But Susa gave us only the courtship, while the ending of Sally's life, as told to me by a man from Kanosh, was as tragic as her childhood days had been thrilling. After she married Kanosh, several years of her life passed pleasantly, in the white man's house which he built for her. Then her Indian husband took to himself another wife, who became jealous of Sally, and perhaps hated her also for her white man's ways.
One day when they were in a secluded place digging segoes, the new wife murdered Sally and buried the body in a gully.
When Kanosh missed her, he took her track and followed it as faithfully as a blood hound could have done, and was not long in finding the grave. In his grief he seized the murderess, and would have burned her at the stake, but white men interfered.
In due time the Indian woman confessed her guilt, and in harmony with Indian justice, offered to expiate her crime by starving herself to death.
The offer was accepted, and on a lone hill in sight of the village, a "wick-i-up" was constructed of dry timber. Taking a jug of water, the woman walked silently toward her living grave. Like the rejected swan, alone, unloved, in low tones she sang her own sad requiem, until her voice was hushed in death. One night when the evening beacon fire was not seen by the villagers, a runner was dispatched to fire the wick-i-up, and retribution was complete.
Sally's funeral had taken place only a day or two previous. Over a hundred vehicles followed the remains to their last resting place, and beautifully floral wreaths covered the casket; for Sally had been widely loved among the white settlers for her gentle ways.
Just across the creek on Brother Kimball's unoccupied lot stood an old gnarled oak tree. Ten feet from the ground a large limb shot straight out, making a good gallows on which to hang beeves, and father used it for that purpose. The first ox that he slaughtered he hung the hide, flesh side out, on that limb; and it attracted dogs from the Fort, and wolves from the mountain. Father set two steel traps at the root of the tree, and during the first night caught a large grey wolf in one trap, and Ira Eldredge's spotted mastiff in the other.
About midnight we heard their terrible fighting; but in the morning the wolf was gone. He had chewed his own leg off below the knee. After liberating the mastiff, I went to the fort, and got Ham Crow to come with his dogs and run the wolf down. We caught the ugly brute in the mouth of Red Butte Canyon; and Brother Crow added the carcass to his scant store of provisions, and grateful for it.
By the time the grass began to grow the famine had waxed sore. For several months we had no bread. Beef, milk, pig-weeds, segoes, and thistles formed our diet. I was the herd boy, and while out watching the stock, I used to eat thistle stalks until my stomach would be as full as a cow's. At last the hunger was so sharp that father took down the old bird-pecked ox-hide from the limb; and it was converted into most delicious soup, and enjoyed by the family as a rich treat.
As the summer crept on, and the scant harvest drew nigh, the fight with the crickets commenced. Oh, how we fought and prayed, and prayed and fought the myriads of black, loathsome insects that flowed down like a flood of filthy water from the mountainside. And we should surely have been inundated, and swept into oblivion, save for the merciful Father's sending of the blessed sea gulls to our deliverance.