I have often been asked to describe the lava beds.  That is beyond the power of language.  In a letter to the Army and Navy journal, written at the suggestion of General Wheaton, I compared the Indians in the lava beds to “ants in a sponge.”  In the language of another it is a “black ocean tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes, a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, barrenness—­a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness, and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this far-stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion was petrified—­all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting fettered, paralyzed and left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore.”

Towards night the rattle of the guns gradually died away and the yell of the savages was hushed for the day.  Leaving a strong guard on the bluff we joined General Wheaton a few hundred yards in the rear, anxiously awaited the coming of another day, little dreaming what that day was to bring forth.  There was little sleep that night.  The frozen ground with a pair of blankets is not a bed of roses, and is little conducive to sleep and rest.  Most of the night was spent around the fires until 2 o’clock when all were ordered to “fall in.”  The order of march and battle was as follows:  The command of Fairchilds and Dorris occupied the extreme left along the lake shore; Mason’s infantry battalion, with mountain howitzers packed, joined Fairchild’s right; Captain Kelley’s command occupied the center with his left resting on Mason’s right; Captain Applegate connected with Kelley’s right and Perry’s left, who occupied the extreme left wing; while Donald McKay’s Indians formed a skirmish line in advance.  The whole line stretched out a mile or more.  As the line filed out of camp, their arms glittering in the bright moonlight, they formed a beautiful and inspiring sight.  The command, “Forward on the line” was now given and we moved forward at a brisk walk.  I galloped down the line and watched it as it descended the steep bluff.  Low down and stretching over the lava beds lay a dense fog, and as the head of the line disappeared it looked as if it were going into the sea.  As I sat there General Wheaton came up and insisted that I should leave my horse.  On my consenting reluctantly, he detailed a soldier who took the animal back to camp.

As we reached the bottom of the bluff the entire line was deployed in the form of a half wheel, the intention being to surround the savages by connecting with Bernard’s left and capture the entire band.  Daylight now began to peep through the fog and night, and “forward on the line” was given and taken up by subalterns and repeated until it died away in the distance.  There were no skirmishers now.  McKay and his Indians