Everything went along first rate for a while, but after about six or eight months of that work, the big, fine horses began to play out, and then the company bought up a lot of wild horses from California, strung them along the road and put the best riders to breaking them.
Peter Neece, our home station keeper, was a big, strong man, and a good rider. He was put to breaking some of these mustangs for the boys on his beat. After he had ridden one of them a time or two, he would turn the half-broken, wild things over to the express boys to ride. Generally, when a hostler could lead them into and out of the stable without getting his head kicked off, the bronchos were considered broken. Very likely they had been handled just enough to make them mean. I found it to be so with most of the horses they gave me to ride.
I was not a bit afraid of the Indians at first; but when the boys began to get shot at and killed by the skulking savages, I might not have been afraid, but I was pretty badly scared just the same.
At one time my home station was at Shell Creek. I rode from there to Deep Creek. One day the Indians killed a rider out on the desert, and when I was to meet him at Deep Creek, he was not there. I had to keep right on until I met him. It was not until I reached the next station, Willow Creek, that I found out he had been killed. My horse was about jaded by this time, so I had to stay there and let him rest. I should have had to start back that night if the Indians had not come upon us.
About four o’clock that afternoon, seven Indians rode up to the station and asked for something to eat. Neece, the station keeper, picked up a sack holding about twenty pounds of flour and offered it to them. They demanded a sack of flour apiece. He threw it back into the house and told them to clear out, that he would not give them anything.
This made them angry, and as they passed a shed about five rods from the house they each shot an arrow into a poor old lame cow, that happened to be standing under a shed. When Neece saw that, he jerked out his pistol and commenced shooting at them. He killed two of the Indians and the rest ran.
“Now, boys,” he said, “we are in for a hot time tonight. There’s a bunch of about thirty of the red rascals up the canyon, and they will be on us as soon as it gets dark. We’ll have to fight.”
A man by the name of Lynch was with us at the time. He had boasted a good deal about what he would do if the Indians attacked him. We thought he was a kind of desperado. I felt pretty safe until he weakened and began to cry, then I wanted all of us to get on our horses and skip for the next station; but Pete said: “No; we will load up all of our old guns and get ready for them when they come. There are only four of us; but we can stand off the whole bunch of them.”
Bur. of Am. Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution