 I'm Amy Blossom from Jackson County Library Services, and I welcome you to Windows in Time. Windows in Time is a series of local history talks, a program that's been developed by the Jackson County Library Services and Southern Oregon Historical Society. It is also part of the Southern Oregon History Show, which airs on Thursday nights at 6 p.m. You can also see us live, though, at the Medford and Ashland Libraries, the first and second Wednesday of each month at noon. So are you ready for some history? Let's go! Hi, my name is Mark Tveskov. I teach anthropology at Southern Oregon University, and I'm an archeologist who has research interests in Southern Oregon and the state of Jefferson area generally. For the last 10 years or so, I've been doing a lot of work with the Rogue River Indian Wars that occurred in the 1850s, and that's the subject of my talk today. As a historian and an archeologist, one of the things that I find interesting is the way that the stories we tell about ourselves are these narratives that oftentimes reflect values and ideas about who we think we are, who we want to be, and that is certainly the case with the Rogue River Indian Wars and the stories that Southern Oregonians and Oregonians generally tell about the Rogue River Indian Wars. And those wars began in the early 1850s, and one of the most sort of cherished narratives we have here in Oregon is reflected in our very state seal, whose origin dates to the same time period, and the motto in Latin translates to she flies with her own wings. And that state seal or the territorial seal reflects an ideology or a narrative of rugged individualism, libertarian values, and generally a sense of independence. And Oregonians and Southern Oregonians in particular, we are justly proud of those values, but when you really start to unpeel history and see how those narratives are constructed, it's interesting how narratives and stories we tell can sometimes mask and change, and for various reasons, conscious or not, the actual facts of the case. Because against the stories we tell and how we like to think about them, there are actual things out there that we can research through archaeology and history. As a historian and archaeologist, one of the interesting facets of that telling and retelling of narratives is how they change over time. So for example, the Rogue River Indian Wars took place in the 1850s, and it was a fight, a sort of existential fight between Native American people who had lived here for 10,000 years at least and new coming American immigrants. And a lot of the stories that we know, the history that we know about the Rogue River Indian Wars was written down and told not in the 1850s, but 50 years later in the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it, or the Victorian Age, or the beginning of the progressive era, when the American nation was very confident in itself, and it had gone through the Civil War, it was experiencing the height of the Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of its own sort of colonial expansion. And at that time, the pioneers who had participated in the Rogue River Wars were now elderly, and they thought very carefully about how they wanted their stories remembered. And so they wrote down memoirs and they gave lectures at 4th of July picnics and the like. And a lot of what we know about the early days of the Oregon Territory and the Rogue River Wars comes from those kinds of narratives. So for example, James W. Nezmouth was one of our first senators and he was a young man during the 1850s. And he describes when in 1853 he was eyewitness to the signing of the Table Rock Indian Treaty, which established a reservation on the north side of the Rogue River. And he paints a picture in this speech and he says, Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, the commander of Fort Lane, had drawn out his company of dragoons and left them in a line on the plain below. It was a bright beautiful morning and the Rogue River Valley lay like a panorama at our feet. The exact line of dragoons sitting statue-like upon their horses with their white belts and burnished scabbards and carbines looked like they were engraved upon a picture. So it's a very classic image and it's a story about the triumph of the New Oregon Territory and establishing this Indian Treaty and seeding land from Indian ownership to pioneer ownership. The officer he's talking about, the dragoon officer is Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, who was a 38-year-old captain in the first regiment of the United States dragoons. He had graduated last in his class or second to last in his class at West Point and found himself on the frontier in command of two companies of mounted soldiers, dragoons. And he had built an 1853 Fort Lane, which was the first tangible inscription on the landscape of the Rogue River Valley of the U.S. federal government. And that Fort, named after Joseph Lane, who was an early Oregon territorial governor, was located on the south bank of the Rogue River northwest of the current town of Table Rocks. Fort Lane is one of the locations that Southern Oregon University has been researching over the last 10 years or so. We've conducted archeological excavations there with Jackson County and with the state of Oregon through state parks, and many Southern Oregon University students have participated in that. This image show on the left side of the screen was drawn