The American Indian in the United States, Period 1850-1914: ... The Present Condition of the American Indian; His Political History and Other Topics; A Plea for JusticeMoorehead, Warren K. (Warren King)
History
The American Indian in the United States, Period 1850-1914: ... The Present Condition of the American Indian; His Political History and Other Topics; A Plea for Justice
Moorehead, Warren K. (Warren King)
Indians of North America; Indians of North America -- Government relations -- 1869-1934
“As they drove they passed near a house, from which several other shots
were fired at the flying mother, when her husband again rode up and kept
off the whole party until the wagon could get ahead. Finally, as the
ponies were tired out, this heroic man abandoned the wagon and put the
two children on one of the spare ponies and his wounded wife and himself
upon another and continued to retreat until the Whites gave up the
pursuit. He finally reached the agency with the wife and children.”
To give readers an adequate conception of what has too frequently
occurred in the West, I desire to state that while One Feather and his
family escaped, wounded, the wife of the other Indian, Few Tails, was
shot twice, and lay helpless on the ground all night. In the morning she
found one of the ponies alive, and mounted it and reached a settler’s
house fifteen miles away.
“Instead of meeting help and sympathy, however, she was driven off by
the two men there with loaded rifles, and leaving her horse in her
fright, she hurried away as well as she could with a bullet in her leg
and another in her breast, passing by the trail of One Feather’s wagon
with the tracks of his pursuers fresh behind it, until she came near a
trader’s store about twenty miles farther south. Afraid to go near it on
account of her last experience, the poor woman circled around it, and
continued, wounded, cold, and starving as she was, to travel by night
and hide by day until she reached the Bad Lands. The rest may be told in
her own words:
“‘After that I traveled every night, resting daytime, until I got here
at the beef corral. Then I was very tired, and was near the military
camp, and early in the morning a soldier came out and he shouted
something back, and in a few minutes fifty men were there, and they got
a blanket and took me to a tent. I had no blanket and my feet were
swelled, and I was about ready to die. After I got to the tent a doctor
came in—a soldier doctor, because he had straps on his shoulders—and
washed me and treated me well.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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