Another class of men who made a winter rendezvous of the present site of Pocatello were the freighters--men who drove the old freight stages from Salt Lake to Butte. These men were true pioneers, camping along the old trails until they knew them blindfold for hundreds of miles, and encountering great risk from exposure and from the Indians. Sometimes an impoverished traveler worked his way with these freighters. He was called a swamper, and to his lot fell all the chores of the camp--chopping wood, carrying water and building fires. He usually paid well for his passage. There was always bad blood between the Indians and freighters, the former resenting the intrusion of the teamsters as they passed through the reservation along the old trail. The freighters prepared for trouble as they neared the reservation limits, and frequently met it. In August, 1878, two men, Orson James, and another named James, but not related to the former, were taking a load of merchandise from Salt Lake to Butte, and were attacked by a hostile Indian on the road between Pocatello and Fort Hall. The red man opened fire unexpectedly and shot James in the back. The freighters returned the fire from behind their wagons, but in time the Indian succeeded in hitting Orson James in the neck. Then he rode off into the sagebrush, but was later captured and taken to Malad City, at that time the county seat, for trial. He was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment in the penitentiary at Boise, where he died before his term expired. Both men recovered but Orson James was lame during the rest of his life. When the Indian just mentioned was taken to Malad City, he was accompanied by a brother. This man heard Alec Roden, a cow-puncher, remark that the Indian on trial should be hung. He attached undue importance to these words, thinking, in his ignorance of the white man’s methods of justice, that they would affect the verdict unfavorably for his brother. Roden was later sent to the Fort Hall reservation to attend to a hay contract. In talking over the trial, Joe Rainey said to Roden, “You should not have let that Indian’s brother hear you advise hanging. He is likely to seek revenge.” Roden laughed the fear away, but that same evening, while he was working at the barn, the imprisoned Indian’s brother shot him dead. Such attacks served to keep the white men on the alert. They were usually unprovoked, so far as the people who were attacked knew, but an investigation generally showed that the red man, after his fashion, was visiting a real or supposed wrong on the first member of the offending race he encountered.