1851 – June 10, Battle Rock battle, would-be settlers kill natives when attacked, Port Orford, OR –13-23

–13-23 Blanchard estimated death toll range.*

— 30 Gaston, Joseph. The Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1911, Vol. 1.
— 23 BattleRockPark.com. “Battle Rock Park.”
— 23 Gaston, Joseph. The Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1911, Vol. 1. 1912, 396-397.
— 23 News-Review, Roseburg, OR. “Survivors of Indian Battle at Port Orford…”1-7-1951.
— 23 Smith, R. Gess. A Place Called Oregon. “The Battle of Battle Rock – Oregon 1851.
–20-22 Schwartz, E. A . The Rogue River Indian War and its Aftermath, 1850… 1997, p. 33, 35.
— 20 Gibbs, Jim. Oregon’s Salty Coast. Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1978.*
–13-20 Hamell.net. The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History…Survivors of Battle Rock.
–13-20 Kirkpatrick. “Correspondence…” Oregon Statesman, Oregon City, 7-15-1851, p. 2.*
— ~19 Lewis. “Battle Rock the First Colonization on the Southern [OR] Coast.” Quartux. 3-16-2019.*
— 17 Michno, Gregory F., Encyclopedia of Indian Wars…1850 – 1890. 2003, p. 12.

*Blanchard note on fatalities: We use thirteen as the low-end of our estimated death too range based on Kirkpatrick’s own account of thirteen Native fatalities. His later notation of about twenty deaths was from what he was told by another Native more than two weeks later, after he reached safety. Thus number would have had to have been second or third hand – or invented. We use the number twenty-three fatalities in that four of the sources we cite note twenty-three deaths, and one notes a range of 30-22. We do not use the Gaston number of thirty fatalities in that we have been unable to locate another source noting more than twenty-three deaths. Thus we do not find this number to be supportable.

*Gibbs: Gibbs writes (p. 38) that thirteen natives [Qua-to-mah ] were killed in the initial attack on the 10th. There were two follow-on attacks and then a 14-day truce was made because the whites told the natives they would be picked up in 14 days. When they did not happen another attack was made and preparations made for one more. At this point, Gibbs writes that “20 of them had fallen in battle as opposed to four injured white men.” But, before another attack was undertaken the whites made an escape through the woods.

*Kirkpatrick: Kirkpatrick, in this letter to the editor describes himself as the leader of the party of nine dropped off at “Point Orford.” He writes that in the initial attack, his cannon discharge killed “some six or eight,” and that after an approximate fifteen minute fight “the Indians broke and ran, leaving thirteen dead on the ground.” He then writes that after their escape more than two weeks later “I learned…from an Indian an Indian at the mouth of Umpqua, who could speak jargon, that there were 20 killed and 15 wounded.” The twenty death toll number is thus, at best, second hand.

*Lewis: Lewis does not provide a total death toll. He notes “upwards of 17 native deaths” in the first attack. “After this skirmish, two other attempts were made by the Native people to take the rock and each time marksmen in the party shot and killed the leaders, causing the natives to stop their attacks.” We assume at least two deaths when Native leaders were killed in two follow-on attacks, bringing the total to approximately 19.

Narrative Information

Gaston: “About June 1st, 1851, the steam coaster Sea Gull, Captain William Tichenor, master, landed a party of nine men at Port Orford in Curry county, as the first installment of a force that was intended to establish a trading establishment at that point, and open a pack trail from there to the gold mines in Jackson county. The names of these men were, J.M. Kirkpatrick, J.H. Eagan, John T. Slater, George Ridoubs, T.D. Palmer, Joseph Hussey, Cyrus W. Hedden, James Carigan, and Erastus Summers.

“Tichenor was under contract with the men to give them supplies, rifles and ammunition for defense in case of an attack from the Indians; but on landing the men found they had only three old flint-lock muskets, an old sword and a few pounds of lead and powder and one rifle owned by one of the men. Complaining of this miserable outfit, the gallant captain assured them they needed no arms at all, but these would do to show and scare the Indians as well as good guns. But to make sure of more efficient defense in case of an attack, the men carried off the signal gun from the ship which was about a four-pound cannon.

“Soon after the men were landed the Indians gathered around and by signs warned them to leave. This intimation [sic] of danger proved their salvation, for they at once set about making ready for an attack. The old cannon was dragged up the sloping end of an immense rock rising out of the edge of the ocean. And upon this rock the men took their outfit of food and blankets, loaded the old cannon with powder and slugs of lead and awaited the attack they felt was coming. As soon as the ship sailed the Indians again ordered the men to leave. There was now no chance to leave.

“The next morning, June 10, 1851, the great rock was surrounded on the land side with a hundred yelling Indians. Their chief made a loud speech to his warriors, after which with a chorus of yells fifty Indians made a rush for the rock and the balance of them filled the air with arrows aimed at the nine white men. The rock is so shaped that before the Indians could reach the white men they would have to crowd upon and along a narrow space for thirty feet. The old cannon had been trained to sweep that approach, and as the first Indian reached the muzzle of the cannon, and the narrow approach was crowded with yelling Indians, Captain Kirkpatrick applied the match and thirty Indians were hurled into eternity in the twinkling of an eye. Besides the outright killing of half the attacking party, the balance of the Indians on the rock were so shocked by the loud explosion that they tumbled off into the ocean or rolled down the sides in deadly terror. This terrific repulse sent the whole band remaining alive or unmangled back to their camp in wailing. And that night the defenders packed their pockets and knapsacks with food and set out in the night on foot to reach the white settlements in Umpqua valley more than a hundred miles distant; and finally after incredible hardships in hiding from the pursuing Indians, wading streams, sleeping on the ground in wet clothing and living on snails and wild berries they all safely reached the houses of white men. The great rock has ever since gone by the name of Battle Rock…” (Gaston, Joseph. The Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1911, Vol. 1. 1912, pp. 396-398.)

Hamell.net: “Battle Rock is one of the most well documented conflicts in Oregon history. Two of the major participants wrote diaries and newspaper articles about it, plus submitted articles to the Oregon Historical Society Quarterly Magazine in 1902.

“In June of 1851, 9 men were landed at what is now known as Port Orford, Oregon. Their goal was to plat the town of Port Orford as a supply depot between the California Gold Fields and Portland. Armed with only a few ancient and not reliable muskets, plus the ship’s four inch cannon that they demanded at the very last moment, these men suddenly found that the previously friendly Indians had turned hostile when their passage out steamed away.

“Finding themselves outnumbered 40 to 9, they camped on a rock part way in the ocean. The cannon was pointed down the only accessible path up the rock and they proceeded to attempt to hold off the Indians. The next morning about 60 Indians including a Chief started climbing up the rock into the camp. The Chief attempted to wrestle a musket out of the hands of one of the men and was clubbed over the head for it. A volley of arrows fired over the camp and J.M. Fitzpatrick fired the canon into the crowd. After the fifteen minute battle, 13 Indians were dead on the ground, four of the party were wounded. Later accounts say that there were 20 dead and 15 wounded Indians.

“The Indians kept firing muskets at the party camped on the rock, but never hit anything. That afternoon another Chief came and asked to remove the dead. They informed him that they would be gone in 14 days (when the ship was scheduled to come back). At that point the Indians left them alone.

“Unfortunately, urgent repairs to the ship delayed it’s sailing from San Francisco on time, so on the fifteenth day the Indians attacked again, this time in much greater numbers. The attack was repelled and the Indians would not attack again, instead firing arrows towards the rock which fell short. At this point the party on the rock was running short of ammunition.

“Luckily, a large group of the Indians set up a camp to the south of the rock near a creek. A small party remained to watch the rock. Those on the rock started building up fortifications in preparation for another attack. Satisfied that they were not leaving, the remaining Indians joined the rest of their party at the creek. Using this opportunity those on the rock managed to get into the woods undetected. As most of their ammo and food was gone they subsisted on salmonberries and a few roots. After four days of being followed and tracked by the hostile Indians, they managed to get a friendly tribe of Coos Indians to ferry them across the river by trading their shirts for passage. J.M. Fitzpatrick carried one of his comrades most of the way, despite demands to be left so the rest could get away. After eight days of constantly traveling through the woods with little to eat, and 4 wounded men to care for, the party managed to make their way to Umpqua City on the Umpqua River.

A second party of 67 men was put together with enough supplies to last four months. These men built two blockhouses and managed to later create the city of Port Orford. Another similar incident happened several months later. This was also a party of 9. Five of those were of the first party. But this time they only had to run for two and a half days. These two battles signify the start of the Rouge Indian Wars which lasted from 1851 to 1856.” (Hamell.net. The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History, Part 5, Survivors of Battle Rock.)

Michno: “June 10, 1851 Battle Rock (Port Orford, Oregon)

“Capt. William Tichenor sailed his steamer Sea Gull to the southern Oregon coast, hoping to establish a town. He dropped of nine men, supplies, and a cannon to start the fledgling burg, which would later become Port Orford. Tichenor departed promising to bring more men in two weeks. The Quatomah band of Rogue River Indians, however, did not appreciate the intrusion and menaced the new colonists. The newcomers pulled back to a rocky promontory between the ocean and the tidal flats and prepared a defense.

“The Indians held a war dance and advanced on the position with about 100 warriors. The colonists’ leader, J.M. Kirkpatrick, directed the firing of the cannon, the defenders fought tenaciously. With only 2 of their own wounded, they killed 17 Rogues, and wounded 10 more. The Indians retreated, but kept the whites under siege for two weeks. When Tichenor did not return on the promised date, the stranded colonists abandoned their rock and fled north, eventually finding safety among the friendly Indians at Coos Bay.” (Michno, Gregory F. Encyclopedia of Indian Wars: Western Battles and Skirmishes, 1850-1890. Missoula, MT: MP Mountain Press, 2003, p. 12.)

Schwartz: “According to the nineteenth-century Oregon historian Frances Fuller Victor, the operators of the Pacific Mail steamship line decided in 1851 that they wanted an Oregon port nearer to San Francisco than Astoria, on the Columbia River. So the company hired William Tichenor, a thirty-six-year-old New Jersey-born miner turned sea captain, to establish a settlement at a place to be called Port Orford, twenty-eight miles north of the mouth of the Rogue River. Tichenor and four other men, among them craggy-faced, forty-five-year-old William G. T’Vault, who seven years before had been the first editor of Oregon’s first newspaper, the Spectator, would be the proprietors of Port Orford.

“There are two distinctly different versions of what happened next. According to the story told by J. M. Kirkpatrick, who described himself as captain of the landing party, the inhabitants of the country who observed Tichenor’s initial landing on June 9 of nine men and a four-pound cannon were somewhat friendly and seemed to want to trade, but their attitude changed after the steamer left. Then, Kirkpatrick said, the Indians ‘grew saucy and ordered us off.’ The would-be colonizers planted themselves on ‘a small island or rock’ and the next morning repulsed about forty Indians, killing half of them. In the afternoon, a leader of the Indians came to have a conference, and Kirkpatrick supposed that he had communicated by signs that his party would leave in fourteen days.

“No one came to take them away, however, and on the morning of the fifteenth day, according to Kirkpatrick, the Indians attacked again. But after an ineffectual exchange of shots and arrows at three hundred yards, the Indians went away. The would-be colonizers decided the time had come to escape from their perch on what would become known as Battle Rock.

“The nine Americans walked for two days and nights to what Kirkpatrick told the readers of the Statesman was the mouth of the Rogue River but probably was the Coquille; the fugitives were going north toward the Coquille, not south toward the Rogue. After five more days they reached the mouth of the Coos River, where, Kirkpatrick said, they found friendly Indians who gave them food. But to get these Indians to ferry them across the mouth of the river, he said, ‘we had to give them the shirts off our backs.’

“Kirkpatrick had mistaken the Coos for the Umpqua River, which is about twenty miles north of the Coos, and spent a futile day on a twenty-mile hike looking for two newly established white towns on the Umpqua. On the following day, the eighth day after they had fled from Port Orford, Kirkpatrick and his men finally reached the white settlements on the Umpqua.

“The alternative to Kirkpatrick’s story was written by Anson Dart, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Oregon in 1851. Dart did not write his somewhat garbled account until more than twenty years after the Port Orford fight. It was published in the San Francisco Chronicle during the Modoc War in northern California when that paper was taking a position sympathetic to Indian people. Dart said he went to Port Orford (which he misplaced about twenty miles north of the California border) aboard the steamer Sea Gull about two weeks after learning of what had been represented to him as the massacre of a white settlement. ‘The first fact that I learned was, instead of an Indian massacre of a white settlement, it was an atrocious massacre of peaceable and friendly Indians,’ he said.

“The landing party had included about sixty Californians. Eight men were sent immediately to look for a route into the Rogue River country. About thirty Indians came down to the shore and helped unload the boat that had brought the landing party. Dart said the whites brought ashore two brass six-pound cannon, ‘one of which, with the assistance of the Indians, was taken to the top of a large rock, standing three sides in the water. The only approach to it was a narrow way from the land side.’

