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Updated: June 15, 2025
Running out, I saw a procession of three priests of the bow, in plumed helmets and closely-fitting cuirasses, both of thick buckskin gorgeous and solemn with sacred embroideries and war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs, and each distinguished by his badge of degree coming down one of the narrow streets.
These, however, were finally overcome. A band of desperate Indians rushed upon the main door, and with repeated blows from their tomahawks and massive war-clubs, succeeded in demolishing it, while others diverted the fire of those within. The door once forced, the struggle was soon over.
Wrapped in furs or blanket-coats, some with gun in hand, some with bows and quivers, and all with hatchets, war-clubs, knives, or swords, striding on snow-shoes, with bodies half bent, through the gray forests and the frozen pine-swamps, among wet, black trunks, along dark ravines and under savage hill-sides, their small, fierce eyes darting quick glances that pierced the farthest recesses of the naked woods, the hunters of men followed the track of their human prey.
In one great hall you were among the satin garments and lacquered furniture of China; in another there was the seal-skin work of the Esquimaux stitched with sinew. Now you sat in a Tartar tent, now among the war-clubs, the conch-shell trumpets, the drums covered with human skin of the Polynesians. Here it was the feathery finery of the Caribs, here the idols and trinkets of the negroes of Soudan.
The colonists in the field, in the meantime, were entirely unaware of the awful scenes which were transpiring, and of their own impending peril. The wily Indians approached them, under the guise of friendship. Each party had its marked man. At a given signal, with the utmost ferocity they fell upon their victims. With arrows, tomahawks and war-clubs, the work was soon completed. Not a man escaped.
What I did see was a sort of stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come from no human hand." Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a wistful look.
It was a gorgeous as well as an appalling spectacle. The blades of their paddles sparkled in the sunlight. The savages were dressed in the highest style of barbaric splendor. Their brilliantly colored feathers, fringed garments, and highly decorated bows, war-clubs and javelins, surpassed, in picturesque beauty, any of the ordinary military trapping of civilized life.
Though we know that the danger is not immediate, there is a significance in the tones of that wild slogan. They express more than the usual hostility of red to white they breathe a spirit of vengeance. The gestures of menace the brandished spears, and bended bows the war-clubs waving in the air are all signs of the excited anger of the Indians.
At this time, perceiving that both the Spanish men and horses were completely tired, the Araucanians broke in among them, fifteen or twenty of them seizing upon one horse, some catching him by the legs, others by the tail, and others by the mane; while others knocked down both men and horses with their great war-clubs, killing them with the greatest rage and fury."
Signs were seen of the sea ahead; but the Indians were 'howling like wolves and brandishing war-clubs, and Fraser concluded that it would be unwise to delay longer amid such dangers. To his intense disappointment he had established the latitude as 49°, whereas the Columbia was in latitude 46° 20'. 'This river is therefore not the Columbia, he declared.
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