Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/290

 what flood-gates of alleged poesy would be opened up! Any sort of "barbaric yaup" could then pass muster as poetry. May the "sacred Nine" forever and a day forbid!

One day Sam accosted me with the remark: "I believe you say you like anapestic verse the best." I assented to the correctness of the surmise, when he added that it "had a better swing." Then he told me he was writing a poem in that measure and wanted to know if I knew anything about the miners of Jacksonville having, in an early day, executed an Indian by hanging. After refreshing my memory a little, I told him it was not the miners who hung him, but the military, under direction of Col. C. S. Drew. Indian George had been arrested for some alleged depredation, and without any trial by the civil authorities, was taken to Camp Baker, near Phoenix, and made a good Indian of, as Col. Drew expressed it at the time. This was not done, however, without some protest from the Indian agent, Rogers, and from many of the prominent citizens. Arriving at Camp Baker, matters proceeded expeditiously. A number of persons went up from Jacksonville to witness the strangulation. To H. B. Oatman, I believe, was accorded the privilege of driving the wagon out from under the Indian. The Oatman family had been pretty much all massacred on the plains by the Apaches, hence the pleasure its surviving member took in the grewsome work of making "good Indians" out of bad ones whenever opportunity offered. And with that family, Indians were nearly all bad.

On this occasion, Indian George gave a loud war whoop as the wagon began to move out from under him, and the surrounding hills perhaps the only thing present in sympathy with the victim echoed the cry for a brief second of time, when the slowly tightening noose completed the work of life extinguishment. But what cared Col. Drew. As Simpson states it:

He was only an Indian, the son of Old Mary,

Swarthy and wild, with a midnight of hair

That arose, as he sped to the Lethean ferry,

Like a raven of doom in the quivering air.