by Captain Smith himself in 1855. And it was part of his reporting on his Fort to his superiors down whose headquarters were in Benicia, California and San Francisco Bay after they had won the Mexican war. It's where the Army was headquarters. And the picture on the right is the excavation of the enlisted men's quarters that Southern Oregon University executed in 2012. And we've spent a lot of time digging around in this site and looking at documents left over by Captain Smith and his fellow officers and digging up and finding the actual artifacts themselves. And those documents and those artifacts speak to more than then just this heroic pioneer narrative that Senator Nezmith relates. So for example, in the Victorian era, this was an era when social distinction and social status and the differentiation between social space of where you ate and where you slept and where people of standing and lower ranking people lived, like the enlisted men in the officers' quarters, that's where those kinds of values were really becoming into focus in Western society. And you see that in the archeological remains of the fort. So for example, in the officers' quarters, they clearly had better artifacts than the enlisted men. They were the only ones that had clearly had up-to-date regulation uniforms. This is a dragoon button on the right, one of the artifacts found in the officers' quarters. And this same officer had a French perfume bottle or a French cologne bottle imported all the way from Paris. The company that he had access to was the same company that was used by the Royal Family of Great Britain. So at the same time, the enlisted men had second-hand uniforms. They had their artifacts reflected a more mundane existence, the equipment they used on a daily basis. And they had cologne as well, but it was made out of cow marrow. That was kind of a different scene. So they were negotiating these social distinctions out here on the edge of the frontier. But at the same time, while that would seem to be sort of reflecting the triumph of the American expansion in the West, there was a more ambiguous reality reflected in both the archeology and in the written documents dating to the 1850s, not the Victorian era. So, for example, the dragoons at Fort Lane, we have a popular narrative in American culture of the Calvary saving the homesteaders or wagon train from the Indians. And that's a story we tell in television and movies, and we still tell it, even in the year 2015. But there was this more ambiguous reality back then. The fact of the matter is that the pioneers of Southern Oregon were torn between those who followed the sort of states' right sentiments of what would soon be the southern side of the Civil War and believed that the federal government had no business in Southern Oregon and that they could treat the Indians in their own peculiar way, which was basically a genocidal sentiment. They wanted to kill the Indians and just claim their land. On the other hand, the federal officers, the mostly Yankee officers of Fort Lane, like Captain Smith, would later on go on to be Union officers, and they believed strongly in liberal values of let's educate the Indian to become a white man and sort of a patronizing vision. And that led to conflict, sometimes armed conflict, and Captain Smith and his dragoons pointed their guns as often at white people as they did at Native American people. Here are two quotes from the Fort. One is by Lieutenant Jacob Bowman Schweitzer, who was one of these Yankee officers. He was a Lieutenant from New York City, found himself on the frontier, and he describes an incident where he says, a large party of miners had collected in Jacksonville and sent a deputation to Captain Smith saying they would attack the Indians on the Table Rock Reservation. Captain Smith told them he would advise them not to as the soldiers would protect the Indians as they were placed under the guard of the military by the Indian Department. They said they would whip the soldiers too if they interfered. Captain Smith said, bring it on. And that was written in 1855. Captain Smith, another moment a year earlier, wrote, he said, News reached camp that a volunteer company had followed us for the purposes of attacking the Indians. I left camp with 153 Indians and proceeded to the ferry determined to shoot the first white man that would attempt to molest them while under my charge. So that paints a very different picture. At one point, a lynch mob from Wairika came from over the mountain pass to Fort Lane to demand a prisoner, a Native American prisoner from the brig at Fort Lane. And Captain Smith refused. And this citizen militia threatened to take them by force. And I think about those kinds of stories which run so contrary to this sort of popular modern narrative and think about what that must have been like for these officers at Fort Lane. And when you look carefully at the assemblage of artifacts he had there, and this is in contrast to that sort of royal picture of the panorama of horse-mounted soldiers in the beautiful Rogue River Valley, the officer in this cabin was obsessed with his personal appearance. Not only did he have French cologne and shiny buttons, but he had thimbles and sewing needles and he was clearly working very hard to keep his appearance up. Despite the fact that they were so far out on the edge of the periphery that they had to take quarters that they would get us pay and