This experience made me feel that my job was too risky for the pay I was getting. The Agent wouldn’t raise my wages, so I quit him and went back to my home at Oxford, Idaho.
“Two Indians were behind them, both on an old horse of mine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE FRONTIER TROUBLES
Later, we moved back into the Bear Lake, where we made our home for twenty years. During this time I was often called on to do dangerous service in the interest of our settlements. After the Indian troubles were over, we had outlaws to deal with who were worse than Indians. For a long time the frontier communities suffered from depredations committed by cattle rustlers and horse thieves. Organized bands operated from Montana to Colorado. They had stations about a hundred miles apart in the roughest places in the mountains. They would often raid our ranges and steal all the cattle and horses they could pick up, driving them into their mountain retreat. They got so daring finally that they even came into the settlements and robbed stores and killed men. The colonists did not get together to stop these outrages till after a fatal raid was made upon Montpelier, when a store was robbed and a clerk was shot dead. This roused the people of the valley to action. Gen. Charles C. Rich called upon the leaders of the towns to send two men from each settlement—the best men to be had—to pursue and punish the outlaws. Fourteen men responded to the call, among them four of the leaders themselves. It fell to my lot to be one of this posse.
We struck across the mountains east of Bear Lake, following the trail of the robbers to their rendezvous on the Big Piney, a tributary of the Green River. We knew that they had hidden themselves in this country, for two of the men with us, whose stock had been stolen, had followed the robbers to their den to recover their property. Finding the outlaws in such force, they didn’t dare to claim their stolen stock but returned to Bear Lake for help.
These men led us to the place where they had come upon the outlaws; but the outlaws had evidently feared pursuit and moved camp. To hide their tracks they had driven their wagons up the creek right in the water for over a mile. Then they had left the creek and driven up a little ravine and over a ridge. As we rode up this ravine, to the top of the ridge, the two men who were in the lead sighted the tepees of the robbers in the hollow below. They dodged back to keep out of sight, and we all rode down into the thick willows on the Big Piney, hiding our horses and ourselves among them. The two men that had sighted the outlaw camp then slipped up the hill again on foot, secreting themselves in the sagebrush at the top of the ridge, and watched the rest of the afternoon to see whether the outlaws had mistrusted anything; but they showed no sign of having seen us. At dark they came and reported.
We held council then to decide what plan to pursue to capture the outlaws. As the robbers outnumbered us, more than two to one, and were well armed, it was serious business. Our sheriff weakened when the test came; he said he couldn’t do it, and turned his papers over to Joseph Rich, as brave a man as ever went on such a trip. There were others who felt pretty shaky and wanted to turn back, but Mr. Rich said we had been picked as the best men in Bear Lake and he didn’t feel like going back without making an attempt to capture the thieving band. One man said he was ready to go cut the throats of the whole bunch of robbers if the captain said so, but Mr. Rich said, “No; we did not come out to shed blood. We want to take them alive and give them a fair trial.”
Every man was given a chance to say how he felt. Most of us wanted to make the attempt to capture the outlaws, and the majority ruled.
How to do it was the next problem. It would have been folly for so few of us to make an open attack on so many well-armed men. The only way we could take them was by surprise, when they were asleep. This plan agreed upon, Mr. Rich proposed that we go down the hill with our horses and pack animals, get in line at the bottom, then, just at the peep of day, charge upon their camp, jump from our horses, run into their tents and grab their guns. When we had decided on this plan of action, Mr. Rich said that this probably meant a fight. If it did we should let them fire first. Should they kill one of us, we must not run; for if we did so they would kill us all. We should give them the best we had. With our double-barreled shotguns loaded with buckshot, we would make things pretty hot for them if they showed fight.