Copied from An Archival Review and Ethnographic Study for the Relicensing of the Hells Canyon Complex Hydroelectrical Plants, L. Daniel Myers, 2001. Pg 94-96.
In the mid-1840s, Mrs Abigail J Duniway published Captain Gray’s Company or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon, in which she chronicles her migration west. Mrs Duniway writes:
Extracts from Herbert’s Journal.
August 25th [1852]. The wearisome duties devolving upon me are so fatiguing, that I sometimes neglect my journal and leave it unthought of for days. This time weeks have passed since I last took notes of travel.
We are now opposite Fort Boise. It is fashioned something like Fort Hall, but is not so durably constructed. It was built by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and was intended more for a trading post, than a Fort. That company have now abandoned it, but it is in possession of other traders. We drove our cattle on an island above the Fort, where grass is plenty. While there we remarked on a very disagreeable odor, arising from a thicket near the water’s edge. We searched the thicket and found a half dozen dead Indians. Maurice examined the bodies, and pronounced them poisoned by strychnine. He inquired about the matter at the Fort, and was informed that some emigrants had poisoned some dead oxen in order to prove a disputed point about whether or not the Indians would eat cattle left dead by travellers! The result proved the experimenter’s argument for nearly twenty Indians were poisoned.
On August 19th [1852], E.W. Conyers, an emigrant from Quincy, Illinois, reported:
Thursday — We stared at 7 a. m. and traveled eight miles over a very good road and stopped for lunch. After lunch we traveled two miles to the crossing of Snake River at old Fort Boise. An old Scotchman of the Hudson’s Bay Company is the only inhabitant of this fort. His name we did not learn. He went around among the emigrants begging fresh milk for an emigrant woman and her babe who was dumped out here by some human fiend to shift for herself. Inside of the fort are quite a number of Indian women ornamenting moccasins with bead work, for which they charge 35 cents per pair. There is an Indian village near the crossing of Snake River at this place. These Indians have been feasting on the dead carcasses of emigrant cattle. Some thoughtless emigrants whose cattle died here cut the carcasses open and put in a bait of strychnine, as they said, “to kill off some of those pesky coyote,” but the Indians happened to get hold of these poisoned carcasses and died by the hundreds. Their remedy was to put the patient into a sweat-house built with sticks and then covered with dirt. These sweat-houses are built near the bank of the river. When they imagined the patient had been sufficiently sweated, they would suddenly open the door, when the patient would make a desperate rush for the river, plunging into the cold water head foremost. Under this treatment the patient invariably died within a few minutes after coming from his cold bath. They kept up a continual pow-wow over their poisoned sick all night. This afternoon we crossed Snake River in wagon beds for a boat. Toll, $3. We camped for the night near the river bank. Very little grass, but plenty of good wood.