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The Klickitat County Agriculturist, Goldendale, WA., February 10, 1933, page 1

COLUMBUS LANDING BACK IN YEAR 1878
(For the Agri.)

W.F. Brock lived at Columbus in 1878. He is still alive, living at Summerville, Oregon. "Our family," he says, "reached Columbus Landing, about 15 miles above The Dalles, early in June.
The ferryman there gave my father a message from Father Wilbur advising the teachers, and my father and mother, to bivou-ac at Columbus or Goldendale until the Indian troubles had quieted down. So my father engaged board for my mother and myself with the ferryman, Mr. Hickenbotham. My mother spent this summer drying and canning fruit from the fine Hickenbotham orchards, of which there were three, two on the sand bar and one half way up the mountain towards Goldendale.
Mr. Brock in a recent issue of The Dalles Chronicle, relates at some length, his life at the old Columbus Landing,-- as it was then known.
"Almost every white man who came to Oregon or Washington territory at that time was seeking a homestead. Incident to his travels, my father wrote articles about the country and the Indians for Ohio papers.
"From the hills above Columbus, I witnessed one Indian battle as they were crossing the river here, and saw the Indians bury a squaw on the north side of the river. They left a white horse by the grave, tied to a sage brush for her spirit to ride to the happy hunting grounds on. About 500 ponies were killed and wounded by the volunteers and by a gunboat as they made efforts to cross from the south to the north banks of the Columbia, at Columbus. For several months the wounded horses stood along the banks and became prey to the coyotes.
"Mr. Hickenbotham talked to the Indians when they came back several times to visit the grave of the woman at Columbus. He helped them keep the body covered with sand as the coyotes worked around it at times, also on the bones of the horse. I used to go down to the sand dunes with him to look after the graves for the Indians.
"During the last fifty years, I have run across in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, a number of families who came to this country in the eighties as a result of my father's letters published in Ohio newspapers during the Indian uprisings. The pictures of the fertile landscapes, the equable climate, rich pastures and the beautiful country appealed to the people whose soil already was worn out and a magnet to those who had a liking for adventure.
"In the years that followed I learned to speak the Piute, Yakima, Chinook, Walla Walla and some of the Cayuse dialects. I might here state that the treatment which Father Wilbur and the U.S. government gave the Indians held in concentration camps is the most cruel and inhumane treatment given to human beings that ever I have seen.
"Leo F. Brune, a stockman, now living at Northdalles, will verify my statements as to that privations. During the weeks that the Indians were heded on the barren hills and flats across from The Dalles, with no issue of rations to them as prisoners, Leo Brune and his sister helped the squaws catch black crickets and watch them bake the crickets. For many days the crickets were their only food, with the addition of ground squirrels and such few birds as they might shoot with bows and arrows.
"Leon Curtiss at Northdalles is another pioneer who remembers well the Indians and their suffering when they were herded through the snows of the mountain ranges, scantily clad, to the Yakima reservation."
Mr. Brock in concluding his article, says that the Indian bureau, operated at Washington, controlled by Indian agents with self seeking motives and congressmen who represented predatory stockmen and settlers, over-rode every natural right of the Indians.