Not only was the winter of 1849-50 an excessive one in cold and storms, but the year 1850 was the most trying in the history of the gold-seekers. The struggles for the possession of titles to the claims staked out by the prospecting miners reached a critical stage; the cholera raged in every section of the Pacific slope—aye, spread from ocean to ocean—and in addition to these and the trials and uncertainties of life in the mines, where hundreds were losing to one making, the Indians started upon the warpath.
Early in the summer, while I was at work at Bidwell’s on Feather River, I witnessed the interesting and somewhat startling spectacle of a band of her men decked out in all of the horrible panoply of savage warfare. All were elaborately painted in striking colors and armed in Indian fashion, bows and quivers, decorated in bright figures and filled with sharp pointed arrows tipped with glass heads, knives and other implements of a warlike nature.
These dusky forces were composed of the “Valley Indians,” as the native inhabitants of the lowlands were called, among whom was a branch known as the “Digger Indians,” and the mountain tribes that had their homes in the Sierra Nevadas and adjacent highlands. The last named tribes were at enmity with the first—a predatory warfare that existed for a long period—a war as it seemed to the bitter end.
An Indian village was situated twenty or twenty-five miles from Bidwell’s easterly in the Sierras, which I had frequently passed through when I was prospecting in the Feather River gold mines.
One day about noon there suddenly appeared in this little mining settlement a file of naked Indian warriors; forty or fifty in number, nearly all young men in the vigor of manhood, all apparently sound, well developed, beautifully proportioned, athletic men, the leader the most conspicuous figure. They came into view traveling at a slow dog trot, single file, each at a uniform distance from his file leader. No word was uttered, and no one of them perceptibly turned his head to the right or to the left.
As the foremost reached the river, which at that place was deep and of considerable breadth, he stepped boldly and deliberately into the current without the slightest hesitation, and swam quickly to the opposite shore, where he again resumed the Indian trot of a few minutes before. Even the river did not break the line or check the speed materially, but the line was maintained and the speed was continued on and up the steep mountain incline as on the level, without break or hesitation, far, far up the rugged mountain trail as we could see, their military order and discipline unbroken.
They were from a valley tribe and had suddenly come into view, passed through the village, swam the river, climbed the mountain side, and passed beyond our view in silence, bent on their errand of bloody carnage and death. Determination, vengeance and savage destruction was pictured on every brow.
Something of vital moment to the aboriginal population not far distant was about to transpire. And it was not long delayed. It was learned a little later that the Indian village in the mountains before mentioned, was suddenly and sadly surprised on the night of the day that the war party passed through Bidwell’s, and for the small Indian settlement it proved a great slaughter or massacre of the men, while a large number of the women and children were taken prisoners and conducted to new homes.
Some time in the spring, James M. Butler being somewhat out of health, went to the Pelham camp to do the cooking for the company, where he remained until late in the fall, when he returned to his home in Pelham.
I did some mining at Bidwell’s and one or two other places while we were waiting for the water to subside. We visited our claim on the middle fork of Feather River several times, and made preparations to work it as soon as the state of the water would admit of doing it. We were obliged to convey all the provisions needed there on our backs over the mountains from Bidwell’s Bar, a distance of 25 or 30 miles.