Page 120 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APT E R TH R E E

the Spirit Lake disaster in r 8 57, "every stranger was viewed with suspi­
cion, and if seen on the prairie was run down and captured as an Indian
spy." He added that as panic grew, "cranes were magnified into Indians,
prairie fires were mistaken f o r Indian camp fires and the very howling
of the April winds sent a chill of horror to the hearts of mothers as they
clung closer to their babes." Of those f a milies who fled, Call remarked,
only a f e w ever returned. Predictably, no Indians were ever fo und in the
area so affected by their supposed presence. lOr
Other settlers stood their ground, but with weapons they were often
ill prepared to use. As a result, whites destroyed their own goods, stock,
and companions. After mistaking his mule fo r an Indian intruder, one
f e llow shot his mule twice. Another shot an oxen through the head. An
Arizona woman who fired at an "Indian" through her cabin door
wounded a neighbor's burro, f o r which her husband had to pay two dol­
lars in damages.102 Settlers also fr equently took aim at each other. Ella
Bird-Dumont drew a bead on an approaching Indian, only to learn that
she had almost shot her own husband, who was searching f o r her. 103
During an Oklahoma scare of the r890s, a local judge obligingly took
command of the "troops" of local men. As he drilled them with sup­
posedly empty rifles, he ordered them into fo rmation and then gave the
command to fire. One recruit discharged a cartridge that he had acci­
dentally left in the chamber, hitting the dust in fr ont of the judge's f e et.
The u dge, angry and disgusted with his recruits, threatened to resign
j
and shouted at his men, "Let the confounded redskins butcher you
all."104 In another area of Oklahoma during the same decade, a native
dance occasioned a scare that resulted in a young boy f a tally shooting
his own brother. 105
As if all this were not enough, settlers developed a "frontier psy­
chology," that is, a near obsession with recounting the dangers of the
W e st and their own heroic victories over all challenges. Within a decade
or two of settlement, whites f o rmed Old Settlers Associations, which
met regularly and sometimes distributed printed proceedings. The mem­
bers' purpose was to recall and recount their hardships and their tri­
umphs. Sadly, these retellings of hardships not only exaggerated Indian
behavior, but caused whites to swell on the possibility of additional
danger. Such hyperbole led to rumors and scares and to hundreds, or

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