About the 20th of June, 1864, word reached Colorado City that a day or two previously, the Hungate family, living on Running Creek about forty miles northeast of Colorado City, had been murdered by the Indians. The father and mother had been shot down and mutilated with horrible brutality, and the children who had tried to escape had been pursued and killed, so that not one of the family was left alive. This news made the people of Colorado City, and the settlers along the Fountain and on the Divide, very uneasy, and of course, after that, they were constantly on the lookout, not knowing where the savages might next appear. Two or three weeks after the murder of the Hungate family, some cattle herders came into Colorado City late one evening and told of having seen near Austin's Bluff, a half a dozen mounted Indians who seemed to be acting mysteriously. Following the killing of the Hungate family, and other acts of hostility at various places on the plains, this was indeed alarming news. Consequently, early the following morning an armed party went to the place where the Indians had been seen, found their trail, and followed it. In this way it was discovered that, some time during the previous night, the Indians had been on the hill that overlooks Colorado City on the north, and that the trail from that point led into the mountains. The direction from which these Indians came, their mysterious movements after they were discovered, taken in connection with the recent acts of hostility, and the knowledge that the tribes of the plains had been attempting during the previous winter to make a coalition for the purpose of annihilating the settlements along the eastern base of the mountains, seemed convincing proof that this band was here for no good purpose.