The next trip the stage made out of Wickenburg, therefore, I remained behind. A few miles from town the stage was held up by an overwhelming force of Apaches, the driver and all save two of the passengers massacred, and the contents looted. A woman named Moll Shepherd, going back East with a large sum of money in her possession, and a man named Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the hills and were the only two who survived to tell the story of what has gone down into history as the famous "Wickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder now to think how nearly I might have been on the box on that fatal trip. I was not entirely to escape the Apaches, however. On the first return trip from Florence to Wickenburg with the buckboard, while I was congratulating myself and thanking my lucky stars for the accident to my ankle, Apaches "jumped" the buckboard and gave me and my one passenger, Charlie Block of Wickenburg, a severe tussle for it. We beat them off in the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and arrived in Wickenburg unhurt. Block was part owner of the Barnett and Block store in Wickenburg and was a well-known man in that section. After this incident I determined to quit driving stages and buckboards and, casting about for some new line of endeavor, went for the first time into the restaurant business for myself. The town needed an establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical. It was astonishing how little was required in those days to start a stampede. A stranger might come in town with a "poke" of gold dust. He would naturally be asked where he had made the strike. As a matter of fact, he probably had washed a dozen different streams to get the poke-full, but under the influence of liquor he might reply: "Oh, over on the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other stream. It did not require that he should state how rich the streak was, or whether it had panned out. All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the direction he had designated was the sight of his gold and the magic word "streak." Many were the trails that led to death or bitter disappointment, in Arizona's early days. Most of the old prospectors did not see the results of their own "strikes" nor share in the profits from them after their first "poke" had been obtained. There was old John Waring, for instance, who found gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew into Arizona City, got drunk and told of his find: