[J. H. Cradlebaugh, The Piute War, Sunset, July 1905]

 

The Piute War

            THE breaking out of the Piute war in the spring of 1860, found me illy prepared for it. There had been blood-curdling rumors in circulation for several weeks, which some of my adult friends retailed to me with ornate embellishments that would make a Cheefoo despatch seem like a Sunday-school lesson. The result was that I was utterly demoralized, and what should have been the sweet slumbers of innocence were disturbed by visions of tomahawks, scalping-knives, hand-painted savages and all kinds of horrible tortures; and I would wake up in the night dripping with perspiration from my vain efforts to pick up my leaden feet in their effort to get elsewhere.

            I did not realize, then, that Ragtown, Ase Kenyon and several barrels of valley tan whisky lay like a Gibraltar between myself and the enemy. I was with my father at the old Mormon station. I bunked with my uncle, eight of us occupying the little room, which was fitted with four double bunks.

            One morning about two o'clock a carpenter sleeping in a shop next door, and evidently as badly frightened as myself, moved by the spirit of his dreams which in this case, took on the shape of a horrible Indian night-mustang, rushed down the little crooked street shouting Injuns! Injuns! I was awakened by the others getting out, and learning the trouble at once abandoned the top of the bed for what I considered a more strategic position—under it.

            The excitement was over in a few minutes and some one struck a light. I peered out. Judge Brumfield was armed with an Austrian musket of the vintage of 1492. My father had a double-barreled shotgun, George Atwater, a young attorney just out from Ohio, flourished an old Wesson pepper-box pistol with six or seven barrels and a muzzle, as I can see it yet, resembling a honeysuckle, while "Chip" Smith, who did the cooking for the crowd, was armed with a frying-pan, probably realizing that in his hands, that was indeed a deadly weapon. I came out from under the bunk with my heart singing a wild peaon of joy, but I do not think I am quite as much of a brunette as I would have been but for that night.

            The cause of the war was, that a couple of men taking care of stage-stock for Ben Holliday at Gravelly ford, on the Humboldt, enticed a young squaw (I can scarcely resist the temptation to make her beautiful) into their dug-out and kept her a prisoner for several days. Her relatives learned this and resorted to the only law they knew, force; killing both men.

            Murder was not so uncommon as to startle a whole community, for that little pleasantry was of almost daily occurrence, but then it was "white kill white." When an Indian, albeit moved by the strongest of human motives, committed the same offense it was a different matter. It may be the cause and not the fact of the murder was what stirred the community to its depths and caused the camp to rise as one man to teach the Indian his place. Sam Brown, "the undertaker's friend," was one of the first to enlist to punish the murderers.

            In a few days, with much clanking of spurs and show of arms, the mob rode out, ostensibly under the leadership of Major Ormsby, a gallant gentleman, but really every fellow was for himself and the devil with a mortgage on the hindmost. The major made an ineffectual effort to get some kind of discipline established.

            Near Pyramid lake they found Chief Winnemucca with his warriors drawn up in battle array. He didn't want to fight but tried to parley. His efforts were futile. The whites were hunting a fight, and they struck it rich. The battle has been described by abler pens than mine, suffice it that the whites were out-generaled and very badly whipped.

            I was at Carson when the remnants of the army came home. They arrived seriatim, Sam Brown being among the first. The stragglers were five or six days in getting in and the surgeon was so overcome by exposure and hardship that he became temporarily insane. He was found by a couple of "buccaroos" near Swift's springs, a mile or two from Carson, and mistaking his discoverers for Indians he fled through the sage-brush and was only brought into camp by being lassoed.

            There was a skirmish afterward, but the first battle was practically the last. The Indians did not want to fight before it, or the whites after, so peace was soon made.

            I learned later that I was one of the victims of the war and had the pleasure of reading an obituary notice of my father and myself, that almost made me wish that I was dead. In some manner the report reached the east that we had been killed, tortured, scalped and I know not what else. I read a long account of our butchery in the paper published in the little town in Ohio that I had selected as a birthplace. And I first learned then what a bright lovable little boy I was, what a brilliant future I had, and what a mark I would have made across the scroll of fame, had I not been (as the editor put it), "ruthlessly cut down in the sweet springtime of my innocent youth: a bud denied blossoming here, gone to mingle its fragrance with kindred bloom in the flower-decked fields of Paradise."

            Most of that future is behind me now, and without prejudice or partiality I solemnly assert that that editor used the truth with prodigal frugality; but oh! if I could have lived up to the part.

J. H. CRADLEBAUGH.