carve them and use them as spurs. And this is an image of one of these artifacts that was found in the officer's quarters. And I think a lot about in our research about how the experience of a 22-year-old West Point trained officer on the frontier and Captain Smith would go back and be a general in the Civil War on Ulysses S. Grant Staff. He's been called by one historian, the most famous general you never heard of from the Civil War. And in this cabin there were two bear canine teeth. So while this guy is sitting in his cabin having to step out in front of mutinous pioneers and Indians, he's trying to facilitate their experience on the reservation. He's also collecting bear teeth as a souvenir of his life on the frontier before he goes back to St. Louis. So our research at Fort Lane paints a slightly different picture than that sort of narrative of a triumphant frontier process for America driven by the efforts of the pioneers themselves. The federal government was there. Another project that we've done through Southern Oregon University speaks to how those soldiers, how those Dragoon soldiers first came to Oregon. And this is the Camp Castaway project that we did a couple of years ago on Coos Bay. This is another one of these stories. Camp Castaway, the story of Camp Castaway was immortalized in once again a turn of the century memoir or set of memoirs written by a newspaper man named Orville Dodge. And Orville Dodge was part of this literary movement to romanticize the pioneer experience as the pioneers themselves were becoming elderly. And he collected three, two memoirs, one by a guy named Baldwin and another guy, Philip Brack, from these who were leading citizens of Coos County at the time. And they told the story of the opening of Coos Bay to pioneer settlement and how that happened. And it happened when the schooner Captain Lincoln wrecked on the north spit of Coos Bay in the spring of 1852. And Company C of the First Dragoons spent four months marooned on the sand dunes. And in the process learned that they could get a boat across the open bar of Coos Bay. And then later on, when their term was up in the Army, they came and settled Coos Bay. And that was the origin of Coos Bay. And to this day, residents of Coos County tell that story, remember that story. They're very interested in our research there. And it's their origin tale. It's how they think about the beginnings of American Coos Bay. So we had an opportunity to work with the Coos Bay Bureau of Land Management and the confederated tribes of Coos, Loram, Kwan, Sayusla Indians on trying to find and excavate the Camp Castaway location. And the real key into that archeological site came from an archeologist named Scott Byrom who was doing research into the field notes of the U.S. Coast Survey who, under the direction of the Treasury Department in the 1860s, were creating the first nautical charts on the Oregon coast. And those surveyors were making detailed maps, and this is one of their charts. This is Coos Bay drawn by the Coast Survey in the 1860s. And while they were creating these charts, they oftentimes recorded Indian villages, trails, old ruins, and things. And one of the places that are mentioned in their unpublished field notes is a wreck that they described as being a shipwreck on this north spit. And Dr. Byrom realized that this is probably the location of the wreck of Captain Lincoln and Camp Castaway, which no one knew exactly where it was. We had some ideas. The general location is on the north spit of Coos Bay, more or less where the ship New Carissa wrecked in 1999. And that's kind of one of those delicious coincidences of history. The two things happened more or less in the same place. And Dr. Byrom went out there and did some preliminary work and found 19th century artifacts. And Southern Oregon University was called in and we went there. And we did our own primary document research into the site. And the sources about that Camp Castaway experience come from two different kinds of sources. One of the contemporary Army records, which include another young lieutenant, Lieutenant Henry W. Stanton, who was in Company C, First Dragoons, the same company as in Fort Lane a couple of years later. And then also a member of the quartermaster corps down in Venetia, California, Captain Morris Miller, and they documented for the official record what happened to Captain Lincoln and the Dragoons at Camp Castaway. And then we have these Victorian accounts written 40 years later, 50 years later, by Henry Baldwin, Philip Brack, and another guy named William H. Packwood, who in Packwood himself is a classic figure in this kind of historiography. William Packwood and a colleague of his, George Abbott, were both enlisted men on Captain Lincoln, members of Company C, First Dragoons, probably in their late teens or early 20s. Both of them went on to be prominent members of the early state of Oregon and the Oregon Territory. George H. Abbott, I mean, George Abbott became an Indian agent. He wrote documents to the Smithsonian about Indian culture and did other things. William Packwood helped design the very seal we showed earlier in the presentation, and he was a member of the Territorial Constitutional Convention. He went on to a career in politics, and he was the great grandfather of Senator Bob Packwood of more recent years. And both of these gentlemen are remembered as leading citizens of early Oregon. But once again, I