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Updated: June 5, 2025
Shortly after the expedition returned to the Dalles, my detachment was sent down to Fort Vancouver, and I remained at that post during the winter of 1855-'56, till late in March.
Rising, as it does, quite near the source of the Missouri River, it runs, by a very circuitous route, to the Pacific Ocean, being in places very narrow, and in others abnormally wide. The Dalles of the Columbia are known the world over. They are situated some sixty or seventy miles west of the city of Portland, and are within easy distance of the American Mount Blanc.
On the morning of March 26 the movement began, but the column had only reached Five Mile Creek when the Yakimas, joined by many young warriors-free lances from other tribes, made a sudden and unexpected attack at the Cascades of the Columbia, midway between Vancouver and the Dalles, killed several citizens, women and children, and took possession of the Portage by besieging the settlers in their cabins at the Upper Cascades, and those who sought shelter at the Middle Cascades in the old military block-house, which had been built some years before as a place of refuge under just such circumstances.
About thirty miles below the Lower Dalles the river expands into Upper Arrow Lake, a beautiful sheet of water forty miles long and five miles wide, straight as an arrow and with the beautiful forests of the Selkirk range rising from its east shore, and those of the Gold range from the west.
Such was the severity of the labor that nearly two-thirds of the animals became poor, and their backs so sore as to be unfit for work. This trip was made from the Dalles, in Oregon, to Salmon Falls, on the Columbia River.
Our main difficulties were now over, and in due time we reached the Dalles, where almost everyone connected with the expedition voted it a wretched failure; indeed, General Rains himself could not think otherwise, but he scattered far and wide blame for the failure of his combinations.
The rivers of the San Francisco Bay, which are the largest after the Columbia, are local to that bay, and lateral to the coast, having their sources about on a line with the Dalles of the Columbia, and running each in a valley of its own, between the Coast Range and the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Range.
He was a good, reliable Indian, and on leaving Vancouver to join Colonel Wright, took his family along, to remain with relatives and friends at Fort Dalles until the return of the expedition. When Wright was compelled to retrace his steps on account of the capture of the Cascades, this family for some reason known only to Spencer, was started by him down the river to their home at Vancouver.
John Whitacre, afterward governor of Oregon, was the head of a party of nine that constructed a raft at The Dalles out of dry poles hauled from the adjacent country. While their stock was started out over the trail, their two wagons were put upon the raft. With the women and children in the wagons, perched on the provisions and bedding, the start was made to float down the river to the Cascades.
The regiment moved from Fort Vancouver by boat, March 25, 1856, and landed at the small town called the Dalles, below the mouth of the Des Chutes River at the eastern base of the Cascade Range, and just above where the Columbia River enters those mountains. This rendezvous was to be the immediate point of departure, and all the troops composing the expedition were concentrated there.
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