“The cannon was pointed down the narrow path, and the Indians were told ‘a little before dark’ to go to the rock to get their pay. ‘When all the Indians were on the narrow way,’ Dart said, ‘the piece of cannon was discharged by one of the parties who came up on the schooner.’ Twenty-two Indians were killed, and the rest escaped by jumping into the ocean. The next morning ‘more than two hundred Indians, all painted for war, appeared in the vicinity and exhibited unmistakable signs of hostility.’ The Californians ‘hastened on board of the schooner and put out to sea, leaving the eight men of the exploring party to take care of themselves.’

“Dart went on to confuse the trek made by Kirkpatrick and his comrades with an expedition led by T’Vault from the interior later in the year. Garbled though his account was, he was clear about the heart of the matter concerning the ‘battle’ of what would soon be known as Battle Rock; the cause was not an Indian effort to drive off the foreigners, as Dart saw it, but rather a deliberate and unprovoked attack by the foreigners.

“Kirkpatrick’s own description of Captain Tichenor’s attitude toward the Indian peoples supports the Dart version. When Tichenor recruited him in Portland, Kirkpatrick said, ‘He told me that there was not a particle of danger from the Indians, that he had been ashore among them many times and they were perfectly friendly.’ When Kirkpatrick asked for arms for defense against them, Tichenor insisted again that there was no danger and gave the men only three flintlock muskets and a rusty sword. Kirkpatrick and some of his men had brought their own weapons, however; Kirkpatrick had an army-issue rifle bought at the last minute that ‘proved to be a magnificent shooting gun,’ plus a pair of derringers.

“When they landed on the beach at Port Orford, Kirkpatrick said, the few Indians in sight appeared friendly. Nonetheless, Kirkpatrick told Tichenor that he ‘did not like the looks of things at all and those Indians meant mischief.’ Kirkpatrick asked Tichenor for the cannon on the Sea Gull. ‘He laughed at us at first for wanting it, but when we told him we wouldn’t stay without it he studied at bit and then said all right he would send it ashore’.” (Schwartz, E. A. The Rogue River Indian War and its Aftermath, 1850–1980. 1997, p. 35.)

Smith: “The Battle of Battle Rock – Oregon 1851 Which took place in the edge of the Pacific Ocean in 1851, and where nine men with four old muskets and an old signal gun repulsed an attack of 150 Indians, killing 23 of them and getting away with their lives.” (Smith, R. Gess. A Place Called Oregon (website). “The Battle of Battle Rock – Oregon 1851.)

Sources

BattleRockPark.com. “Battle Rock Park.” Accessed 10-18-2012 at: http://battlerockpark.com/

Enjoyportorford.com. “Battle Rock Park.” Accessed 7-1-2021 at: https://www.enjoyportorford.com/battlerockpark.html

Gaston, Joseph. The Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1911, Vol. 1. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1912. Google digitized; accessed 7-1-2021 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=uWUUAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Gibbs, Jim. Oregon’s Salty Coast. Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1978.

Hamell.net. The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History, Part 5, Survivors of Battle Rock. Accessed 10-18-2012 at: http://www.hamell.net/tag/massacre/

Kirkpatrick, J.M. “Correspondence of the Statesman.” Oregon Statesman, Oregon City, 7-15-1851, p. 2. Accessed 7-1-2021 at: https://truwe.sohs.org/files/battlerock.html

Lewis, Dr. David G. “Battle Rock the First Colonization on the Southern Oregon Coast.” Quartux (Journal of Critical indigenous Anthropology). 3-16-2019. Accessed 7-1-2021 at: https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2019/03/16/battle-rock-the-first-colonization-on-the-southern-oregon-coast/

Michno, Gregory F. Encyclopedia of Indian Wars: Western Battles and Skirmishes, 1850-1890. Missoula, MT: MP Mountain Press, 2003. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=MmNtF5n-VuEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

News-Review, Roseburg, OR. “Survivors of Indian Battle at Port Orford…”1-7-1951. Accessed 7-1-2021 at: http://www.douglascountyhistoricalsociety.org/2011/01/06/the-battle-of-battle-rock-1851-oregon/

Schwartz, E. A. The Rogue River Indian War and its Aftermath, 1850–1980. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Partially Google digitized. Accessed 9-7-2012 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=OZwAnfQj62cC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Smith, R. Gess. A Place Called Oregon (website). “The Battle of Battle Rock – Oregon 1851. Accessed 10-18-2012 (website no longer operational)