The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  The surviving Williams brother had neglected a crucial aspect of the story. Sometime before, he and his brothers had abducted two Indian sisters who were about twelve years old, tied them up, stuffed rags in their mouths, and held them captive beneath a trap door in the floor of their station house. They’d almost certainly raped the two children. The fathers of the missing girls tracked them to Williams Station, gathered a warrior band, and retaliated in a fashion that most people in the West, of any culture, would have condoned had they understood the full story. Unfortunately, those ugly facts didn’t surface until events had slipped far beyond containment.

  • • •

  Among the native tribes of the Great Basin, anti-immigrant resentment had been mounting ever since the California gold discovery. Herds of privately owned livestock ravaged ecosystems that had formerly supported abundant game. Whites decimated nut-bearing pine forests for lumber and fuel. White ranchers around Honey Lake, eighty miles northwest of Virginia City, reneged on grazing agreements. Then came the Comstock discovery. For the natives of the region—Paiute, Washoe, Bannock, Goshute, Western Shoshone—the rush to Washoe was the biggest catastrophe since the Gold Rush. Their ire surged. With their grasp on their way of life loosening, tribal leaders gathered at Pyramid Lake in the spring of 1860 to discuss alternatives.

  Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of the great Paiute chief Winnemucca, had lived in Carson City with prominent settler William Ormsby and his wife for more than two years. She would grow into one of the most fascinating women of the nineteenth century, her lectures and book, Life Among the Paiutes, drawing much attention to the injustices visited upon Native American peoples. Although in it she described the Paiutes as “not fond of going to war,” the ferocious winter recently endured and the endless white incursions made many Paiutes fear their alternatives had been reduced to fighting or starvation. Militants advocated a war to scourge the invaders from their homelands. Only the much-respected Paiute chief Numaga, who had toured California and understood the overwhelming preponderance of white power, counseled accommodation. Chief Winnemucca held himself aloof. Into the volatile debate came news of the outrage and punishment meted out at Williams Station. “There is no longer any use for counsel,” Numaga said. “We must prepare for war, for the soldiers will now come here to fight us.”

  Numaga was correct. The Pony Express rider’s account of “the Williams Station massacre” had thrown Virginia City into an uproar. “That sovereign cure—a public meeting” appointed Henry Meredith and four other men to a “committee of arrangements.” The committee called for a volunteer force to “chastise the savages,” telegraphed Carson City, and dispatched riders to warn other settlements and parties of prospecting miners, and solicited monetary contributions to support a militia force. According to Frank Soule, who represented the Daily Alta California in Virginia City, the camp passed Tuesday, May 8, in “a vast deal of talk, noise, and confusion, collection of rifles, muskets, revolvers, and knives, and an immense punishment of whiskey. Could the Indians be as effectually consumed, peace would soon be restored.”

  Saloon soldiers worked themselves into a patriotic, anti-Indian delirium, made rousing speeches, appointed themselves militia captains, and declared their right to press into service any horse in camp. Rumors swept the camp: that the initial report was exaggerated, that Brigham Young and his Mormons were behind the whole business, that five hundred heavily armed Indians were within raiding distance of camp, that thieves had concocted the excitement to steal mules and horses under the guise of patriotism and valor, that gamblers had murdered the Williams brothers, torched their station, and blamed Indians.

  All over the eastern slope, reports of the massacre had the white citizenry in a furor. Towns posted guards, alarms were raised—all of them false—and wild opinions circulated. Wiser people argued that if the Paiutes intended a general campaign to “clean out the whites,” they wouldn’t have confined their aggression to an insignificant trading post. Over in Genoa, a San Francisco Herald correspondent found “truly amusing” the plight of “three females of tender nerves,” who, fearing Indian outrage, locked themselves in the stone cellar of a merchant’s house. In his estimate, they were in no more Indian danger in Genoa than they would have been in San Francisco. He held a dim impression of the men who ran “the little grog shops called trading posts along the great immigrant road,” and he ventured his guess regarding the Indian difficulty: “It originated in the gross outrages of the whites themselves.”

