Collection of Nebraska Pioneer ReminiscencesDaughters of the American Revolution. Nebraska
History
Collection of Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences
Daughters of the American Revolution. Nebraska
Frontier and pioneer life -- Nebraska; Nebraska -- History
The new leader of the Indians rode a white pony and seemed at times to
work his warriors up to great desperation, and young Comstock made up
his mind to shoot him the next time that he appeared. It was now too
dark to distinguish one man from another. Mr. Comstock, senior, was
mounted on a white horse and he was enroute home about the time the
Indians were expected to return. The vigilant son raised his gun, took
aim, and was about to shoot, when one of the girls, remembering that her
father rode a white horse, called out, "Father, is it you?" An
affirmative answer came back just in time to prevent the fatal shot
which would have followed in an instant more. Mr. Comstock had ridden
through the Indian lines, while returning to his ranch, unmolested. He
said to me he believed the Indians spared his life that evening on
account of favors he had always granted them.
Five miles east of the Comstock ranch that day a boy eighteen years old
by the name of Ulig was met by two Indians. One of them shook hands with
him while the other pierced his body with a spear and then scalped him
and left him writhing in the broiling sun to die on the prairie. This
savage and brutal act was followed by others unparalleled even in savage
warfare. Four miles above Oak Grove at a place called the Narrows on the
Little Blue river, lived a family of ten persons by the name of Eubanks.
They were from the East and knew nothing of Indians' cruel warfare and
when they were attacked they left their cabin and ran for the trees and
brush along the river banks. Nine of them were murdered in the most
brutal manner: scalped and stripped of their clothing. Two of the women,
Mrs. Eubanks, with a young babe in her arms, and Laura Roper, a school
teacher who was there on a visit, were the only ones who arrived at a
place of concealment and would have escaped had not the babe from heat
and fright cried out. The practiced ear of the Indians caught the sound
and they were made captives and subjected to the most inhuman and
beastly treatment by the horrible savages. After the mother was made a
captive the baby cried from hunger. The mother was so famished she could
not nourish the babe but held it fondly in her arms trying to soothe it;
and one of the merciless savages stepped up and brained it with his
tomahawk. No pen or brush can tell the horrors of this diabolical deed.
The two women were subjected to six months of bondage impossible to
describe. I was telling this story one day to the late Captain Henry E.
Palmer of Omaha, and learned from him that he and his command of
soldiers and Pawnee scouts followed these inhuman wretches over the
plains trying to bring them to bay, and finally down on the Solomon
river in Kansas captured some of the Indian chiefs and succeeded in
exchanging them for the two women captives.
This is one of the terrible chapters in the early settlement of Nuckolls
county and was graphically detailed to me by Mr. Comstock soon after I
settled in the county.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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