Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not in good taste.
The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks of the Platte.
A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell.
“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”
Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that shot?”
“I did.”
“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead—too dead to skin!”
At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.
In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.
One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.