“Here we found that Doctor Lecount had done all in his power to get up and hasten a party of men to our relief; but he was prevented by the commander, a Mr. Heinsalman, who was guilty of an unexplainable, if not an inexcusable delay—a delay that was an affliction to the doctor, and a calamity to us. He seemed deaf to every appeal for us in our distressed condition. His conduct, if we had been a pack of hungry wolves, could not have exhibited more total recklessness. The fact of our condition reached the Fort at almost as early an hour as it would if the animals of the doctor had been retained, and there were a number of humane men at the Fort who volunteered to rush to our relief; but no permission could be obtained from the commander. If he still lives, it is to know and remember, that by a prompt action at that time, according to the behests and impulse of a principle of ‘humanity to man,’ he would have averted our dreadful doom. No language can fathom such cruelty. He was placed there to protect the defenseless of his countrymen; and to suffer an almost destitute family, struggling amid dangers and difficulties, to perish for want of relief that he knew he might have extended, rolls upon him a responsibility in the inhuman tragedy that followed his neglect, that will haunt him through eternity. There were men there who nobly stepped forward to assume the danger and labor of the prayed-for relief, and around them clusters the light of gratitude, the incense of the good; but he who neglects the destitute, the hungry, the imperiled, proclaims his companionship with misanthropists, and hews his own road to a prejudged disgrace. After several days he reluctantly sent out two men, who hastened on toward Pimole until they came to the place of the massacre, and finding what had happened, and that the delay had been followed by such a brutal murder of the family for whose safety and rescue they had burned to encounter the perils of this desert way, sick at heart, and indignant at this cruel, let-alone policy, they returned to the Fort; though not until they had exhausted their scant supply of provisions in search of the girls, of whose captivity they had learned. May Heaven bless these benefactors, and pour softening influences upon their hard-hearted commander.”
The mind instinctively pauses, and, suspended between wonder and horror, dwells with most intense interest upon a scene like the one presented above. Look at the faint pointings to the reality, yet the best that art can inscribe, furnished by the plate. Two timid girls, one scarcely fourteen, the other a delicate, sweet-spirited girl of not eight summers. Trembling with fear, swaying and reeling under the wild storm of a catastrophe bursting upon them when they had been lulled into the belief that their danger-thronged path had been well-nigh passed, and the fury of which exceeded all that the most excited imagination could have painted, these two girls, eye-witnesses to a brutal, bloody affray which had smitten father, mother, brothers, and sisters, robbing them in an instant of friends and friendly protection, and cast themselves, they knew not where, upon the perpetrators of all this butchery, whose tender mercies they had only to expect would be cruelty itself. That brother, that oldest brother, weltering in his blood, perfectly conscious of all that was transpiring. The girls wishing that a kindred fate had ended their own sufferings, and preserved them by a horrible death from a more horrible after-part, placing them beyond the reach of savage arm and ferocity. O what an hour was that! What a world of paralyzing agonies were pressed into that one short hour! It was an “ocean in a tear, a whirlwind in a sigh, an eternity in a moment.” Unoffending, innocent, yet their very souls throbbing with woe they had never merited. See them but a little before, wearied with the present, but happy in the prospect of a fast approaching termination of their journey. A band of Indians, stalwart, stout, and fierce-looking came into the camp, scantily clad, and what covering they had borrowed from the wild beasts, as if to furnish an appropriate badge of their savage nature and design. They cover their weapons under their wolf-skins; they warily steal upon this unprotected family, and by deceiving pretenses of friendship blunt their apprehensions of danger, and make them oblivious of a gathering doom. They smoke the pacific pipe, and call themselves Pimoles who are on their way to Fort Yuma. Then secretly they concoct their hellish plot in their own tongue, with naught but an involuntary glance of their serpent eyes to flash or indicate the infernality of their treacherous hearts. When every preparation is made by the family to proceed, no defense studied or thought necessary, then these hideous man-animals spring upon them with rough war-clubs and murder them in cold blood; and, as if to strew their hellish way with the greatest possible amount of anguish, they compel these two girls to witness all the barbarity that broke upon the rest, and to read therein what horrors hung upon their own future living death. O what depths and deeds of darkness and crime are sometimes locked up in that heart where the harmonies of a passion-restraining principle and reason have never been waked up! How slender every foundation for any forecasting upon the character of its doings, when trying emergences are left an appeal to its untamed and unregulated propensities!
