The Klickitat County Agriculturist, Goldendale, WA., March 10, 1933, page 2

COLUMBUS LANDING, IN THE PIONEER DAYS, 1878
By W.F. Brock, Klickitat Pioneer
(For The Agri.)

     I appreciate your thoughtfulness in sending me the two copies of your paper containing a condensation of my recollections of the summer of 1878 at Columbus Landing in Klickitat county during the Bannock-Piute Indian War, followed by a letter on the same subject by Leon W. Curtiss, a Klickitat pioneer, which is interesting and well stated.
     I gave my recollections to the press in order that they might have contradiction or verification by old-timers who personally knew of the incidents recalled along the Columbia River. And I welcome Mr. Curtiss' views, even though not altogether in harmony with mine.
     All remember the fable of the two knights who battled of old, one saying that the tower was white, the other that it was red. Each saw the color painted on his side of the tower, and, when in the skirmish they crossed over, each saw that the other was right, from his standpoint.
     I am on the side of the Piute Indians, (not of the Bannock), in that controversy, because I was on that side of the tower: directly after the war I lived among them at the Simcoe Agency and my father issued their scanty and insufficient rations, as furnished him at wide intervals by the "Big White Chief" at Washington, on the requisition of Father J.H. Wilbur, the agent of the Yakimas. Sarah Winnemucca, the trusted Piute guide of General Howard throughout that war, lived in our household: and during the years that followed she visited in our household often. From her, and from my own observation I know how those Piutes suffered and were wrongly accused and oppressed and wrongly removed from their own haunts in Nevada.
     Like a band of sheep driven by dogs through the snowy Blue Mountains, the Piutes, most of whom took no part in that Bannock War, were herded by soldiers, after snowfall, from Southern Idaho to Fort Simcoe, about 1700 half naked natives, men, women and children, a number dying from exposure on the way.
     This unhappy migration was investigated by predatory stockmen in Nevada, Southern Idaho, and Southeast Oregon, who wanted the Piutes and their ponies off those ranges. And these stockmen, to accomplish their purposes of taking over these fine ranges from those Indians wrote lies about those Indians to their Congressmen, and to the War and Interior Departments. This propaganda had its results in the order of banishment of the Piutes to Fort Simcoe, Washington Territory.
     General O.O. Howard assembled many of these letters, passed some of them to Sarah Winnemucca and treated them in his official reports to the War Department, as well as in his published writings. And from first to last, as the commanding officer in charge of this Department of the Columbia, and in charge of operations against the Bannock Indians, General Howard recommended that the Piutes be allowed to live their natural life upon the Nevada pastures. His advice finally was partly adopted for a part of the tribe, but not until most of its members had been decimated by starvation, abuse and disease.
     For verification of my assertions in these matters I refer the reader to the annual reports of General O.O. Howard for the years 1878, '79 and '80, officials records of the War Department; also to his book, "My Life and Experiences Among the Indians," published in 1907, and to his magazine and newspaper articles.
     Now as to Indians being fired upon as they crossed the Columbia, by river steamers fitted out at gunboats. In my original manuscript I did not refer to this phase of the war as a battle or battles, which terms have been given in the editorial writing down of my manuscript. I described the incidents along the Columbia as needless and wanton slaughter of Indians and horses. This slaughter was committed by the gunboats and by volunteers, (not regulars), who pursued the Indians and drove them from the South side of the Columbia to the North side.
     Most of the Indians fired upon by the gunboats and by the volunteers were non-combatants returning from the Blue Mountains in Oregon. Several of them are alive and now on the Yakima Indian reservation and their stories are in writing in the hands of Historian L.V. McWhorter, Yakima, Wash.
     In my files of the Walla Walla Gazette, during 1894, '95 and '96, I have the narratives of several of the volunteer Indian fighters of those days, who participated in the driving of the Indians from the South to the North side of the Columbia, none of which narratives were contradicted by the many surviving scouts and Indian fighters. I did those interviews myself in my sketches of pioneer days, and I tried to sift the truth by inviting contributions from those who had personal knowledge of the incidents, even as I am doing now.
