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Updated: May 29, 2025
Wetzel was seen stalking from one porthole to another. His fearful yell sounded above all the others. He seemed to bear a charmed life, for not a bullet had so much as scratched him. Silas communicated to him what Sullivan had said. The hunter mounted the ladder and went up on the roof. Soon he reappeared, descended into the room and ran into the west end of the block-house.
It was the mortuary ground of these Indians that occupied the only level spot we could get for the block-house. Their dead were buried in canoes, which rested in the crotches of forked sticks a few feet above-ground. The graveyard was not large, containing probably from forty to fifty canoes in a fair state of preservation.
After penetrating through the brush, matted as it was with briers, for a few hundred feet he entered an open space, that surrounded a low, green hillock, which was crowned by the decayed block-house in question.
In the Civil War our block-house system was just as effective, but in another direction. We used it for the purpose of protecting our lines of communication, not as a trocha, or a line connected with wire fencing and other obstructions, as used by the British and by the Spaniards in the Cuban War. The British built theirs of bags filled with earth.
When the Indians attacked the people at the Cascades on the 26th, word was sent to Colonel Wright, who had already got out from the Dalles a few miles on his expedition to the Spokane country. He immediately turned his column back, and soon after I had landed and communicated with the beleaguered block-house the advance of his command arrived under Lieutenant-Colonel Edward J. Steptoe.
It was the mortuary ground of these Indians that occupied the only level spot we could get for the block-house. Their dead were buried in canoes, which rested in the crotches of forked sticks a few feet above-ground. The graveyard was not large, containing probably from forty to fifty canoes in a fair state of preservation.
The Indians stood stoutly behind the loop-holed walls of the cabins, and in the block-house; the Americans, advancing cautiously and gaining ground inch by inch, suffered much more loss than they inflicted.
It was very dark about midnight when the whole place lay locked in slumber. The sentries, watchful as ever in the block-house towers and at the chained and barred gates, noted now and again shadowy figures about the region of the southeast bastion, the old exhausted smoke-house had been in that locality, and thence suppressed voices sounded occasionally in low-toned, earnest talk.
While these discussions were in progress, the attention of each was suddenly arrested by the cry of some person from the right hand block-house, looking toward the south, announcing that a single horseman was approaching with a speed which betokened evil tidings.
The volunteer companies of the infantry returned also to England, and so did nine militia battalions, whose place was taken however by an equal number of new-comers. The British position was very much strengthened during the winter by the adoption of the block-house system. These were small square or hexagonal buildings, made of stone up to nine feet with corrugated iron above it.
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