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And still that flag flew, proud and rankling over the Long Tom River, visible for miles from every oncoming stage. It flew there, proud and defiant, until a day in late August, when something rather remarkable happened — another “first and only” for the Beaver State. On that historic day, the McCornack family had just settled down to supper at their farm on Elmira Road, just outside Eugene, when to their astonishment a large detachment of federal troops — blue-coated United States Cavalry officers and men — filed up to the farmhouse in two columns, which split apart and flowed around the farmhouse and outbuildings. Soon the whole spread was surrounded with a cordon of several hundred armed men. Two officers then approached the farmhouse, and family patriarch Andrew McCornack — no doubt more than a little nervously — came to the door to see what they wanted. The officers were gracious and courteous. Did Mr. McCornack have an employee by the name of Armstrong, they wondered? “As a matter of fact, I do,” he replied, or words to that effect, and the captain then called to Armstrong to come out and give himself up. He was, as it turned out, a deserter from the U.S. Cavalry. Once he’d been collected, installed on a horse and surrounded by his once-and-future comrades, the bugler played “recall” and the troop rode away in the direction of Eugene, leaving the astonished McCornacks to finish their supper. “Now, these troops were stationed at Vancouver,” Elwin McCornack wrote in his account of his relatives’ adventure. “Had they ridden 150 miles to take Armstrong the Deserter? No, they had not. They had other business in this vicinity and had orders to pick up the deserter while they were there.” By the time poor Mr. Armstrong was on his way back to the barracks, that business was all over and done, and the prize — a large home-made rebel flag — was safely stowed in a saddlebag. One source claims there was a “small skirmish” before the flag was confiscated. While possible, this seems unlikely; if shots had been fired at U.S. Cavalry troopers, Smithfield would no doubt have been burned to the ground and its surviving occupants hauled back to Vancouver as prisoners. I’ve been able to find no record of anything like that. But, skirmish or no, it was the first and only incidence of an operation by the U.S. Army against a non-Native American military enemy on Oregon soil, and it ended in defeat for the Smithfield rebels.
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