In this way the whole nine were punished. Just before
death they all acknowledged their guilt by confessing their
participation in the massacre at the block-house, and met their doom
with the usual stoicism of their race.

CHAPTER VI.

MISDIRECTED VENGEANCE--HONORABLE MENTION--CHANGE OF COMMAND--EDUCATED
OXEN--FEEDING THE INDIANS--PURCHASING A BURYING-GROUND--KNOWING RATS.

While still encamped at the lower landing, some three or four days
after the events last recounted, Mr. Joseph Meek, an old frontiersman
and guide for emigrant trains through the mountains, came down from
the Dalles, on his way to Vancouver, and stopped at my camp to
inquire if an Indian named Spencer and his family had passed down to
Vancouver since my arrival at the Cascades. Spencer, the head of the
family, was a very i