SIEGE OF BATTLE ROCK
Before their arrival, however, a tragic scene had occurred on the rock. On the 10th the Indians had made a combined attack upon the little band. At first a hundred or more assembled upon the beach, and from there with wild yells and a fusilade of drawn arrows toward the rock, then with a mad rush up the narrow defile the foremost began grappling in hand and knife conflicts with the defenders, and then, Kirkpatrick with flaming torch uplifted, lowered it to the cannon priming, and with lead and powder its explosion swept the advance crowd off the ridge with deadly effect and with thirteen killed outright, and then with four more killed with revolver and rifle shot, all the rest were in reckless flight and the entire rock was soon made free from every hostile.
In the beginning a singular feature was observed in the one first leading the attacking Indians in his red shirt and long brandishing knife, he seemingly being more experienced than the rest. When, by permission of the besieged, the dead were removed from the rock by two unarmed hostiles, they refused.to remove the red shirt leader found among the dead, and were observed to kick his body violently. The whites buried him, and when closer seen he was found to be a white man, once a Russian sailor, wrecked on the coast, and adopted by the Indians, and so stated by them.
Disguising their position by an apparent increase in strength, and observing 114 Indians left on guard to be retiring for further reinforcements, they resolved to steal away to the mainland, and late in the afternoon of the 10th they entered the dense forest nearby and rapidly escaped up the coast. Their perilous flight in the forest made after four days of tortuous travel ended, they reached the settlements on the Umpqua, and this would be another story of itself. And ere long may there be erected upon the summit of that historic rock a monu-
