Product Overview
Thunder Over the Ochoco is literally the work of a lifetime. Its author spent 40 years combing historical records and interviewing dozens of descendants of pioneer settlers and Native Americans who shared oral traditions that have been passed down through generations.
What emerges is history as it has never been told before. A history of conquistadors and fur trappers, of merchants and missionaries. The history of an Indian war that was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts ever fought on American soil, but which for political and economic reasons was covered up for decades. Above all, the history of those first settlers of the Ochocomen, woman, and childrenwho were left to wander and starve in a land they thought belonged to them through eternity, a people who in their final agony cried out: `Nimma ne-umpu!'`We too are human!
Gale Ontko tells this story with compassion and grace, in a style that combines the precision of the scholar with the vigor and drama of the novelist. The five volumes comprise nearly 2500 printed book pages and have been described by some as the most factual writing by any author on the history of the Shoshoni People.
Volume III covers the period between 1860 and 1869 when rich deposits of gold were discovered in eastern Oregon, and the citizens of the Willamette Valley were out to claim their share at any cost. Shoshoni dog soldiers were equally determined that they keep to their side of the Cascade barrier. War was officially declared. The opposing forces went for each others throats locked in a death struggle that seemed endless. The crashing crescendo of thunder was accompanied by lightning strikes of destruction which ricocheted into four western statesand the military campaign they thought would last but a few weeks stretched into years. In flashing raids, Shoshoni dog soldiers humiliated the Oregon Cavalry, taking a deadly toll on mining settlements, homesteads, stagecoaches and wagon trains. It would take a battle-hardened army baptized in the carnage of the Civil War four years to bring the Shoshoni to their knees: an aggressor with unlimited resources pitted against a foe that was undermanned, undernourished and outgunnedbut desperately fighting for survival. Volume III is the story of the first violent Shoshoni outbreak, which would again erupt in the 1870s.