  Nothing pacified the hotheaded whites. Hallooing slogans like, “an Indian for breakfast and a pony to ride,” a group of Virginia City volunteers trotted out of camp dragoon style at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 9, spurs jangling, shotguns and ropes tied to their saddles, brandishing knives and pistols. Prominent among the Virginians was Henry Meredith, the black-haired, goateed lawyer from Nevada City who’d purchased a share of the Ophir from George Hearst. Looking ahead to what many expected would be the creation of a new territory and state from the western portion of the Utah Territory, Meredith reportedly nurtured political ambitions. Prominent citizens would fill the governorship and the senatorial seats of a new state, and Indian-fighting heroes did well in American politics. Whatever his ambitions and those of other “toughs” in the volunteer force, a rigorous military inspection would have found them much more liberally supplied with whisky than with provisions, ammunition, and long-range, muzzle-loading Minié rifles, riding mules and horses of middling quality, and lacking discipline. The vigilantes reached Williams Station in the middle of the following morning. John Mackay was not among them. Raised in the Irish slums of New York City and having mined for eight years, he might not have been an accomplished horseman. He might not have owned any guns, and he might not have approved of the “tone” of what passed for soldiers. Mackay stayed in Virginia City.

  Amid the charred remains of the outpost, the vigilantes found three bodies, blood and brains staining the blade of an axe, the tracks of Indian ponies, and a wounded dog with an arrow protruding from its side. The men extracted the arrow from the dog and buried the bodies. Late in the evening, William Ormsby trotted into camp at the head of a force from the Carson and Eagle valleys. Ormsby was a controversial figure on the eastern slope. His influence had waned since the arrival of more legitimate authority in the person of U.S. District Judge John Cradlebaugh, seated in Genoa since August 1859, and although Ormsby had always maintained good relations with the Paiutes, he may have also been hoping for the political benefits of a successful anti-Indian expedition. Most vigilantes agreed to serve under Ormsby, and they voted on what they ought to do. Unanimously, they chose to pursue the Indians. They rolled up in their blankets and passed an uneventful night.

  Behind them in Virginia City, two thousand feet higher on the slopes of Mount Davidson, a furious gust of wind awakened the camp about midnight. Tent canvas flapped in sudden anger; new, hastily constructed buildings creaked; and a wave of dust tore through camp. Then other blasts, “hollow and threatening,” boomed down Mount Davidson. A pregnant silence dropped after each impact, the air calm as death, until the sound of the next bludgeoning gust built on the mountain seconds before it struck the camp. Each successive blow seemed stronger. Flapping tents strained at their moorings. The angry winds flung piles of kindling down the mountainside. A fierce gust whipped away the canvas sheltering two “women of light character” and left them together in bed, clinging to flapping blankets. Hundreds, half clad, turned out to save the camp. About one o’clock in the morning, Rassett’s Hotel blasted apart. Flying debris carried away four tents. The stronger gusts that followed collapsed other buildings. Boards, shingles, scantling, and sheets of gritty dust flew through the camp. Loaded clotheslines took wing. A man named Ned Batturs clung to a tent rope in the hopes of keeping his habitation grounded. A gust shot his thirty-two-dollar Peruvian hat into the desert.

  At daybreak, Virginia City looked like an Arkansas saloon the morning after a midnight brawl. The win
dstorm had destroyed fifty-seven houses and tents. Many of the latter had vanished entirely. Residents laughed at their misfortunes and heaped maledictions on the Washoe climate. Soon after, it started snowing.

  • • •

  While residents of Gold Hill and Virginia City searched for their scattered possessions and rebuilt their shelters, the volunteer force rode north from the wreck of Williams Station in “high glee,” through heavy wind and snow, easily following the trail left by the Indian ponies driving fifty head of stock they’d liberated. The vigilantes pounded twenty-two miles north. About half an hour past noon, they reached the Big Bend of the Truckee River, where the river swerved from its eastward course and curled north toward Pyramid Lake—the Great Basin “sink” of the Truckee. They elected to camp and allow their animals to recruit strength from the abundant grass.V A few late arrivals raised their numbers to 105 or 106.

