Rogue River War, Part Three--Open War

This is an 1865 photograph of Chief John (or Tecumtum), a chief of Rogue River Native Americans who rallied ten years earlier to fight deportation from their ancestral lands.  The Grand Council Treaty of 1853 had given some respite from white "vigilante" groups looking to exterminate "Indians" as long as they stayed on the reservation around the Table Rocks. But the confines of reservation life had brought death to dozens of his people in the form of malaria and other diseases.   

Chief John group fought off US troopers and volunteer forces for the better part of 1855-56.  The photograph was taken shortly before his death on the tiny and rocky island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, where he had been kept prisoner by the US government.    

 

The Massacres of the Nasomahs and the Coquilles

The last battles of the war began in early 1854, near the southern Oregon coast. A group of forty white miners  atttacked three villages of Nasomah Indians.  Indian sub-agent F.M. Smith described one of the massacres in that area as follows--"the Indians were aroused from sleep to meet their deaths...fifteen men and one squaw were killed...all but one of the houses of the Indians were fired and utterly destroyed. Thus was committed a massacre too inhuman to be readily believed."(1)  The miners later justified the attack on the encampments by acts of "insolence" by the Nasomahs, including thefts of property and horses. They insisted to subagent Smith that the Indians were on the brink of a full-out attack and that the actions they took were, in effect, assertive self-defense.   Smith was not convinced and considered the white men who committed the deeds "savages" who were only looking for a provocation. (2)  It would have been useless to arrest the white savages, however, since a jury made up of white men from the local area would never have convicted a fellow "paleface" of any hostile act against a native. As if to prove the point, one leader of a similar treacherous attack and mass murder against the Coquille tribe was arrested and sent to the coastal town of Port Orford--where an army fort was nearby--to await trail.  The man was shortly freed for "want of sufficient  evidence" by a civilian justice of the peace.  

More massacres followed, again mainly along or near the Oregon Coast.  Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory, Joel Palmer,  a basically good man  trying to spare the native tribes while dealing with the strong prejudices of local settlers,  began to grow alarmed at the frequency of the attacks.  Palmer feared native warriors  would soon answer in kind against isolated farmers and miners, thus triggering all-out  war. Palmer informed the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, George W. Manypenny,  of the situation. Palmer painted a grim picture for any hope of maintaining peace. 

Meanwhile, on the Table Rocks Reservation, site of the Grand Council Treaty of the previous year, one quarter of the estimated 500 Indians had succumbed to malaria and pneumonia during the harsh winter of 1853-54.   More and more Umpquas, Shastas, Rouges and other Indian groups left the reservation and joined those holding out against the treaty in the  hinterlands away from the mining towns and emigrant trails, to await a time for a counter-attack.   

(above, the modern state of Oregon.  The small pink shaded in the lower left area shows the location of the Rogue River Valley. Below, an 1890 map of the Rogue River Valley area, which includes Jacksonville, center. In the mid-1850's Jacksonville was the central area of white settlement, with about 800-1200 permanent residents. It also served as a center for the mining camps  along the  Rogue/Illinois and Applegate river system.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacksonville and John Beeson 

(above ) One of the earliest depictions of the mining town of Jacksonville, from the mid-1850's. 

Jacksonville had a bad reputation--much deserved--as a center of anti-Indian violence.  Many of the criminal hoodlums who had terrorized San Francisco in the early Gold Rush days of that city had escaped out of California--one step ahead of the city vigilante committees set up to end the total lawlessness --and made their way to the first city north of the California border--Jacksonville.  

      Shortly before the Grand Council Treaty of 1853 put an temporary end to hostilities, a nine-year old native boy was about to be hanged in the main street of the town by a group of vigilantes.  The mob was looking to avenge a recent Native warrior attack 15 miles away near the small settlement of Ashland, that the boy had nothing to do with.  One man, James Sutton, a newspaper man also from Ashland, tried to stop the lynching by trying to convince the mob that had gathered that he would care for the boy. Someone shouted out that Sutton should be stopped, that the boy would only grow up to kill whites. 

Sutton then tried to take the boy off the street to the nearby United States Hotel to get the frighten child something to eat.  He was attacked by three miners with long knives and seriously wounded. The boy was summarily hanged. 

(left, Jacksonville mother and child, 1850's, photo by Peter Britt.)  

In other Siskiyou Mountain towns in the area (such as Yreka, California, another gold-mining settlement)  captured Indian males faced similar lynchings, in some cases even after more upstanding citizens had  found the native defendants innocent and tried to have them released from further harm. Wherever official presence of Federal soldiers was weak, such activity went unmolested. 

  An early resident of Jacksonville, John Wesley Hillman, later described the frontier town in his memoirs: "(We) had as temporary citizens some half-dozen well-known gun fighters and quite a crew of gamblers and other riff-raff.  To claim (Jacksonville) as your home town was to place yourself as an all-around gunman and fighter."     

There were white settlers being killed by outlying bands of Rogue tribes--normally after volunteer scouting parties were looking to find small tribal groups that had stolen horses or attacked farms. The punitive attacks finally did the thing that the settlers most feared--a general native-American uprising.