mean, their histories are a lot more ambiguous than that. Even to this day, the Oregon Encyclopedia describes William Packwood as an Indian fighter. And we know from documentary evidence that he and Abbott, after their tenure in the Army, were implicated in the massacre of Kokwell Indians on the mouth of the Kokila River in February of 1854, and then charged the government for their services in that action. So there's some ambiguities there. But that's where the information comes from. They wrote these stories about Captain Lincoln and Camp Castaway. Captain Lincoln was a transport schooner of the quartermaster department of the United States Army, and it was built at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution by a guy named R.F. Loper, who was a shipbuilder from Philadelphia, and he made a fortune on government contracts and patenting maritime technology in the mid-19th century. And as the United States grew, the quartermaster department needed to transport stuff all over the continent, and they created this fleet of transport schooners. This is one of their ships, the transport schooner wig, which is a two-masted schooner. Captain Lincoln was a three-masted schooner, and it had a capacity of about 300 tons. It was launched in 1847 and was quickly put into service in the Mexican War, where it spent time traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Veracruz and Brasso Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande River. After the Mexican War was over, it found itself in Benicia, California, and then in late December of 1851, it was assigned to transport the first company of U.S. Dragoons to the Oregon coast at a time when the only settlements on the coast of Oregon was Fort Orford, and here was the federal government using its power through the United States Army to assist in the pioneer settlement of Oregon. Fort Orford had been established by a man named William Tichner as a commercial enterprise. This was at the height of the Gold Rush, and the city of Jacksonville was at that time the biggest city in Oregon, and people from San Francisco and Portland and Willamette Valley converged on the Rogue River Valley to try to strike it rich with gold. William Tichner was thinking ahead, and he looked at Fort Orford on the Oregon coast and said, that's how I can make money by supplying those mines, because it was only about 70 miles as the crow flies between Fort Orford and Jacksonville. So he established that town site and then sent his own people to blaze a trail up the Rogue River to reach Jacksonville, and they got lost and attacked by Indians. That is to this day one of the most rugged wilderness areas in Oregon, and to drive that 60 or 70 miles as the crow flies takes four hours between Jacksonville and Fort Orford to this very day. So the army came to Tichner's rescue and established Fort Orford and sent these dragoons to Fort Orford. They left port on December 27th, San Francisco. They crossed the Golden Gate and immediately were hit with a gale. According to the memoirs, the ship was leaky, and the 22 dragoons on board had to take turns manning the pumps for the three or four days they were in route. In the middle of the night on January 3rd, 1852, they hit a sandbar and were lifted over that sandbar and came to a rest broadside to the beach. And in the pre-dawn hours that they didn't know if they were alive or dead, all the men were hunkered down below decks and the waves were crashing over the top of the ship and the captain ordered a double strong grog to be served around. They passed it around in two wooden buckets drinking, waiting for dawn to see what would happen. But when dawn came, they found out that they were alive. They were on the north spit of Coos Bay in five feet of water. They happened to crash at a really high tide and they began to offload the ship and they had all this valuable cargo on board and for the next four months, they sat there on the north spit of Coos Bay while the army figured out what to do. 22 guys plus a handful of sailors. The local Native Americans from the village of Honisich, which is where North Bend now stands, came to visit them and help them offload the ship and they began to trade with the Dragoon soldiers there. They built a tent city and they took the stove from the ship's galley and set up a kitchen. They erected a mast as a flagpole and they set up military discipline and Lieutenant Stanton would travel back and forth to the Yom Kwa River in Fort Orford trying to figure out what to do with all this cargo. Eventually, to make a long story short, Morris Miller, the quartermaster and Stanton got a ship, they chartered a ship at the mouth of the Yom Kwa, the fawn, and with the captain of Captain Lincoln as pilot, it entered Coos Bay and this was in May of 1852, offloaded all the cargo and Camp Castaway was abandoned. That's very briefly the story of Camp Castaway. Having located the site, we went out there to see what we could find. These are the archaeologists working on the site. We started out with a ground penetrating radar survey, which is a way, a remote sensing technique to look beneath the ground. This was a Southern Oregon University class that we hold in the summertime and included the participation of the Coquelitean tribe and the confederated tribes of Coos Lorom Kwa Sayusla. Using the radar waves bounce off artifacts and features below the ground and using that, we targeted some of those