  After sunrise on Saturday, May 12, 1860, the white force shook free of damp wool blankets to find three inches of snow on the ground. They dawdled through most of the morning, waiting for sun and wind to remove the snow and reveal the Indian trail. Not until eleven o’clock did they saddle up and continue pursuit.

  Following the Indian trail, the vigilantes stayed on the Truckee’s right bank and advanced a few miles down the valley to where the river squeezed between two ranges of brown hills. A natural terrace cutting around the foot of the hills above the river provided the only reasonable avenue of advance. The Indian trail went straight down it. Ormsby ordered scouts to check the terrace for trouble.

  The scouts probed along the terrace for two miles without incident. At the end of the terrace, the hills backed away from the river. A commanding view stretched north to the shore of Pyramid Lake, about three and a half miles distant. A little over halfway to the lake, the trail dropped sixty to eighty feet into a shallow, flat valley at the river level, bounded on its east side by the edge of an ancient floodplain. Some distance ahead and below, the scouts spotted two Indians. They reported back to the main body of the force.

  Ormsby ordered them to return and capture the two Indians, if possible, while he continued bringing up the rest of the vigilantes.

  The scouts trotted out front again, dropped into the shallow valley, and moved forward, searching for the two Indians. A mile or more down the valley, they found them—along with a significant group of their fellows. The Indians charged, and the scouts fled back to the main body of the volunteers, who by then had reached the top of the slope into the lower valley. The time was about 4:00 p.m.

  Suddenly, about a mile and a half to their front, a line of mounted Indians roughly equal to their numbers appeared along the edge of a rise. Four or five war chiefs galloped back and forth in front of the Indian line, displaying remarkable skill in handling their horses. The Indians’ shrill war whoops echoed over the intervening distance.

  They presented just the sort of force the whites hoped to punish. The vigilantes advanced about three-quarters of a mile. Stands of cottonwoods and underbrush lined the banks of the snowmelt-swollen Truckee about two hundred yards to the whites’ left. A steep rise to the edge of the ancient floodplain overlooked their right flank. The Indian force before them stayed in sight the whole time.

  One of the Indian chiefs stunted a gorgeous black charger. Oddly, he seemed to be holding a white flag as he raced back and forth along the line. Confused, and still five or six hundred yards distant, Ormsby called a halt. Wise members of the expedition used the pause to tighten their saddles. One of the men possessed a rifle with a telescopic sight that revealed what he thought was an enormous battle-axe glinting in the sun whenever the chief wheeled his horse. (The chief was probably holding a spear decorated with eagle feathers.) The man took a shot at the chief.

  Unharmed, the chief rode back to join his men, and as a unit, the whole force of mounted Indians advanced to the edge of the ancient floodplain. They stood for an instant, then simultaneously dismounted and fired their rifles. Their horses stayed perfectly still, a discipline that impressed those few whites disposed to carefully measure the quality of their opponents.

  Ormsby suggested a charge. One of his lieutenants thought it better to make for a stand of cottonwoods, where they could anchor a flank against the river and shoot across open ground. Ormsby yelled for a charge. The whites advanced—and discovered their horses struggling through fetlock-deep sand. About thirty whites spurred ahead, racing for a wash that rose gently to the level of the plateau to the right of the Indian position. A few individuals fired their weapons. Most held their fire, hoping for closer range. (Reloading muzzle-loading rifles or revolvers with black powder and ball from horseback was no trivial undertaking.) Not liking the slant of developments, at least five whites turned tail and galloped for the bench leading out of the valley.

  The whites gained the top of the rise to find the Indians vanished—into an open landscape. The Indians seemed to have ceded the ground without a fight. Lacking targets, or even a focal point of terrain worthy of capture, the vigilante force suffered a few seconds of confusion. A few even thought they’d won some kind of victory. Then rifle fire erupted on their flanks. Clumps of sagebrush resolved into dismounted Indian marksmen firing rifles and bows. Small groups of Indians on foot ducked in and out of covered positions in ravines and washes and sniped at the whites. Ormbsy had led his rabble into the heart of a perfectly sprung ambush.