The work of plunder follows the work of slaughter. The dead bodies were thrown about in the rudest manner, and pockets searched, boxes broken and plundered, and soon as they are fully convinced that the work of spoils-taking is completed, and they discover no signs of remaining life (which they hunted for diligently) to awaken suspicions of detection, they prepare with live spoils, human and brute, to depart.
“Soon after,” continues Olive, “we camped. A fire was struck by means of flints and wild cotton, which they carried for the purpose. The cattle were allowed to range upon the rock-feed, which abounded; and even with this unnatural provision, they were secure against being impelled by hunger far from camp, as they scarcely had strength to move. Then came the solid dough, made of water and flour, baked stone-hard in the hot ashes, and then soaked in bean-soup; then the smoking of pipes by some, while others lounged lazily about the camp, filled up the hour of our tarrying here. Food was offered me, but how could I eat to prolong a life I now loathed. I felt neither sensations of hunger nor a desire to live. Could I have done it, I should probably have ended my life during moments of half-delirious, crushing anguish, that some of the time rolled upon me with a force sufficient to divide soul from body. But I was narrowly watched by those worse than fiends, to whom every expression of my grief was occasion for merry-making. I dwelt upon these awful realities, yet, at times, such I could not think them to be, until my thoughts would become confused. Mangled as I knew they were, I longed to go back and take one look, one long, last, farewell look in the faces of my parents and those dear brothers. Could I but go back and press the hands of those dear ones, though cold in death, I would then consent to go on! There was Lucy, about seventeen years of age, a dear girl of a sweet, mild spirit, never angry. She had been a mother to me when our parents were absent or sick. She had borne the peculiar burden falling upon the oldest of a family of children, with evenness of temper and womanly fortitude. ‘Why,’ my heart inquired, ‘should she be thus cut off and I left?’ Lorenzo I supposed dead, for I saw him fall to the ground by the first blow that was struck, and afterward saw them take from him hat and shoes, and drag him to the brink of the hill by the feet. Supposing they would dash him upon the rocks below, I turned away, unable to witness more! Royse, a playful, gleeful boy, full of health and happiness, stood a moment horror-struck as he witnessed the commencement of the carnage, being furthest from the Indians. As they came up to him, he gave one wild, piercing scream, and then sank to the earth under the club! I saw him when the death-struggle drew his little frame into convulsions, and then he seemed to swoon away; a low moan, a slight heaving of the bosom, and he quietly sank into the arms of death. Little C. A. had not as yet seen four summers; she was a cherub girl. She, with her little brother, twenty months younger, had been saved the torments of fear that had seized the rest of us from the time of the appearance of the Indians. They were too young to catch the flashes of fear that played upon the countenances of the elder children and their parents, and were happily trustful when our father, with forced composure, bade us not be afraid! The struggles of these two dear little ones were short. My mother screamed, I turned, I saw her with her youngest child clasped in her arms, and the blows of the war-club falling upon her and the child. I sprang toward her, uttered a shriek, and found myself joining her in calling most earnestly for help. But I had no sooner started toward her than I was seized and thrown back by my overseer. I turned around, found my head beginning to reel in dizziness, and fainting fell to the ground.
“The reader can perhaps imagine the nature of my thoughts while standing at that camp-fire, with my sister clinging to me in convulsive sobs and groans. From fear of the Indians, whose frowns and threats, mingled with hellish jests, were constantly glaring upon us, she struggled to repress and prevent any outburst of the grief that seemed to tear her little heart. And when her feelings became uncontrollable, she would hide her head in my arms, and most piteously sob aloud, but she was immediately hushed by the brandishing of a war-club over her head.
THE CAPTIVES AT THE INDIAN CAMP-FIRE.
“While in this camp, awaiting the finished meal, and just after twilight, the full moon arose and looked in upon our rock-girt gorge with a majesty and sereneness that seemed to mock our changeful doom. Indeed a more beautiful moonrise I never saw. The sky was clear, the wind had hushed its roar, and laid by its fury; the larger and more brilliant of the starry throng stood out clear above, despite the superior light of the moon, which had blushed the lesser ones into obscurity. As that moon mounted the cloudless east, yet tinged with the last stray beauties of twilight, and sent its first mild glories along the surrounding peaks, the scene of illumined heights, and dark, cavernous, shade-clad hill-sides and gorges, was grand, and to a mind unfettered with woe would have lent the inspiration of song. I looked upon those gorges and vales, with their deeps of gloom, and then upon the moon-kissed ridges that formed boundaries of light to limit their shadows! I thought the former a fit exponent of my heart’s realizations, and the whole an impressive illustration of the contrast between my present and the recent past. That moon, ordinarily so welcome, and that seemed supernaturally empowered to clothe the barren heights with a richer than nature’s verdure robes, and so cheering to us only a few evenings previous while winding our way over that dusty road, had now suddenly put on a robe of sackcloth. All was still, save the chattering of our captors, and the sharp, irregular howling of the coyotes, who perform most of their odes in the night, and frequently made it hideous from twilight to twilight again.
“O how much crowded into that short hour spent at the first camp after leaving the scene of death and sleeping previous! Ignorant of the purposes of our own preservation, we could only wait in breathless anxiety the movements of our merciless lords. I then began to meditate upon leaving those parents, brothers and sisters; I looked up and saw the uncovered bows strung over the wagon, the cloth of which had been torn off by the Indians. I knew that it designated the spot where horror and affection lingered. I meditated upon the past, the present, and the future. The moon, gradually ascending the sky, was fast breaking in upon the deep-shade spots that at her first rising had contended with ridges of light spread about them. That moon had witnessed the night before my childish but sincerest vow, that I would never be taken alive by Indian savages, and was now laughing at the frailty of the resolution and the abruptness with which the fears to which it pointed had become reality! That moon had smiled on many, very many hours spent in lands far away in childish glee, romps and sports prolonged, near the home-hearth and grass-plotted door-yard, long after the cool evening breezes had fanned away the sultry air of the day. The very intonations of the voices that had swelled and echoed in those uncaring hours of glee came back to me now, to rehearse in the ears of a present, insupportable sorrow, the music of past, but happier days. This hour, this moon-lit hour, was one most dear and exclusive to the gushing forth of the heart’s unrestrained overflowings of happiness. Where are now those girls and boys? where now are those who gathered about me, and over whose sun-tanned but ruddy cheeks had stolen the unbidden tear at the hour of parting; or, with an artless simplicity, the heart’s ‘good-by’ was repeated o’er and o’er again? Is this moon now bearing the same unmingled smile to them as when it looked upon our mutual evening promenadings? or has it put on the somber hues that seem to tinge its wonted brightness to me, heralding the color of our fate, and hinting of our sorrow? These, all these, and many more kindred reflections found way to, and strung the heart’s saddest notes. And as memory and present consciousness told me of those days and evenings gone—gone never to be repeated—I became sick of life, and resolved upon stopping its currents with my own hands; and but for the yearning anxiety that bent over little Mary Ann, I should have only waited the opportunity to have executed my desperate purpose. The strolls to school, arm-in-arm with the now remembered, but abandoned partners of the blissful past, on the summer morn; the windings and wanderings upon the distinctly remembered strawberry patches at sultry noon; the evening walks for the cows, when the setting sun and the coming on of cloudless, stormless, cool evenings, clothed all nature with unwonted loveliness; together with the sad present, that furnished so unexpected and tormenting a contrast with all before, would rush again upon me, bringing the breath of dark, suicidal thoughts to fire up the first hour of a camp among the Indians!”
But these harrowing meditations are suddenly interrupted; cattle are placed in order for traveling; five of the Indians are put in charge of the girls, and welcome or unwelcome they must away they knew not where.