SUBLETTE WOUNDED.-A FALSE ALARM.



be ta-ken back to camp. Sublette then: pressed forward,
and seeing an Indian looking through an aperture, aimed
at him with fatal effect. No sooner had he done so, and
pointed out the opening to Campbell, than he was struck
with a ball in the shoulder, which nearly prostrated him,
)and turned him so faint that Campbell took him in his
arms and carried him, assisted by Meek, out of the swamp.
At the same time one of the men received a wound in the
head. The battle was now carried on with spirit, although
from the difficulty of approaching the fort, the firing was
very irregular.
  The mountaineers who followed Sublette, took up their
station in the woods on one side of the fort, and the Nez
Perces, under Wyeth, on the opposite side, which acci-
dental arrangement, though it was fatal to many of the
Blackfeet in the fort, was also the occasion of loss to
themselves by the cross-fire. The whites being constantly
reinforced by fresh arrivals from the rendezvous, were
soon able to silence the guns of the enemy, but they were
not able to drive them from their fort, where they re-
mained silent and sullen after their ammunition was ex-
hausted.
  Seeing that the women of the Nez Perces and Flat-
heads were gathering up sticks to set fire to their breast-
work of logs, an old chief proclaimed in a loud voice
from within, the startling intelligence that there were
four hundred lodges of his people close at hand, who
would soon be there to avenge their deaths, should the
whites choose to reduce them to ashes. This harangue,
delivered in the usual high-flown style of Indian oratory,
either was not clearly understood, or was wrongly inter-
preted, and the impression got abroad that an attack was
being made on the great encampment. This intelligence
occasioned a diversion, and a division of forces; for while



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