[4] Brigham Young and his followers crossed to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
A Canyon in the Cliffs, Southern Nevada.
Pencil sketch by F.S. DELLENBAUGH.
Meanwhile a gang of freebooters, who left Texas in 1849, found their way to this point and acquired or established a ferry two or three miles below the old mission site. Their settlement was called Fort Defiance in contempt for the Yumas. They were led by one Doctor Craig. They robbed the Yumas of their wives and dominated the region as they pleased. Captain Hobbs,[[5]] a mountaineer who was at Yuma in 1851, says:
[5] Wild Life in the Far West, by Captain James Hobbs.
“The attack which wiped out this miserable band was planned by two young Mexicans, who had attempted to cross the ferry with their wives, and had them taken from them and detained by the Texans. The Mexicans went down the river and the desperadoes supposed they had gone their way and left their wives in their hands. But they only went far enough to find the chief of the tribe who had suffered so horribly at the hands of this gang, and arrange for an attack on their common enemy.”
By this plan twenty-three out of the twenty-five whites, including the master scoundrel himself. Dr. Craig, were destroyed with little loss to the attacking party. Hobbs calls this the best thing the Yumas ever did. It took place only a month before Hobbs reached the ferry, and only two or three days before one of the periodical returns of United States troops, this time a company of dragoons under Captain Hooper, probably belonging to Heintzelman’s command. To him the two escaped desperadoes came with a complaint against the Yumas, but the captain was posted and he put the men in irons to be transported to California for trial. The Yumas now established a ferry by using an old army-waggon box which they made water-tight, as the Craig Ferry had suffered the fate of its owners. Hobbs employed the Yumas to take his party over, the horses swimming, and the arrangement seems to have worked very well.
