suffered untold agonies for four days, and begging many times to be killed and put out of misery. We dare not stop, and the jolting of the wagon was almost unendurable to him."

man named Clark, who was bringing a drove of thirty or more fine horses with him, and whose wife and daughter traveled in a carriage, while he and his son, still a boy, were most of the time on horseback, crossed with the train with which Hugh Crockett came in 1851. As the grass was short where they camped one night, the boy started the horses on ahead of the train next morning, hoping to find better feed for them. Mrs. Clark and her daughter followed in their carriage. About noon they came to a place where the grass seemed inviting, and they determined to halt and let the horses graze until the train came up. As there was no hint that Indians were in the neighborhood, the boy went down to the river bank to fish, while his mother and sister disposed themselves to rest. He had only been gone a few minutes when the Indians came upon them and shot Mrs. Clark dead, wounded the girl, and left her for dead. The boy, hearing the guns, rushed up the bank and was shot dead. His sister survived the frightful treatment she had received and was brought through to Oregon.

A more horrible massacre was that of the Ward party in 1854. This party was composed of several families, all or most of whom were related. They had separated from the main train and gone ahead of it. The night before the massacre, some cattle were stolen from the main train and Alexander Yantis, afterwards well known in Thurston County, and five other men were sent out to discover and recapture them. While following the trail of the robbers, they came upon the camp of the Ward party, which they found in the greatest confusion, everything indicating that

a bloody battle had only recently taken place there. The still warm and bleeding bodies of nine white men and seven Indians lay among the wagons where they had fallen. The party had been surprised while at dinner, and some of them killed before they could make any defense. The others had fought heroically. A young man from Massachusetts named Babcock had fallen close beside the bodies of two Indians, both of whom he had apparently killed in his own death-struggle. The body of Robert Ward lay close beside that of his son, while near them were the bodies of two dead Indians. All the men in the party had been killed, but the women and children had been carried away and reserved for a worse fate.

Yantis and his party started out to pursue, and if possible rescue them, but found this impossible, as the Indians too greatly outnumbered them. They came near enough to the party to have a short battle with them, but were compelled to retire after exchanging a few shots. During the battle they could plainly hear the cries of the captives imploring them to save them. It was subsequently learned that one young woman broke away from her captors and was shot. A married woman met a similar fate. Two or three children were burned to death before the eyes of their mothers, after which the women themselves were tortured by hot irons thrust into their flesh, and by all the devices which savage cruelty exults in.

Some of those who were thus carried away as captives were never afterwards found or heard from. The bodies of those who were tortured and burned to death, or murdered in other ways, were subsequently collected, and together with those of the men were buried in one common grave on the spot where the party had made their last camp.