The Indian war.
The war in the West with the Indians continues to grow in interest and magnitude. The inhabitants of the country infested are promiscuously murdered, and the citizen troops are put to a vast deal of trouble, for which they get nothing in return. Fort Kearny, Denver, and other places in the Kansas and Nebraska department, are points of rendezvous for Federal citizen forces, while all between them the savages run riot. An agent of the Indian Bureau writes to the Yankee Government as follows:‘ * * * "Those with whom I traveled stopped about half a mile below Pawnee ranch. I concluded to go back to a house in the rear to get dinner, and not apprehending danger, I left my revolver and bowie-knife behind. At a point half way between the wagons and the ranch, three armed Indians, mounted on fleet horses, dashed down from the bluffs at full speed into the road, and shot a man through the head and scalped him instantly. He was just a little way behind me, driving a two-horse team. I shall ever feel indebted to my legs for my life and scalp. You may believe they conveyed me with the speed of a quarter-horse to Metcalf's ranch. The ranchmen mounted their horses, pursued, and fired at, the Indians as they retreated over the bluffs.
* * * "The overland road passes along the Little Blue for perhaps fifty miles, and all along that distance, at intervals, we saw men and women lying in the road and by the wayside dead, stripped, shot full of holes and scalped. The Ewbank family,--except the old lady, who was away from home,--all lie within a few yards of each other — a gray-headed man, two grown daughters, three grown sons, and a boy fifteen or sixteen years of age. One of the daughters had seven arrows sticking in her body. They were all stripped and scalped except the old man and boy.
"We were eight men and four ladies, and being not too well armed, we did not stop to bury the dead, as we saw a number of parties on the opposite side of the river, and some of our men declared that they saw fifty Indians. I looked with both my eyes, which I think, just at time, were unusually dilated, and I did not see an Indian. We traveled through there at such speed that the topmost boughs of the distant trees appeared to be moving.
"A few miles below were two murdered and scalped men in a house, the doors of which were closed. We afterwards overtook the family fleeing to the settlements, and learned that thirty- five Indians attacked them the previous evening, and killed the two men in the house and badly wounded three others. Two unhurt boys succeeded in bracing the doors, got upon the loft, cut holes in the roof, and drove off the savages by shooting at them with revolvers and one Henry's rifle.
"This house was set on fire soon after we passed, as we learned by one of the boys who had returned to it, hoping to bring away seven thousand five hundred pounds of flour that was in the house by some returning empty train of wagons. The Indians discovered him, chased him into the house, where he returned to the hole in the roof and, shot four Indians, before they made a rush upon the house and set fire to it, intending to burn the boy alive; but he shot down the back way and escaped through the brush.
"At the next ranch were two men dead, shot full of arrows, and scalped. Others were killed a little way from the house; but the inhabitants were so filled with consternation that they did not venture to bring them in. Nearly all who were unharmed were fleeing to Marysville and other parts of Kansas more densely populated."
’ The overland mail to the Pacific has been stopped by the Indian hostilities. Contractors on that route report that the road is materially injured, and that five thousand Indians are on the war path. They urge that a suitable number of the army be sent into that region, under the command of General Harney. From all accounts, the Indians on the Plains are giving the Yankees a very effective "fire in the rear," and meting out to them a taste of the outrages which they have so long practised upon defenceless people in the South. There is something like retribution in all this.
