its Captain, in garrison at Fort Vancouver, and the fort was the center of more general alarms and troubles than any other point in the Northwest. The Yakima Indians were attacking the Cascades settlement only thirty miles to the eastward, and a large number of settlers had been killed there. General, then Lieutenant Philip Sheridan, with only forty men, the last of the regulars, had gone to the Cascades to withstand them, and was having a hard time. Everywhere fear was about Vancouver and all of the settlers from the threatened points were encamped about it for protection.
Panics were of daily happening and it was a common occurrence for such a panic to arise in some strange way in the middle of the night. A cry would be raised in the darkness that the Indians were coming, and in a moment the