places and we dug in the sand dunes and collected a large number of artifacts from the Captain Lincoln and many of them were in very poor condition given the salt water. For example, this is a blunt bolt. The memoirs talk about the ship being a rickety old ship and the archaeology confirms that there are many of these things like pieces of rebar that the sailors would drive between the beams on the ship to keep an old ship together. You can see how rusty it is, but it still retains some integrity. This is our laboratory procedure as we x-ray the artifacts and then use an electrolysis process to reverse the rusting and that's the same artifact after its conservation. There was a large number of architectural remains from Captain Lincoln at the site. These are spikes that are part of the architectural aspects of the vessel. More of these blunt bolts that are indicative of the poor condition of the ship. This is a chain bolt that is part of the rigging of Captain Lincoln and that confirms archaeologically that they were dismantling the ship and dragging it ashore as a shipwreck on land so to speak and these are all hand forged 19th century technology. These iron or ferrous metal spikes would have been used above the water line on the ship's superstructure and there you can see the hand forged heads of these spikes. There were also copper spikes which were in 19th century maritime technology were below the water line and many of them we would find them in clusters and they were all sheared at the same angle as it were. Two beams were torqued apart in the wreck of the ship which was kind of a neat detail. The hull of the ship was sheathed in copper and we found today you think of them like roofing nails the kind of nails that would hold that copper sheeting to the hull of the ship and there they are in the field and the copper acted as a preservative and preserved some of the wood of the Captain Lincoln's hull around the actual nails. And then this is in turn some of the copper sheeting which we found deliberately cut up which was done either by the Dragoons to trade to Native American people or after the camp was abandoned Native American people did that themselves. Indians really appreciated metal from the American pioneers. Other parts of the ship and cargo were in bad condition that's a barrel hoop that as we excavated it in the field and that was a ghost of itself it was just a rusty stain in the soil so we pulled the dirt out from around it and got the dimensions on it and that's a barrel hoop so that was part of the cargo of Captain Lincoln that they hauled out of the ship but that didn't come out of the ground it came out and it was basically rust colored sand. The Dragoons and Camp Castaway we found some aspects of their stay there over four months including these percussion caps which are how they fired their weapons they spent a lot of time apparently just firing at their guns at a boredom or for weapons drill and musket balls and this was a standard 69 caliber and 31 caliber cartridge that would go into what they called musket tunes that were used by the Dragoons and they were locked together in a paper bag with gunpowder and that was the standard cartridge of the Dragoons at that time. Not too much in the way of domestic artifacts but we did see them attempt to establish some kind of domestic normalcy there were alcohol bottles there and China plates and their memoirs of that do talk about maintaining some military discipline and having enlistment barracks and the like. Like at Fort Lane we also found at least one glass trade bead which was universal currency for Americans who wanted to interact with Indians and at least one of these Dragoons or sailors brought some glass trade beads with them and military buttons identical to those at Fort Lane. So Captain Lincoln you know that was the U.S. governments using the United States Army to ensure the success of this early pioneer venture and that's how the first Dragoons came to Oregon they would go on to establish Fort Lane and that would administer the Table Rock Reservation until the fall of 1855 when the last paroxysm of violence of the Rogue River Wars took place and that started on October 8, 1855. Lieutenant Schweitzer was awake in his cabin at dawn and he heard gunfire off in the distance. This is on October 18, 1855 and that gunfire was a vigilante group from Jacksonville led by a man named James Lupton who went down to the Rogue River. This is about where 2 Vel State Park is today and attacked three Indian villages on the border of the Table Rock Indian Reservation and massacred their inhabitants. Lieutenant Schweitzer was ordered by Captain Smith to ride out to the Lutton Mass to the site and the pioneers fled at his approach and they took the surviving Indians back to Fort Lane and that's a complete inversion of that narrative of the Calvary running to the rescue of the pioneers. In the aftermath of the Lutton Massacre the Native Americans on the reservation basically took one of two approaches some trusted to the government and went to Fort Lane for protection against the pioneer lynch mobs the rest, and these were led by the Indian Chiefs John, Limpie and George basically decided to fight it out and they traveled westward down the Oregon-California Trail following the route of today's I-5 and killed every white person they could find and burned down every cabin they could find and then holed up in relatively inaccessible