The white Indian boy

by Elijah Nicholas Wilson

Antelope on the desert. Pictures of this kind were often seen by Pony Express riders.

Afterwards I was changed to another division, driving in Nevada from Austin to Sand Wells. Jim Clift was division agent here. It was a heavy road,—full of sand; but it wasn’t so hard and heavy as another stretch that Ben Halliday, our big chief, gave me later. When he heard I was careful with the horses, that I didn’t use them up as did some of the drivers they brought in from the East, who didn’t know mountain life, he set me to driving from the Sink of Carson to Fort Churchill. I drove there that summer and winter and the next spring I was sent to drive from Carson City to Virginia City, Nevada.

Howard R. Driggs

Old stage station at Fort Hall or Ross’s Fork, Idaho.

I arrived at Carson City about ten o’clock one very fine morning in June. The mail agent met me just as I entered the town, and told me to drive to Tim Smith’s big rock stable and put up my horses. He told me that the line I was driving on was in dispute, and he would have to go to Salt Lake City to see who had the right of way. “Stay here until you hear from me,” he said, “and board in that hotel across the street.” With that he left me alone, seven hundred miles from home and among strangers. If he had left me in an Indian camp, I should have felt all right; but to be left away out here among a lot of strange white folks was more than I could bear.

I put my horses up, and while I was sitting out by the side of the stable, I saw a man come out of the hotel. He had on a white cap, and a white apron that reached from his chin to his feet. In each hand he had a big, round, brass thing. He pounded these together and made a fearful racket. I had never seen a hotel before, to say nothing of being in one, and as the men that worked in the barn came rushing past me, I asked one of them what was up. “Dinner,” he said. I got up and went over to the hotel, and when I went in, I never saw such a sight before. They had tables all over the house, and people were rushing in and sitting down to them.

I slipped in and took off my hat and stood by the side of the door waiting for some one to come up and ask me to sit down at a table, but nobody came. I stood there a while longer, and saw others come in and sit down at the tables without being asked, so I went sneaking up to a table and stood there, and as nobody asked me to sit down, I sat down anyhow. A waiter came up and began to mutter something to me. I asked, “What?” He got it off again. I told him that I did not know what he said, so he went out and brought me something to eat. I went over to the stable and sat down, and then I began thinking of home. I didn’t go back to the hotel that night for any supper, and when I went to bed, the fleas were so bad I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and when morning came I was hungry, sleepy, tired, and homesick.

Next morning I met one of the stable men. He asked me if I had been to breakfast. I told him I had not. “Come right on in,” he said, taking me by the arm. The waiter came up and got off the same thing that he said the day before, and the man that was with me told him to fetch it along. I told the waiter to bring me the same. Well, I ate two or three breakfasts that morning to make up. Then I felt much better.

After breakfast we went back to the stable, and pretty soon Tim Smith came in and said, “Young man, it may be three weeks before the right of way is settled, but if you want to go to work in the stable I will give you three dollars a day.” I agreed and began to work. Tim Smith was a one-armed man, and he had fourteen hostlers and a clerk that worked in the stable. The office was in one corner of the stable and a young man by the name of Billy Green was the clerk. He had charge of the men and was very kind and good to me.