“There’s someone standing over there.” Captain Boling pointed to the mouth of the valley.
“Ay; Injun woman,” said a sharp-eyed miner.
As the men quickened their pace the woman ran to meet them. It was an old Indian squaw, who was wringing her hands in an agony of terror. Dr. Bunnell reined up and questioned her, and she at once admitted that a strange Indian girl had been brought to the valley a few hours earlier, and that over two hundred Indians were sheltering there. She also told him what he did not believe at the time, but which subsequently proved to be true: that these would be the first white men to enter the valley. He looked sharply round at the prisoners; their faces fully confirmed the old woman’s betrayal of their tribe’s hiding-place.
At the sound of the bugle the whole troop dashed into the valley, and the first sight that greeted them was a large group of wigwams. Before the savages could get into battle array their camp was surrounded, and a brisk carbine fire had opened on them. Almost at the first shot they lost heart, and on seeing them lay down their arms, the Captain stopped the firing and ordered his men to close in. John Savage, unable to control himself any longer, made a rush for the wigwams; and, while he looked desperately round him, his wife, screaming deliriously, came running to meet him.
Through this prompt action on the part of the militia, the Indian rising was entirely suppressed, over a hundred braves were carried back to San Francisco as hostages, and the beautiful Yo-Semite Valley ceased, from that day, to be the stronghold of Shoshonee mountain-brigands.
CHAPTER XVI
AMONG THE NIQUIRANS AND APACHES
A somewhat adventurous career fell to the lot of the late Julius Froebel, a nephew of the great Friedrich Froebel of “Kindergarten” fame. Having devoted his early manhood to journalism and politics of a very rabid and revolutionary character, he became the recognised leader of the Dresden democratic party in 1848. After being arrested in Austria and reprieved from a death-sentence, he fled to New York, and was for some time the editor of a German paper published there.