Constable Lon Huff started to take him to Seneca, but when they came to the creek crossing, a ford, in my Uncle Nick Bristow’s timber, Andy slipped off his shackled boots, jumped out of the buggy and made his getaway, barefooted, over the snow-covered ground. My cousin, Burrel Bristow, followed Andy’s barefoot tracks through the woods and counted the trees barked by the constable’s gun.
That Alonzo—he was the shrewd one. Shot up the trees, he did—and brought home Andy’s shackled boots.
I liked Andy—and, though I was never to see him again, as glad that he had gotten away from the constable. I think that nearly all the other people here were glad it, too. And, moreover, I’ll bet Andy did not travel far without foot-protection.
You may be sure Andy did not come home to his wife. Lou Hazeltine told my mother that the arrest was big mistake. Charley Hazeltine, Lou’s Swede husband, said “The vimens was yust yumpin at collusions.” Elisha’s wife and Andy’s daughter May left Wetmore soon thereafter. Demmy remained here with his grandmother for several years—then went to his father at Spearfish, South Dakota, from which place Andy was then operating a stage line to Deadwood.
With Ursula Maxwell and Charley Hazeltine as long-range intermediaries, Andy Maxwell waived claim to farm equipment, livestock, and all other belongings, in favor of Lizzie Maxwell. All Andy asked—and received—were his children, and the promise of no contest in two divorces, Lizzie Massey Maxwell remained here. She sold the farm improvements to Dr. W. F. Troughton for $50. Troughton filed on the homestead in 1872.
In the meantime Andy, with his daughter May and Mrs. Elisha, traveling out of Miles City, Montana, in covered wagons, with four other men, were attacked by Sioux and Nez Perce Indians—the siege lasting for three days. The newspapers said at the time, it was the hardest-fought Indian battle of all times.
A three-column account of that Indian attack, written reminiscently by a correspondent of the Chicago Times seventeen years after it had taken place, found its way by mere chance into the Wetmore Spectator—right back to the old home of the defenders — through the medium of the Western Newspaper Union, Kansas City, Mo., from which auxiliary the Spectator then got its inside pages ready-printed. It was a hair-raising story—one that could be read with interest again and again.
Incidentally, Andy Maxwell had Indian blood in his own veins. His mother told me she was a quarter-breed. She had Indian features.
Then there was another Indian story having Wetmore connections. I have in my newspaper files Catherine German-Swerdfeger’s own story — nearly a full page written for the Spectator — of the slaying by the Indians of her father and mother, a brother and two sisters; and the capture of herself and three sisters—Sophie, Julia, and Addie. John German, from Blue Ridge, Georgia, with his family, was traveling by ox-team and covered wagon, through Kansas on the way to Colorado at the time of the attack.
Catherine’s description of the abandonment of her two little sisters, aged five and six, after two weeks on the move by the roving band of Indians, on the then uninhabited plains somewhere between southwestern Kansas and the main Cheyenne camp in Texas, in the midst of a big herd of buffalo, where, after following on foot until well nigh exhausted, as mounted Indians forced the two older girls on ponies away from the scene, the little girls lived—no, existed—for six weeks, in October and November weather, with no shelter other than a clay bank, on the leavings of soldiers, (cracker crumbs, scattered grains of corn, and hackberries), in a deserted camp, by a creek, would wring your heart.