On the outside it said, “Boston baked beans.” It was about three o’clock in the afternoon and all the officers were very hungry.
We dined as well as we could. Each man gave one dollar. Just think of it. It only cost one dollar a plate for beans baked in Boston. We got into Camp Harney very late that night. It took us three clays to overtake the troops. The same night we got there an Indian woman was taken prisoner. They brought her to our tent. I asked her about everything. She did not want to tell me at first. Sister Mattie said, “If you do not tell us we will see why—you had better tell us.” She was a Bannock woman. Then she was afraid and told us everything. She said her people were going right to Umatilla Reservation, and as the Umatilla Indians had told Oytes they would help them to fight the white people, this was why they were going there. She said Oytes had taken her nephew’s place as chief over the Bannocks. She cried, and said her nephew Buffalo Horn was killed at South Mountain. I told General Howard what she said. The next morning she was taken to Camp Harney, as she was blind, and the troops were ordered to go and have a fight with Bannocks about fifteen miles above us. The volunteer scouts kept coming to report. They said the Bannocks were waiting to fight there. General Howard asked me what I thought about it. All I said was, “General, if you find any Indians within two hundred miles of here you may say Sarah is telling lies.”
“Then you think these scouts are not telling the truth, do you?”
“That is what I mean.”
So we pushed on ahead of the troops for a while, and sister and I saw something on a high hill above us and ahead of us. It looked as if there were a great many there. We knew what it was but we did not say anything for
