In the meantime, gathering the livestock from the exposed range was proceeding slowly. A party sent out from Rockville in April to round up the stock in the vicinity of Maxwell’s Ranch, found the bodies of two men, a woman, and an Indian, killed a few days before. When the bodies were brought in to Grafton, it was ascertained that they were young Robert Berry, his wife, Isabel, and his brother, Joe, who were coming home to Berryville in Long Valley via the Dixie settlements and the Arizona Strip (a roundabout way, but the only wagon route at the time). They had left the Maxwell Ranch on Short Creek on April 2, 1866 when some Indians (presumably Paiutes), ambushed them.
According to verbal reports, as related by Mrs. John Dennett of Rockville (then a girl living in Long Valley and who pieced her story from Indian and white sources), the Berrys fought for their lives. The Indians shot one of the horses, rendering the wagon useless. In the fighting, one Indian was shot. Joe Berry loosened the other horse and tried to escape but was killed in so doing. The Indians closed in and captured Robert and his wife. They tied Robert to a wheel where he was forced to watch them torture Isabel, who was an expectant mother. They shot arrows into her and laughed at her as she tried to pull them out. Then they shot him full of arrows. Mrs. Dennett said her father always felt that the Berrys had been killed in revenge for some Indians slain by Long Valley men who had found them roasting a beef. At that time three were slain: an Indian, a squaw and a papoose.
When the Berry tragedy was reported in St. George, orders were issued forbidding travel unless in groups large enough to provide adequate safeguards. This led to the declaration of martial law, May 2, 1866, and to the issuance of instructions to concentrate the settlers in fortified places of at least 150 men. Patrols were ordered out in various directions, especially across the trails used by the Navajos in raiding the Mormon country and in contacting the rampaging Utes of Sevier County.
When Silas S. Smith, stationed on the Sevier, heard of the Berry massacre, he found that the Paiute chief at Panguitch had known about it for five days without reporting it to him. Smith at once ordered pickets to bring in all passing Indians for questioning. Friendly Indians responded willingly enough, but when two strange Indians refused, a skirmish resulted in which one was killed and the other wounded.
Smith decided to disarm the local Indians and surrounded one of their camps near Panguitch one morning before daylight and took their arms. Two visiting Indians were missing from the camp so he kept a guard awaiting their arrival. When they came, they showed fight. One of them was killed, whereupon the other surrendered. The next day Smith surrounded another camp soon after sunrise, but the natives had already fled. However, in the ensuing melee two more Indians were killed. The arms taken from them included several guns, many new arrows, and a peck of new arrow heads. Some escaped to Panguitch Lake and spread the alarm among the Indians there.
General Snow had a number of chiefs from Panguitch, Parowan, and Red Creek brought to Parowan for conference. He tried to pacify them with arguments and presents but insisted that they must not have arms or ammunition and must have passes in order to travel through the Mormon settlements. This aroused some resentment, but on April 25, 1866, they agreed to leave their weapons at Parowan as a token of friendship. Some of the Indians reported gunfire around Upper Kanab where Col. W. B. Maxwell was on lookout for Navajos.
With the declaration of martial law and the order to concentrate settlers in large towns, the outlying ranchers and people from the smaller villages began to move into Toquerville, Virgin and Rockville. In June, General Snow decided to abandon Long Valley. Mrs. John Dennett, who made the trek as a girl, recalled the line of wagons leaving Long Valley with armed guards in front and rear. While crossing the sand hills between there and Kanab, a small boy was run over and killed. A halt was made while the child was buried in the sand, but the exigencies of the situation forbade longer delay and the weeping mother was hastily torn from the fresh grave.
The settlers’ train passed Kanab to the left and pushed on toward Pipe Springs. Near the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon (June 27) they ran into an ambush of Indians who, for some unexplained reason, failed to attack. J. M. Higbee reports[72] that they called to the Indians to come in and talk or be shot. They came in and talked. According to Mrs. Dennett, there were seven or nine Indians taken into Pipe Springs for a council of war. The wagons were driven into a large circle, as was customary in times of danger, the Indians inside the circle in the center of the group of whites. Higbee says the Indians were told that if any more were found along the route of the caravan they would be shot. Mrs. Dennett adds that some of the Indians had guns and clothes belonging to the Berry boys, which greatly enraged a brother of the dead men, who pleaded to be allowed to revenge his kin. After this, no more Indians were seen on the trip.
In the late summer of 1866, Captain James Andrus[73] was ordered to investigate Indian routes crossing the Colorado River in the rough country between the Kaibab and the mouth of the Green River. A group of men was mustered into service from the Virgin River settlements at Gould’s Ranch, twenty-six miles east of St. George, August 16, and moved on to Pipe Springs two days later, where final preparations were made. On the 21st, forty-six mounted men, each equipped with a rifle and two pistols, and with a pack horse bearing forty days’ rations for each pair, started northeast toward the rough country. They went via abandoned Kanab and Scutumpah to the Paria River six miles above Paria settlement where they met another contingent of their party. Two days later, Joseph Fish with eighteen men arrived from Iron county. They located the Ute trail which passed down the Paria to the Colorado. Elijah Averett, sent back with some of the surplus animals, was killed by Indians in the hills west of Paria.
On August 29, the main party went northeast through the hills south of the Aquarius Plateau into a valley where they found wild potatoes growing (hence named Potato Valley, now Escalante Valley). They climbed the Plateau and looked off into the wild country stretching to the mouth of the Green River. Convinced that there was no use in going farther, they retraced their march on September 2, traveled to the northwest corner of the plateau, descended to the Sevier River Valley and reached Circleville. They had been pathbreakers from Paria to this point. From here they returned via Parowan and Cedar City.