In December 1855, the Battle of Walla Walla, also known as the Battle of Frenchtown, was fought here for four days in what was the longest Indian battle in Washington Territory history, involving approximately 350 Oregon Mounted Volunteers and an estimated thousand Walla Walla, Cayuse, Palouse, and Yakama warriors. The conflict followed a running battle that began at the mouth of the Touchet River, nine miles west, and spread across the flat, the riverside trees, and the hills in cold, snowy weather. A central point was the cabin of Joseph Larocque and his wife Lizette Walla Walla, where the outnumbered and ill-equipped volunteers took refuge, established their field headquarters and hospital, and enclosed the site in a stockade they called Fort Bennett. The main battlefield lay between that cabin and the cabin of Louis Tellier and Anqelique Pendoreille a mile east, and the Tellier cabin changed hands several times between the Indians and the Volunteers. Walla Walla Chief Peopeomoxmox and others on both sides were killed during the fighting, and Peopeomoxmox and four other hostages were killed by the Volunteers while in captivity at the Larocque cabin on the first day of the battle; his body was mutilated and dismembered. After four days, with the volunteers running low on ammunition, reinforcements arrived from Fort Henrietta and the Indians withdrew, leaving a four-day stand-off. The battle at Frenchtown was part of a larger war that broke out in September 1855 after the Walla Walla Treaty Council of May and June provided for reservations for tribes of the region and ceded most of their tribal lands to the United States. Immediately after the council and before Congress ratified the treaties, miners and squatters began occupying tribal lands, and the tribes resisted to protect their property and livestock. Members of the Walla Walla tribe had raided the Fort Walla Walla trading post at Wallula, and Chief Peopeomoxmox had reportedly vowed to kill Governor Isaac Stevens on his return from a council with the Blackfeet. In response to a call from U.S. Army Major Gabriel Rains, Oregon Mounted Volunteers marched from the Willamette Valley, established Fort Henrietta on the Umatilla River, inspected the abandoned Fort Walla Walla trading post, and marched toward the Touchet River to punish the Walla Walla. Peopeomoxmox met them under a white flag of truce and, at their insistence, became their hostage to prevent an immediate attack on his village. When the volunteers returned to the Walla Walla River and started up the valley to establish a winter camp at the old Whitman Mission, the battle began. The larger conflict, known as the Yakama War, ended in 1858 after an aggressive U.S. Army campaign under Colonel George Wright, and in 1859 Congress ratified the three treaties signed in Walla Walla, creating the Yakama, Nez Perce, and Umatilla reservations and officially opening the rest of the region to white settlement.