3
session adjourned to call a mass meeting of citizens that night. Several members went over immediately to consult with Dr. McLoughlin.
"Dead? Oh, those treacherous Cayuses! I warned him, I warned him," cried the old doctor, pounding the floor with his cane. "Why did he not heed?" Presently recovering himself, "Yes, yes, if there is to be an Indian war the Dalles is your Gibraltar. Hold the Dalles."
In fifteen hours from the time they enrolled their names, the Spartan band of fifty were on their way to the upper country.
The governor issued a call for five hundred men to rendezvous at Oregon City on Christmas day. Those whom Whitman had befriended leaped to avenge his death; heroes who had toiled at his side in 1843, and immigrants of succeeding years who had hailed his mission as the first civilized landmark beyond the Rockies.
Applegate, Lovejoy, and Abernethy on their personal credit secured a loan at Fort Vancouver. The women of Oregon City baked and sewed and tore up their last sheets for shirts, and out of bits of bunting made a flag. Trembling fingers sewed the stripes and stitched on the stars. Farmers on horseback came packing through the woods old buffalo-guns and flint-locks, beans and bacon, and lead and blankets whatever could be spared from their scanty stores. Joe Meek, the trapper, resigned his seat in the legislature to go overland as a delegate to Washington with despatches for aid.
The Indians regarded the settlers at Champoeg as their own people.
"Will they desert us? Will they join their Indian kindred? "queried the anxious settler
