Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago

by William F. Drannan

It was getting towards bed time when four women came to me with their faces swollen with tears. One of them said, "Mr. Drannan, do you think our husbands have been killed by the Indians?"

I answered, "That is a question I can not answer, but I will say that I hope they have not; they may have lost their course and in that way have escaped the Indians."

While I was talking with the women, I heard the tramp of horses' feet coming towards camp on the trail.

I said, "Listen, perhaps they are coming now." and we went to meet the coming horsemen. There were four of them, and one of them was the husband of the woman I had been talking to. When they came up to us, he jumped off his horse and, clasping his wife in his arms he said, "Oh Mary, I never expected to see you again."

In a few minutes everybody in camp was standing around those four men, and they surely had a dreadful story to tell. They said, they did not know how far they had ridden that morning when they sighted a band of Buffalo in a little valley. They fired at them and killed four; they dismounted and turned their horses loose and went to skinning their Buffalo and had the hides nearly off of them when, without a sound to warn them of danger, the Indians pounced upon them, and of all the yelling and shouting that ever greeted any one's ears, that was the worst they had ever heard, and the arrows flew as thick as hail.

"One of them struck me here," and he pulled up his pants and showed us a ragged wound in the calf of his leg. After we had looked at the wounded leg, he continued his story. He said, "As soon as I heard the first yell, I ran for my horse and was fortunate in catching him. I think the reason of we four being so lucky in getting away was that we were a little distance from the others. We were off at one side, and we four were working on one Buffalo, and lucky for us our horses were feeding close to us. I do not believe that one of the other men caught his horse as their horses were quite a distance from them, and the Indians were between the men and their horses. The last I saw of them was their hopeless struggle against the flying Indians' arrows.

"We had mounted and had run a hundred or two hundred yards when we saw that four or five Indians were after us. They chased us two or three miles. It seemed that our horses could outrun theirs, and they gave up the chase, but in the confusion we had lost our course, and we did not know which direction to take, and we have been all the rest of the day trying to find the train, and we are just about worn but, and we are hungry enough to eat anything, at least I am."

As it happened, Jim Bridger was standing near me when the man was talking. The man turned and said to him, "Mr. Bridger, I hope all the people of this train will listen to your advice from this night until we reach the end of our journey. If we four men had done as you told us to do, we would not have suffered what we have today, and the nineteen, who I have no doubt have been scalped by the savages, would have been alive and well tonight. There is no one to blame but ourselves. You warned us, but we thought we knew more than you did, and the dreadful fate that overtook the most of the company shows how little we knew what we were doing in putting our judgment in opposition to men whose lives have been spent in learning the crafty nature of the Red-men."

Jim answered, "I always know what I am saying when I give advice, and I knew what would be liable to happen to you if you left the protection of the train. This is the third case of this kind which has happened since Will and I have been piloting emigrants across the plains to California, and I hope it will be the last."

There was but little sleep in camp that night. Out of the nineteen men that were killed, twelve of them were the heads of families, and the cries of the widows and orphaned children were very distressing for Jim and me to hear, although we were blameless. The next morning just after breakfast the committee of five men came to Jim and me and said they wanted to have a private talk with us.