Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/441

Rh able to get a fight out of the Indians yet, although they had followed them around a great deal.

We decided to take Sublet's Cutoff, leaving Salt Lake City about one hundred miles south, as Jim said he would rather fight Indians than Mormons.

Six days after leaving Fort Bridger I met two of Gen. Connor's scouts in Cash valley, and they told us the Utes were very bad farther West, and advised us to take the Goose Creek route to avoid the Indians. We took their advice.

Here was a scope of country that neither Jim nor I had ever been over, it being a new road just made the year previous.

After traveling four days on this road, late in the evening of the fourth, I discovered a little band of Indians about six or eight miles from the road on a stream that I have since heard called Raft river, which is a tributary of the Snake.

We watched the band until dark and then rode as near as we thought safe. I then left my horse with my two assistants and crawled up near the Indian camp and tried to get a count on them. When I got near them I found that they were Bannocks and were not warriors, but apparently a hunting and fishing party, and were an old men and women. I went away without molesting or even allowing them to know that I had been there.

Four days' travel from here brought us into a section of country where I had done my first scouting, on the waters of the Humboldt. The first day after striking the Humboldt, three of my men and I late in the afternoon, ran on to a small band of Utes, eleven in number. I