     In 1897, I accompanied officers of the Fourth Cavalry over the battle grounds of the Bannock Rebellion and with them, located, from the officials records sent for the purpose from the War Department, the land marks of those battle grounds. This reconstruction of war maps I reported for the Walla Walla Union, so far as I was permitted to publish findings made for the War Department. Then, when the Indian War Veterans of the Yakima Indian War met in Walla Walla in 1894, I accompanied them to the battle fields along the Columbia and at the Umatilla Meadows and Butter Creek, in Umatilla county, and heard first-hand their narratives of that fierce struggle. At the same time, the stories of the pursuit of renegades, as they called them, during the Bannock War of 1878, when some of these same Indian fighters drove Indians across the Columbia, and when some Indians were shot and many horses killed.
     Mr. Curtiss says that during the war of 1878 "Bannocks or Piutes, as they were commonly called, and some of the Umatillas, (tried) to cross the Columbia river near Umatilla and make a junction with the Indians of the Upper Columbia valley and these Indians were intercepted by the U.S. troops on armed steamboats … but a few Indians and horses were likely killed--, not a great number."
     Please note that the Bannock Indians are not Piutes, nor are Piutes Bannocks--, that different dialects are spoken by the two separate and distinct tribes, and that for all the years that these Indians have been known to the White Man, that these two tribes have been at war with and against one another; that a small part of the Piute tribe was forced into this war by the Bannocks and by the mismanagement and contrivance and strategy of the Indian agents in Idaho and Nevada who wanted to get rid of the Piutes, and drive them up into Washington Territory.
     Umatilla Landing was strongly fortified in 1878 and peopled by about 500 whites, who gathered there when the Indians were first heard of in their approach at the head of the John Day. No warpath Indians were shot at nearer Umatilla than the mouth of Willow Creek, according to the interviews that I gathered both from the pioneer whites and with the Indians of that day. If Mr. Curtiss is aware that Indians were shot at near Umatilla Landing he is furnishing history with facts heretofore overlooked, and I am glad to study that phase further.
     While the Bannocks War was in progress in 1878 and our family was quartered with the Hickenbothans at Columbus Landing, (Now Maryhill), I was a boy of only 8 years of age. But so impressed was I with what I saw and heard of Indian fighting at that time that I have followed up the subject ever since and I have supplemented my own memory and observations with writings of others. All of which confirm the killing of some few Indians and of many horses -- , about 500 --, by volunteers and regulars, between Willow Creek and Columbus Landing. An unjustified slaughter.
     My comments on this war are not intended as a brief in defense of the Indian in general, as against the White Man, only on the merits of this particular war.
     General Crook, for many years one of our most conspicuous Indian fighters, was interviewed by the Oregonian, August 14, 1878, after he had gone over the whole matter of the Bannock-Piute Rebellion, and among other things this is what he said:
     Of about 1500 Bannocks and Shoshones, not more than 150 went on the warpath and that was caused by hunger. Of about 2,000 Piutes, not so many as 150 were voluntary associates with the aggressive Bannocks. The war leaders forced innocent members of their tribes into war camps and put all Indians of those tribes on the defensive."
     The Indians were starved into rebellion by hunger, according to General Crook's findings. He visited their former haunts and reservations and made investigations before giving out his interview to The Oregonian.
     He found that the government had forced the Piutes on the Bannocks reservation, where their squaws were ridden down by the Bannocks braves, lassoed and outraged, with nothing done about it by the agent or other government authorities; that the Piutes got along badly with the Bannocks because intruding upon their reserve.
     Finally, in the Oregonian of Nov. 30, 1878, General Crook is quoted as saying that the government had been allowing the Indians only 4½ cents a day per head for food after transferring them from their own places in Nevada to the Bannocks reservation in Southern Idaho; that they were in a starving and impoverished condition and beset on all sides by encumbrances.
     That the food was scandalously insufficient during the two years that the Piutes were held in concentration camp near Sim-coe I very well remember, for my father was ration master during the most of that time.
     At different times the Indians of the plains practiced the most inhuman cruelties, which justified their subjugation, and in many cases, the extinction of entire tribes and races. But there is a difference in the Indians and a difference in "causes belli." Let us preserve the balance of justice.

Wilbur F. Brock.

Also read the article titled: "Knew Father J.H. Wilbur Says W.F. Brock, Historian"

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer