Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/632

498 lowing them. On arriving at the spot they shook hands with Captain Jack and the other Indian, and probably fifteen minutes elapsed when Captain Jack dropped his blanket from his shoulders to the ground and suddenly turned and picked it up. This, I believe, was a signal for an attack, for the next moment I saw smoke from a number of guns from the rocks and could hear the reports also. Col. Thomas, Meeks and his squaw started on the run, but Gen. Canby fell in his tracks, a victim at the hands of Captain Jack and his followers. Col. Thomas only ran about ten steps, when he fell. Meeks ran nearly one hundred yards, when he fell, and the squaw escaped unhurt, but badly scared, I presume.

As soon as Gen. Canby had fallen George Jones asked if he had better go to headquarters and give the alarm. I told him to go with all possible speed. George reached camp twenty minutes ahead of me. The other officers could not believe that he was telling the truth, but when I arrived and told them that the entire crowd had been killed, with the exception of the squaw, they were thunderstruck, and by the time I was through telling them the squaw was there.

I do not know just how many soldiers were sent to recover the dead bodies, but that day there was a general attack made on Captain Jack, which was kept up from day to day almost as long as the war lasted.

When it was foggy, as it was nearly all the time, the Indians almost invariably got the best of the soldiers, from the fact that they would come out without any clothing on their bodies with a bunch of sage-brush tied on their heads, and their skins being so similar in color