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old fellow into it and laid him on his back, tied a rope to the cover and Pierson's saddle horn and I held the back end together, and in that way we dragged him to the house and put him in with the other man.
There was also a young woman and some small children in the family who were missing; so we went on down the creek looking for them.
On the main traveled road, not far from where Ludell now stands, lay another dead man; his companion and a man who looked very much like him, lay a few hundred yards from him toward the Beaver.
He had evidently not been killed by the first shot and had made a run for the creek and timber.
By the side of the one on the road was a woman who was trying to dig a grave.
I took the spade from her and tried my hand at digging, but the ground was hard and dry and we did not have time to give him a decent burial, so we concluded to roll the poor fellow up in our saddle blankets for the present.
This man had evidently lived a long time after he was shot, as he was not swollen as were the others I had helped to handle.
His boots or shoes were gone, had not been off but a short time for they were not sunburned.
When the woman saw us getting the blankets out she went up to the dead man and bent over him, I did not notice what she was doing, but in a few seconds I happened to look in that direction and she had hold of the dead mall's overalls, which was the only thing he had on, and gave a little flip and the overalls came off.
She put them under her arms with as much importance as if she had bought them of the deed man's heirs or he had willed them to her.
I took the overalls from her, but not as gently as I had taken the spade a few moments before.
We rolled him up as good as we could and buried him. If she got those overalls she had to rob the dead twice to get them.
I have seen the woman several times since and if she has not died or removed within the last few years, is in the same neighborhood at present.
We did not find the children or the girl that day; the Indians had taken them along, but they either got away or were let go that night, and came back to the Beaver below the ranch and were taken to their home the next morning.
We got back there shortly after they had arrived. This sight would have cured those who pity the poor Indian.
There lay the husband and father and outside the door was the wife and children.
The eldest girl had a bed quilt around her for a dress. Take it all around and it was a pitiful sight.
A fellow from Oregon whose name I have forgotten, and myself went on down the Beaver hunting horses that had been dropped out and taken down into settlement.
We stayed over night with Jack Langly, a preacher, who afterward came up on the middle Beaver to Captain Stephenson's and preached to us in 1881-82.
The next night we stayed at Mr. Hugh's on the Sappa, sixteen miles below Oberlin.
There was a crowd there, among them was Ben Ingalls, formerly a fiddler of Norton county.
Some wanted to have a prayer meeting and some a dance. They vetoed the dance and we in turn stopped the prayer.
The next night we were in Oberlin, boarding at the little log hotel kept by Mr. and Mrs. Rodehaver and slept
in the straw pile. Most of the people thought we were there to steel (sic) horses, so they night-herded us and the straw pile.
In the morning we started for our wagon at the forks of the Beaver, having only found one horse." Frank H. Baker, superintendent of Norton county, first saw light at Linville, Rockingham county, Virginia, in 1862. At the close of the civil war his parents moved to Iowa, where he lived until 1886, when he became a resident of "sunny" Kansas. Mr. Baker |
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