Page:Life Among the Piutes.djvu/183

 two hundred feet deep; and as the walls are nearly perpendicular, our command actually slid down the trail that we were following into the stream, which rushed clown the bed of the cañon, and we had to climb up the opposite side, leading our horses, the ascent being so steep that several of our pack animals fell over backwards into the stream and were lost, while trying to follow the puzzling zig-zags of the trail. The Indians that constituted their rear guard numbered about forty. They had fortified themselves near the brow of the hill, on the trail, so as to command it for several hundred feet below their line of work. The scouts, numbering about eight, were a short distance ahead of us, who were in the advance guard. The Indians, who were in ambush, permitted them to get almost up to their line, when the accidental discharge of a carbine in the advance guard, caused them to believe that they were discovered, and they at once fired upon the scouts, killing H. H. Froman, a courier, who was with the advance, and severely wounding a scout, John Campbell. The advance guard was Company E, 1st Cavalry, under Capt. W. H. Winters. At the sound of the firing, he deployed his company, dismounted, and took a strong position, which was re-enforced by sending forward Company H, under Lieutenant Parnell, and Company L, under Lieutenant Shelton, and they extended the line to the right by pushing Company G, under Captain Bernard and Lieutenant Pitcher, up the side of the cañon to a projecting point which commanded and protected the trail and the bench of land upon which we had corralled our stock. As soon as this formation was completed, which occupied us about an hour and a half, and was made under fire of the enemy, the line moved forward, and the crest of the precipitous hill, or, more properly speaking, bluff, was reached, not soon enough however to give us a chance at the foe, who had mounted and fled.