June 29, 1907.] 
loud beating of the tom-toms, the rise and fall 
, of the war chant of the women, the varying 
: success of the battle, as fortune declined one way 
L and then the other; the exultant songs of vic¬ 
tory when some enemy fell, for cutting off their 
hair and maiming of themselves or the relatives 
of the slain, the wails and lamentations over the 
i dead. 
The Indians kept up a series of skirmishes 
against the settlement during the early spring of 
1869. A white woman, Jenny Smith, was 
wounded and scalped alive, and a Crow squaw 
j was shot through the lower part of the body in 
the first attack. For a couple of weeks anyone 
who ventured out any distance was sure to be 
fired at and run in. For a short time again 
the Indians apparently had left, when some men 
who. ventured out to get some wood were run 
in by a small party. This small party, a dozen 
or fifteen Indians, would make constant petty 
attacks and run off again if they received the 
slightest opposition. The majority of the set¬ 
tlement took great precaution for their personal 
safety, and would on no occasion venture outside 
. the shelter of their houses. A very few men 
were all that would offer decided opposition to 
these constant ^attacks, but continual success on 
the part of the whites, and the apparent coward- 
I ice of the Indians, finally induced almost every 
one to run after the Indians whenever they made 
any sort of demonstration. The only horse in 
: the settlement was picketed and iron hobbled 
close to one of the buildings. One morning a 
few Indians crawled through the sage brush, cut 
the horse loose, and endeavored to get him away 
with the hobble on. Nearly every one ran after 
them, and the heavy firing caused them to aban¬ 
don the horse and seek safety in flight. 
A couple of mornings after this occurrence 
I they opened fire at a couple of Crow squaws, 
who were gathering sage brush for fire wood. 
The Indians numbered sixteen, and almost every 
white man rushed after them in a body. The 
Indians ran toward the Musselshell and then 
1 ran up the bottom. They were not running very 
t fast and the whites were gaining on them when 
1 suddenly there came a shot, which killed Jack 
Leader, and the- whites saw an ambush. Had 
: he Indians seized the moment of panic no white 
1 nan could have escaped the massacre. The 
ivhites turned to run; one man then saw r the 
i langer of flight and stopped it with a leveled 
I ifle. The Indians had probably been trying to 
iring about this ambuscade for several days. 
. 'heir principal force was cached in’ a square 
I oulee on the bank of the Musselshell. Their 
; lan was to make feint attacks with a small 
| arty, so- as to induce all- the whites to run after 
iiem; their decoy party was to run by the hid- 
i en Indians; when the pursuing whites came 
I ose to the ambush the Indians were to jump 
I at, and in the surprise and panic kill every 
; hite man. It was well and ably planned, and 
i robably owed its failure to some nervous In- 
! :an, w'ho had fired too soon; but even as it 
as, it would have been successful had they 
j ade their onslaugJ.it in the moment of terror 
id panic that followed their first shot. 
; Most of the whites gradually withdrew to 
j e settlement or to a safe distance from danger, 
ve or six men kept their position within thirty 
forty steps of the now besieged Indians, 
e thought there was quite a fiumber of them, 
t did not know, how many. After a short time 
other white man, named Greenwood, was shot 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
through the lungs and had to be carried back. 
We resorted* to various artifices to get a shot 
at the Indians. Two men would lie close to¬ 
gether behind a clump of sage brush; one would 
• show his hat on a stick to draw a shot from the 
enemy; the other would fire at the flash of the 
Indian s gun. A couple of hours were passed 
in this way, and it began to lpok as though we 
should not accomplish anything, when, fortu¬ 
nately, it began to rain. We were armed with 
breechloading rifles, the ammunition of which 
rain would not injure; the Indians were armed 
with flintlock guns and bows and arrows, and 
as they were stripped naked for war, they could 
not protect their arms from the rain. We were 
getting impatient, and relying on their arms 
being useless on account of the rain, started to 
charge their position, but were appalled at the 
sight of their numbers in the coulee. 
1 he only possible way to reach them was for 
some of us to cross the Musselshell, get in their 
rear, open fire from there and drive them out 
of their coulee, when those on the other side 
of the Indians would have a chance at them, 
and thus place them between two fires. I sug¬ 
gested this plan to Frank Smith and Joe Bush¬ 
away. They agreed with it, and we three pre¬ 
pared to cross the river. We crossed the river 
about forty steps above the Indians' position. 
1 he Indians, when they saw 11s make this move¬ 
ment, came to the mouth of the coulee and tried 
every means to get their guns off. One would 
aim a gun and snap the flint, another pour pow¬ 
der on the pan. They did manage to fire off 
a few of their old fukes, which went off with 
a noise like that from so many cannons. Other 
Indians tried to shoot us with arrows, but their 
wet bow strings possessed such feeble force that 
the arrows could scarcely reach us. The stream 
was miry behind the Indians—where we crossed 
it was tolerably solid, but the water in the deep¬ 
est portion took me to the armpits; the other 
men, being taller, did not have so much trouble. 
