INDIAN WAR DAYS
One of the saddest chapters in the early history of Washington Territory was the trouble with the Indians, which led finally to open war.
On October 28, 1855, word came that all the settlers living on White River had been killed by the Indians and that the next day those in the Puyallup valley would be massacred. At the risk of his life a friendly Indian brought this news to us in the dead hours of the night.
The massacre had occurred less than twenty miles from where we lived. For all we knew the Indians might be on us at any moment. There were three men of us, and each had a gun.
The first thing we did was to harness and hitch the team to the wagon. Then we opened the gates to let the calves get to their mothers, turned the pigs loose, and opened the chicken-house door—all this without light. Then the drive for our lives began, the women and babies lying close to the bottom of the wagon, the men with guns ready for action.
We reached Fort Steilacoom unmolested. But we could not in safety stop there. The place was really no fort at all, only an encampment, and it was already filled with refugees from the surrounding settlements. So we pushed on into the town and stayed there until a blockhouse was built.
This building was about fifty feet wide and nearly a hundred feet long. It was bullet-proof, without windows, and two stories high. A heavy door swung at the front entrance to the lower story, while an inclined walk from higher ground in the rear enabled us to reach the upper story; inside, a ladder served the purpose of a stairway between the two stories.
The blockhouse proved a haven of safety during the Indian trouble, not only to our own family but to many of our neighbors besides. Seventy-five such houses were built during these troublous times. Numbers of settlers did not go back to their homes for several years.
The Indians finally came in force just across the Sound and defied the troops. They also prevented the soldiers from landing from the steamer sent against them. A few days later we heard the guns from Fort Nisqually, which, however, I have always thought was a false alarm. It was when a captive child was brought in that we began to feel the gravity of the situation.
Yet many of our fears turned out to be baseless. For instance, one day Johnny Boatman, a little boy not quite four years old, was lost. His mother was almost crazed, for word went out that the Indians had stolen him. A day later the lad was found under a tree, asleep. He had simply wandered away.