The Last of the Indian Wars by Forbes Parkhill

Author:Forbes Parkhill [Parkhill, Forbes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781014196705
Google: CoiuzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Creative Media Partners, LLC
Published: 2021-09-09T04:23:19+00:00

Sing Death Song

HALF A century earlier, on Jan. 29, 1863, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor, with warrants for the arrest of two tribesmen, had set the pattern for attacks upon the Indians when his California volunteers surrounded a large Bannock village on the Bear River in Utah, opening fire without warning at dawn on a bitterly cold winter morning.

In the surprise attack 224 Indians were shot down and many others were drowned in attempting to swim the river. Fourteen soldiers were killed, fifty-three wounded, and seventy-nine suffered frozen feet during the winter march.

The same pattern was followed in the West’s most brutal and senseless massacre of Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, when Col. John M. Chivington, in command of Colorado volunteers, surrounded an Indian camp on November 29, 1864, and, in a surprise attack at dawn of a winter morning, slaughtered Indian men, women and children, estimated at from 80 to 500.

Instead of putting an end to Indian atrocities, the Chivington massacre incited repeated reprisals directed against the whites in the ensuing year, and brought about the deaths of many white frontier families that paid with their lives for Chivington’s savagery.

During the 1868 winter campaign of reprisal against the plains Indians, General George A. Custer’s cavalry surrounded and attacked Chief Black Kettle’s camp of sixty lodges on the Washita and killed 103 Indians, including Black Kettle and a few women and children.

When Marshal Nebeker launched his dawn attack on Old Polk’s camp near Bluff, he was merely following a pattern already established in the West, a pattern but slightly modified in the Indian troubles of the eighties in the Four Corners country.

The marshal had been charged with serving a murder war-rant on Tse-ne-gat. He lacked the shadow of an excuse or legal authority to shoot down, without warning, other members of Old Polk’s camp.

“This matter was fully exploited in the newspapers,” said the Sniffen report, “when it was made to appear that all the Utes in that section were on the warpath, ‘armed to the teeth,’ and prepared to resist any effort of the authorities to arrest Tse-ne-gat.

“That the Indians were not spoiling for a fight, or even prepared for it, is evident from the fact that they did not take the precaution to guard their camp, and they were therefore easily surprised. Indeed, I was informed that some of them were unarmed, their guns being in pawn.”

R. E. Pool of Cortez was quoted in the Outlook magazine as saying:

“Nebeker made the mistake of gathering a posse of men composed chiefly of the rougher element of cowpunchers. These proceeded to tank up in anticipation of the coming fun with the Indians.”

The posse reached Bluff in the middle of the night. Nebeker dared not delay his attack, for fear the presence of his possemen might be discovered by the Utes.

He sent them out with orders to surround Old Polk’s camp, to hide themselves in the rimrocks, and to await the order to open fire as soon as it was light enough to sight their rifles.

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