Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/66

 tance. Prairie chickens and sage hens were abundant. We were 58 days making the trip to Salt Lake City. We reached there in the summer of 1863. Fred settled in Salt Lake City, became a state senator, built up a large business in Salt Lake City and Sacramento and became wealthy. Salt kake City did not appeal to me, so with six other young men, I decided to go on to California. We bought a wagon and a yoke of oxen and headed westward.

"On the way out from Omaha, near Laramie, we met Jim Bridger, a very likeable and reliable man. I also met Bill Hutchison and Bill Hickman. Bill Hickman is the author of a book in which he tells his experiences while serving as one of Brigham Young's 'destroying angels.He was a fanatic, and being quite ignorant, he believed anything and everything that Brigham Young told him. Just ahead of us there was a wagon train which was traveling fast. We were rapidly overtaking them but we never saw them, that is, alive. At the head Of the Humboldt Divide, we found where the members (of this party had dug trenches to resist attack. The (horses, women and girls had all ben taken, the men had been killed and we found their bodies lying beside the burned wagons. The massacre had evidently occurred a couple of days before, and all that was left to tell the tale was a lot of wagon tires, thimble skeins and chains and mutilated bodies. Three days before this massacre 300 Indians in war paint had overtaken us, stopped us and looked through our wagon and then gone on. Evidently they were after the wagon train ahead, which they overtook and destroyed.

"When on my trip westward from Salt Lake City, I got to Virginia City, I landed a job at road building, and some time later I became a Wells-Fargo express rider.

"Probably there never was a town which was more wide open than Virginia City," said Colonel Dosch. "The saloon men, barkeepers and gamblers were the aristocrats