  Although by some minor miracle none of the whites were wounded in the initial fusillade, arrows and bullets thwacked into the flanks of their horses and mules. Panicked animals reared. Riders struggling to control bucking mounts couldn’t return fire. Many dropped their weapons to avoid being thrown. The long charge through the deep sand and up the wash had greatly tired their mounts. The Indians seemed content to let them stay where they were. The time was by now about five o’clock. Some three hours remained until sunset. The chances of surviving a night surrounded by aggressive Indian warriors suddenly seemed dim indeed.

  The whites fell back down the hill, ceding the high bench in the hopes of gaining shelter among the cottonwoods on the riverbank, two hundred yards to the rear. Indians concealed in the trees shattered their hopes. Pursued by remounted Indians astride superb, rested, recently fed animals, the white force fled, aiming for a grove of cottonwoods three-quarters of a mile to the south.

  Three hundred yards short of the timber, the whites rallied a brief stand, then panicked and again fled south. Henry Meredith and a few others who had assumed battlefield leadership rallied a shaky stand in some cottonwoods near the edge of the Truckee River about 250 yards from the slope that rose out of the south end of the valley. The Indians fought their way into the cottonwoods from the north. A savage fight developed in the undergrowth. Bullets and the arrows scythed through the foliage. Indians appeared on the edge of the plateau above the battlefield and began sniping at the whites below. A number of men took wounds, including Henry Meredith. Worse, so did Meredith’s mule. The terrified animal broke loose and bolted. The mule’s mad flight unhinged the whites. They fled southward, toward the rise out of the valley bottom. As the whites cleared out, a man offered Meredith a spot on his mule behind him. “No, sir, it would endanger your life,” Meredith replied.

  Another man who’d lost his mount vaulted onto the back of sixteen-year-old Joseph Baldwin’s mule and spurred the animal south without letting the teenager mount behind him. Like Meredith, Baldwin ran after his departing fellows on foot.

  Wounded, Meredith lagged behind. Some fifty howling Indians charged toward him as he trailed the fleeing whites. Another projectile—either bullet or arrow—struck Meredith and he fell, clutching his shotgun. He raised himself on an elbow, and one after the other, aimed and fired both barrels at the onrushing, howling Paiutes. Meredith reached for his pistol and discovered that it had fallen from its holster during the mayhem. The front-running Paiutes cut him to pieces. Amid the chaos, several whites thought they saw a triumphant Indian hoist Meredith’s blood-drippin
g scalp.VI

  Young Baldwin seemed certain to fall next, but the same brave man who’d tried to rescue Meredith swept the lad onto the back of his mule. The vanguard of the white rout confronted Indians blocking the rise to the plateau—the whites’ only hope of escaping the death trap. Remarkably, only two or three whites had been killed by this point in the battle, although more had taken wounds. William Ormsby, inconspicuous in the engagement since his ill-fated order to charge, led a desperate attack up the slope. The charge broke through and opened the avenue to escape, but Ormsby was wounded in each arm and in his mouth. His mule took a hit, too. Tempted by the possibility of survival, any semblance of white discipline evaporated. They spurred and whipped their horses and galloped for their lives, driven like cattle before the thundering hooves of the Indian ponies.

  The chase stretched out for miles. Whites with weak, wounded, tired, or overloaded mounts fell behind. They were dragged down and killed as their animals foundered. Others threw away their arms and begged for quarter. Indians spitted them on arrows, knives, and spears. The whites fled onto the bench above the river that contoured around the nose of the hills. One after the other, the rout stalled at each of three gulches that sliced the bench. Paiute warriors carried death and havoc to the hindmost, stabbing with spears and shooting arrows. South of the terrace, the rout backed up against an arroyo. William Ormsby’s mule gushed blood from one of its flanks. Lubricated by the slick of blood, Ormsby’s saddle slipped and dumped him to the ground. Ormsby gained his feet and faced an onrushing Indian, whom he recognized. Ormsby called to the man by name and held out his palm. “Don’t kill me,” he implored through the bloody foam frothing from his mouth. “I’m your friend. I’ll talk to the whites and make peace.”