Page 110 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER THREE

Not infrequently it was train members who generated the scare.
When two young women rushed through the dark toward a young man
on the fr inge of camp in revenge f o r some of his practical jokes, they
were appalled to see him dash into camp raising an Indian alarm.32
Similarly, a man in another train jokingly fired a shot to awake a sleep­
ing guard, thereby raising the entire camp, stampeding the stock, and
causing the guard to be run over and seriously injured. In recounting
the episode, Mary Saunders commented that "it taught Mr. Baker and
all the guards that they could not break the rules with safety."33 Harriet
W a rd also disparaged the tendency of some travelers to use scares fo r
their own purposes. When her son was hit by an arrow, the entire camp
f
readied itself o r a f u ll-scale assault, only to find that "the much dreaded
arrow was but a harmless little stick" thrown into the midst of the chil­
dren "to fr ighten them, by one of the boys whose slumbers were dis­
turbed by their merriment."34
Moreover, a variety of people along the trail were sometimes taken
f o r Native Americans. Mary W a rner remarked that a member of her
train was fired at by an Indian as he passed through a canyon, or rather,
she explained, "he supposed it was them."35 Lucy Cooke related a sim­
ilar incident about one of her f e llow travelers.

He had not gone f a r when, looking back, he saw someone in pur­
suit, and fe aring it to be an Indian,jumped offhis horse and took
to his heels and hid in the tall grass, leaving his horse fo r Mr.
Indian. The pursuer proved to be one of his own men, so he got
well laughed at fo r his fr ight, and would have lost his horse had
not an Indian caught it and brought it to camp.
The captain of the train justly rewarded the Indian with a dollar
f o r his honesty. 36
The soldiers sent to protect the migrants also elicited their share
of cases of mistaken identity. Ada Millington described the men of her
party loading their guns and regrouping the train when they thought
they had sighted wigwams in the distance and Indians firing guns.
When the Indian camp turned out to be tents and United States sol­
diers, she said that "we had a good laugh over our scare."37 Emily
Andrews mentioned that her party grew very excited about a small

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