areas. Chief John took his people up to Deer Creek up on the Illinois River and George and Limpie went up into the grave creek hills in the highlands between the Rogue River and Cal Creek and that was a very violent moment the citizen militia and the federal soldiers at Fort Lane dropped their animosity for a brief period of time I think of it as like a 9-11 moment when all the political differences were set aside against this horrible event that had happened and they agreed to work together to fight this battle they had to find the quote-unquote hostels though so Captain Smith of Fort Lane and a man named John Ross who was a quote-unquote Indian fighter from Jacksonville led their, just tried to find the George Limpie and John who were waging a guerrilla warfare by that time the Battle of Hungry Hill was what happened the Battle of Hungry Hill was what happened when those Dragoons and citizen militias found the hostile encampment of Native Americans in the grave creek hills and it happened between October 30th and November 1st, 1855 the word of what happened at the Battle of Hungry Hill reached the settlements of the Willamette Valley a couple days later and this is a quote from the newspaper at the time The Oregon Statesman and this is how people back in the settlements heard about the battle and said the war in the south has become a real and earnest affair the battle in the grave creek hills has proved most disastrous to our side it is supposed that there were not more than 100 fighting Indians engaged in the action the loss on the side of the Indians was very trifling probably not more than seven or eight killed the Indians had taken a position in the mountains about 15 miles west of the road to Jacksonville an almost inaccessible place after two days of hardest kind of fighting the Indians were left in possession of the field in about 10 days it is proposed to renew the attack the exterminators are rather down in the mouth those are the people that attack the Indians on the reservation Major Ross was present in command of the Southern Battalion God only knows when or where this war may end and that is a pretty sober assessment of what happened it was a resounding defeat for the American forces one of the biggest defeats of the United States Army at the hands of an Indian force in the history of the American West but what is strange is that compared to other more famous battles like the Sand Creek Massacre the Battle of Little Bighorn the Battle of Hungry Hill which is in scale a very huge fight it was like 300 Americans and 100, 200 Native Americans and it was a major defeat it's like it's not part of our history and I was curious why and the actual location of the battlefield was missing now when you jump ahead to that era of pioneer memoir like this one here from 1884 it paints a picture of the battle of Hungry Hill that's very romantic when news of the butchery of the Harris's Wagner and the other unfortunate reached the mines and farms the entire male population of the Rogue River Valley sprang to arms with a unanimity and promptness and consonance with the extreme gravity of the situation the inhabitants of every mining camp enrolled themselves for duty against the despoilers the command of the military had devolved by right of his commission as Colonel in the 9th Regiment of Oregon Militia upon John E. Ross an Indian fighter of great experience judgment and resolution the company commanders numbered several men who had already achieved celebrity by their conflicts with the red men James Bruce was there characteristically impatient to fall upon the foe Jacob Reinerson had left his claim on Cal Creek at the first news of the massacre and assembling perhaps two score of his neighbors had arrived upon the bloody ground almost before the corpses of the slain men women and children had stiffened in death Welton Griffin, T. Smiley Harris, Wilkinson and other men of might and courage were there whose names yet linger in the recollections of the people of Southern Oregon and are not likely to be forgotten as long as bravery and hardyhood possess a charm so that was an anonymous memoir written 40 years after the effect that celebrates the heroism of the participants of the Battle of Hungry Hill in this defeat so a few years ago we began Southern Oregon University, the Bureau of Land Management the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians the Cal Creek Tribe, the Grand Ron Tribe we all worked together to try to find this location we also had the help of Ben Truy of the Southern Oregon Historical Society and an Army historian, Colonel Daniel Edgerton and we assembled as many written documents that we could and we conducted archeological survey the location is in the highlands between Cal Creek and the Rogue River west of Interstate 5 and we basically spent several years conducting field research with metal detectors walking at likely locations in the forest and after a number of years and it proved challenging very dense vegetation this is John Craig who is one of our surveyors who is basically repelling down a steep slope and heavy brush while simultaneously metal detecting and then eventually we found the Battle of Hungry Hill once again 69 caliber musket balls and a lid to a gunpowder container we were aided by an actual map that Captain Ross and Captain Smith drew for the battle and once again to make a fairly long story short it was a classic story of what can go wrong Captain Smith had originally planned to divide his forces into three and surround the Indian forces and this is a map that shows that plan but what actually happened was they left at 11 o'clock at night and they wanted to march through the night and surprise them at dawn but they all got lost in the woods and instead of coming up surrounding the Indian encampment they arrived in front of the Indian encampment in a single spot and they almost shot at each other thinking that they were the enemy force and while they were and when they realized what had happened they figured out what to do and against orders some of the men lit a tree on fire this is after marching all night and they were cold and two of the military officers were described as being too drunk to proceed it was kind of pandemonium and the discipline of the men broke down and they saw the Indian encampment on the further ridge line and all 300 men or most of them just went for it and they ran and if you look at this picture the charge went from the left side of this picture down into a valley 1,500 feet and then up to the next ridge line another 1,500 feet and they took them two hours to do that charging and yelling and then so instead of their carefully laid out plan to envelop the Native American encampment they made the biggest mistake in military tactics and attacked a prepared position head on and they got annihilated these are two eyewitness quotes from what happened next the first onset of the troops drove the Indians from the crest of the ridge into the cover and shelter of the trees and chaparral of the descending slope concealed in this excellent cover and stripped for the fight they quickly checked our progress by their telling fire and laid orders to combat on a large number of troops and then one Lieutenant, Lieutenant Kaut said one of ours Gillespie was killed and several wounded this one dead man won the battle and two-thirds of the men never got passed this one dead body and we were able through archeological survey to identify different parts of the battlefield these are our 69 caliber musket balls some fired, some not fired and in some degree of detail we were able to track out the movement of the battle of both sides of both forces over the course of the day the Americans unsuccessfully tried to bludgeon their way through the Indian position but failed this is a shot roughly where John Gillespie was killed and this was after one of our forest fires took across the landscape and two more quotes from that battle it was a horrible battle there was that little group of devils protected behind their fortifications dead sure of their own safety we, a lot of green hordes hardly knowing how to hold a rifle we felt like game before the good huntsman's aim in Venice he was called he had himself in sconce in a hollow pine tree that almost hit him and there he blazed away with the crack of his telescope rifle as easily from a porthole he was a deadly shot to that fellow and here's a case where a memoir written later agrees with the contemporary source because another man said in 1855 it is said that much of the execution was done by one Indian who lay concealed behind a root the crack of his rifle could be heard over all the others whenever the smoke was seen to rise and behind that root a white man was almost sure to be killed or wounded and this is an image that shows the rough position of the Indian sniper and we found a fired ammunition where the American weapons had attempted to reach him in any case the battle ended in a route and they spent the night at a place called bloody springs and the next morning they were evacuated out to the settlements and many of the memoirs the private memoirs unpublished ones admitted that they basically wanted to forget that the battle had actually happened the war would continue over the winter time it was not the quick victory they were looking for Ben Truy of the Southern Oregon Historical Society found an amazing letter written by one of the army officers Lieutenant August V. Kautz once again one of these junior officers would gain some fame in the Civil War later on and he wrote a private letter to Joseph Lane a politician who lived in the Roseburg area at that time and it creates a very in contrast to the romanticized pioneer memoirs it has a very sober assessment of what had happened and I'll end with this quote and Lieutenant Kautz who participated in the battle his assessment was the unpleasant truth is that the whites were cowards they were wiped out by one fourth of their numbers of Indians and had it not been 30 or 40 good men they would have broke and run as it was some did break and never stopped the great secret of the failure is that the volunteers expected the regulars to do all the fighting whilst the regulars were expecting the same thing from the volunteers I do not think much of the conduct of the officers nobody attempted to lead the men and I don't think that Colonel Ross or Captain Smith attempted to fire a gun there was a want of confidence all around it is a war they have brought on themselves the Indians are fighting in self defense I have every reason to believe that it has been gotten up expressly to procure another appropriation I fear you paid them too well for their meritorious service in 1853 war is a money making business thanks so thank you for coming and joining us this evening and open your eyes remember history is everywhere