The two others wore buckskin shirts; I was 
dressed in buckskin complete, and in crossing 
the stream my buckskin pants lengthened and 
interfered with me so much that I was obliged 
to kick them off, although I had about $500 in 
the pocket, and throw them to the opposite shore, 
where I afterward recovered them; but during 
the remainder of the battle I had on nothing 
but a shirt. Nearly all the men belonging to the 
settlement were back about half a mile from the 
Indians. We three had crossed the stream and 
were opposite the Indians, about sixty steps off, 
and had commenced to fire on them, when this 
mob, seeing us in our flesh-colored buckskin 
clothes, mistook us for Indians, and opened a 
heavy fire on us, obliging us to retreat across 
the river again. When the Indians saw our 
plan, the uselessness of their arms and the trap 
they had placed themselves in, they realized their 
fate A gloomy Nemesis scowled retribution 
for the massacre of many a white man. We 
could see the smoke from the circling pipe and 
hear the low wail of the death song. 
By this time Jim Wells, Dennis Halpin and 
others, who were on the opposite side of the 
Missouri River when the fight commenced, had 
crossed the Missouri when they heard the firing 
and had hurried up to the front. This time Jim 
Wells, Frank Smith and Frenchy crossed the 
Musselshell at a better point and opened fire on 
the Indians from the rear. The Indians jumped 
out of the coulee with wild terror, panic and 
IOO9 
fear, and were met with a withering volley from 
those on the bank, which caused them to run 
almost anywhere in their blind terror. There 
was not a cheer nor a yell; not a sound but 
that of the panting of the breathless, horror- 
stricken Indians, and the rattle of the firearms 
which sounded terribly distinct against that low¬ 
ering rainy sky as the deadly cross-fire swept 
their tumultuous, panic-stricken flight. I recol¬ 
lect one great big Indian—horror and death star- 
ing in his wild eyeballs—blind in his terror, who 
almost ran into the party on the bank, but a 
bullet stretched him on the plain, and as he fur¬ 
iously grasped the sage brush his sobbing, gurg¬ 
ling breath ended in death. 
In their wild despair they plunged into the 
river. Some were shot as they mired, others 
dragged their wounded bodies to the brush. No 
Indian would have escaped had it not been for 
this mob a half a mile off. They fired indis¬ 
criminately at friend or foe, and prevented us 
from closing in on the Indians. 
Several Crow squaws, who were living in the 
settlement, when they heard the heavy firing with 
which the battle closed, came out about half way 
and were engaged in a war dance, and the high 
notes of their peans sounded weirdly through the 
mist and rain. After the battle I passed by them 
on my way back to the settlement to get some 
clothes for myself, and their attentions were 
rather embarrassing in my undressed condition. 
An old fraud, by name of Capt. Andrews, cut 
the heads off the dead Indians, removed the flesh 
and brains by boiling, labeled the skulls with 
awe-inspiring names, and started on a lecturing 
tour throughout the States, in which, I have no 
doubt, he made Baron Munchausen ashamed of 
himself. 
Thirteen Indians were left dead on the ground, 
and the camp when they came in to gather up 
the remaining bones and lament the dead, ac¬ 
knowledged that more than thirty died on the 
route to the camp, and only one out of the ninety 
odd who were in the fight escaped without a 
wound. 
Next day we found the cache whete they had 
stripped for the fight, in which there were more 
than a hundred robes, a great many moccasins 
and two war bonnets. The robes and moccasins 
were sold and the .money given to the wounded 
man. Greenwood. Wells and myself received the 
two war bonnets. Wells’ war bonnet was a 
circlet crown of war eagle feathers. The head 
piece of mine had horns and plumes (an insignia 
of the very highest rank) and the waving tail, 
made from the tail feathers of war eagles, w-as 
more than five feet long. 
1 he settlement declined into a mere trading 
post, and its final fate was characteristic of the 
place. When Carroll was established Mussel¬ 
shell was abandoned, and two men were hired 
to chop into cordwood what remained of the 
buildings. When they had their work finished 
some Indians captured them, tied them to the 
cordwood and burned everything. When the 
howling winds from off the desert bad lands 
swept away the ashes of that murderous fire, 
the last vestige of civilized man disappeared 
from this ghastly place. Once more this ill-fated 
spot was left to the growl and snarl of wild 
beasts and the home of the hoarse croaking raven, 
whose circling flight over the fatal spot looked 
like the wraith of some murdered white man or 
slaughtered savage—fit scene for wailing ghost 
and goblin shade. 