One Jacksonville resident, John Beeson, stands out as an exception.  A Methodist lay minister and family farmer, Beeson urged his fellow citizens in a Methodist Quarterly Meeting meeting in the Fall of 1854 to avert total war and come to some peaceful understanding with the native population.   His eloquent plea for tolerance  was met  by stone silence by his fellow citizens.  Beeson would not  be silenced but continued to speak out in public meetings until mid-1855.  His remarks were met with some fanatics making arguments  for the extermination of all Indians, even by using a false treaty to lure them into giving up their weapons and leaving themselves unprotected. (3)  Those who had expressed support for Beeson in other quarters stood silent when it came time to speak up with him. One man did come foreward after the meeting and offered to send a copy of his remarks to the Commisioner of Indian Affairs. (4)

    Beeson's small farm soon became a refuge for native people fearing persecution, much to the consternation of his neighbors.  Southern settlers, ofwhich there were many in the area, also were angered that Beeson had stood for the Territorial Legislature as a anti-slavery Republican.  (Slavery was forbidden in the Oregon Territory by Congress, but so was the entrance of black setlers to the region.)  Legally blacks could be whipped and forced to leave the state, although such laws were not enforced, few blacks before or after statehood and the Civil War came to Oregon, especially southern Oregon.  

 In the Summer of 1855, Beeson's son discovered a plot on his father's life. "The Father of Oregon Civil Rights"  had to flee Jacksonville to the northern section of Oregon, where white and native relations were relatively friendly.   He later wrote 'A Plea for the Indians; With Facts and Features of the Late War in Oregon" (1857).   

The Rogue River War, Final Phase  

The Rogue River War went forward, with a magnification of similar events as had characterized earlier bloodletting.  Here is a excerpt from u-shistory.com on the events:   

"Joel Palmer, Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs; and General John E. Wool, the U.S. Army commander on the Pacific Coast, actually opposed the new hostilities. But General Lane, the territorial delegate in Washington and a heavyweight in the ruling Democratic party, asserted himself in favor of war, and anticipated receiving swift remuneration for war claims.

"Indian people who chose to fight, led by Tecumtum (Chief John) of the Etch-ka-taw-wah band, took refuge in the Coast Range. They effectively repelled assaults, most notably in the Battle of Hungry Hill at the end of October 1855. Others chose to place themselves under the protection of regular troops at Fort Lane, commanded by Captain Andrew Smith. They were removed in January 1856, to the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwestern Oregon.

"In February 1856, the natives in the mountains brought the fight down the Rogue River to the Pacific Coast, apparently to buy time to find food following a harsh winter. They nearly cleared the coast of non-natives, but in May they came under attack from two directions.

"Regular army troops moved north along the coast from Crescent City, California, and met little opposition. Most of the combatants submitted to that unit's commander, apparently because they believed that the army would protect them from more predatory volunteer troops.

"The volunteers, meanwhile, came down the Rogue toward the coast, and at Big Meadow attacked natives who had already submitted to the regulars.

"The followers of Tecumtum put up their final resistance at Big Bend on the river, where they nearly overcame regular troops who were guarding a prisoner-of-war camp.

"In 1856, in a ghostly reminiscence of the Cherokees' Trail of Tears, between 900 and 1,000 natives were compelled to relocate to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations west of present-day Salem, Oregon. Some were obliged to trudge up the coast to their new domicile, the Coast Reservation, on the central coast. There was fierce resistance to the removal because people thought they would be allowed to stay at Table Rock."

In his final report about the conflict on May 30, 1856, General Wool of the Department of the Pacific, submitted the following:

"No man can have felt more keenly or grieved more sincerely than I at the sacrifice in southern Oregon of many innocent men, women and children by savage warfare.  But what was the cause?  No other than the massacre by volunteers and citizens of some 80 or more friendly Indians. As in the case of  the killing of a friendly chief (Old Jake) and his band comprising between 40 and fifty males, besides destroying their huts and provisions, and exposing their women and children to the cold of December, who, making their way to Fort Lane for protection, arrived there with their limbs frozen."

Howitzers were brought into the field of battle to dislodge the remaining bands of holdouts.  Meanwhile, angered white civilians tried to rush Fort Lane in early 1856  to exterminate the 400 natives of various tribes who sat unarmed inside the fort.  They were prevented by the Army commander. It is indeed a measure of the savagery of  this early war against Indians in the Far West that the US Army officals--who prosecuted much of the war--manage to come off a great deal more leniant than the majority of armed "citizen-volunteers".  The volunteers, in Army accounts, often come off as useless in actual battle or ambush compared to regulars and only interested in the "mopping up" phase of a battle after the enemy had been put to flight.         

 By the time it was over, perhaps 180 whites and 450 natives were dead in what was the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississppi for many decades.   

sources (1) and (2) "Uncertain Encounters"--Nathan Douthit, 20004, OSU Press

(3) and (4) "Indian Wars of the Rogue River", 1969, editors Dorothy and Jack Sutton, Josephine County Press