During the year preceding the period whereof I write, and in fact from the time of the discovery of the Salmon River mines, nearly every train or single company of immigrants going in that direction was attacked, robbed, the animals belonging to it stolen, and frequently many of the persons composing it slain, by predatory bands of Bannack Indians, which tribe possessed the entire country for a distance of five hundred miles north of Salt Lake City. Their rapacity and cruelty had become the great terror of a journey otherwise full of difficulty and discouragement. So frequent and terrible had been this warfare, that nearly all communication between the distant mines and Salt Lake City was suspended; yet the wretches who conducted it, conscious of their superior power, hesitated not, meantime, to visit the settlements, and maintain an apparent friendliness towards the people. Several attacks had been made upon them by detachments of troops from Camp Douglas, attended with more or less success, but none of them had the effect to allay their murderous depredations. Success had made them defiant as well as bloodthirsty, and long impunity begot in them the belief that they were invincible. When the winter began to close in, rich in the spoils of their bloody forays, a large band of nearly three hundred Bannacks, under their chiefs Sand Pitch, Sag Witch, and Bear Hunter, established quarters for the cold months in a ravine on the west bank of Bear River, about four days’ march distant from the Federal camp. Gen. P. Edward Connor, the officer in command at Camp Douglas, had carefully watched their movements with the intention of inflicting the severest punishment upon them for the enormities they had committed. The example to be salutary, must be terrible, and Connor contemplated nothing less than the destruction of the entire band. It was a measure of safety. Many thousand people in the States and Territories were engaged in active preparation to make the journey to the northern mines, on the return of warm weather, and the lives and property of many of them depended, as General Connor knew, upon the success of his contemplated expedition. The Indians selected their camp because of the protection it afforded from the inclemencies of the weather. The general southwest course of the river was, by a bend, changed so as to be nearly due west where it passed their encampment. The nook or ravine, open on the bank, stretched tortuously between high precipitous banks, north from the river several hundred yards, until lost in the abrupt ascent of a lofty overhanging mountain. Clumps of willows grew irregularly over the surface of the little dell, amid which the Indians pitched their buffalo tents, and fastened their ponies for better protection against wind and snow. Their women and children were with them, and all the conveniences and comforts known to savage life were clustered around them.