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Show v ' Telegraph Operator Goes Awry And Calls In Gentile Army; Indians Driven Afield By Stan Mum Every time you take the "high, gear" highway north out of Brigham City, through Bear Blver City, you flip another page of history soundlessly down onto a story that beats all the movies youll ever see. ' It lies under seventy-fou- r summers. ; You get within about a half-mil- e or where it happened when Jim you pass the weed-growBtidger monument thats stood by the road a few miles north of Bear Blver for 17 years. No to marker, however, testifies where this story took place West of the monument. In the flat, quiet fields where another sugar beet crop will soon be Harvested. To be sure It happened at all, 'you have to go talk a while with One of five people who were there , and still - remember. ' . . t Theyre all members of the L. D. S. church which is the almost forgotten reason why it all happened. - About 600 church members Including them were the, reason when the story flared through the national press In the fall of 1875.- - Six hundred tMormons and a big .town named Corinne thats what made the 6tory. there . It started in Corinne, where the pleasantest of farm houses sun themselves . now. That fall the "old Corinne the "Gentile city serving up hard' liquor and talk was just starting . downward in its rocket-lik- e passage across Utah leaves. Bom with a golden spike in its mouth' six years earlier, it was still a lusty city of maybe 15,000 people but it had upon it the imprecation of no less a man than Brigham Young, who had told a (Bear Biver City congregation that the polished wood in Corinnes fine saloons some day would be n , . n 61 rubbed by cows la Bear Biver . . . ' City barns. Perhaps because there was real danger to their economic security in 1875, the citizens of Corinne were jittery about their At any physical rate, they were quick to get excited the night of August 10, when two men galloped Into town shouting that a great band of Indians was making ready to attack the city from the northwest. Nobody went out to see, it appears, but this was said: An Indian squaw had warned white friends to leave and escape the massacre! A Mormon girl employed by a Gentile family had received a warning to flee the city before tomorrow! Mormons The Indians and-thwere In alliance to destroy Co-' rinne! . That night the. city appealed to the governor of the territory for protection. .Troops were on their way from Fort Douglas at dawn. ; , Nothing, says B. H. Boberts in his history of the church, did so much to feeling outside of Utah as the frantic reports which Corinnes telegrapher sent out before the soldiers got there. Boberts cites as evidence this excerpt from the front page of the Sacramento well-bein- . e , , anti-Morm- Eeccnd Union. So much is certain .that if the Gentiles of Utah are in danger and help is wanted, a call for volunteers in California will be responded to by 24,000 armed men inside of twenty four hours; and, if these volunteers should go to Utah and find hostilities in operation, we should be 6orry to have to answer for the consequences of their indignation. If Corinne is attacked by the Indians, let Brigham Young see to it that Salt Lake does not smoke for the outrage. No Californians, it turned out, ... needed to come rescue Corinne The men who did U. S. soldiers found Indians with weapons camped north of Corinne all right, and they found them alBut lied with Mormons. the weapoift were reapers. The Indians were just starting to harvest the first crops they had ever planted, crops cultivated by Mormon methods. By August 14, the Omaha Herald could report: "The Corinne telegrapher surrendered as gracefully as he could yesterday on the Corinne conspiracy. That interesting individual and the gangs of which he is the mouthpiece would do well to go and hang themselves. We deny the whole indictment against the Mormons, and we have no doubt that the Indians are as innocent of 'hostile intent towards the. people of Corinne, or any other white people, as though they were unborn. . . . That the army should have been cajoled into giving countenance to the scheme is to be regretted, but we do not believe there is an officer at Camp Douglas with a thimble full of brains who believes that there was the least foundation for the organized scare at Corinne. The Heralds editorial was right about the Indians, but it was wrong about the officers e who led the operation, allowing they had the requisite thimble full of brains " The major (Brant) delivered his message which was to the effect that all the Indians must leave the farm and go to their reservations before noon the next day, or he would be compelled to drive them therefrom by force. I told the major, writes (Hill, that all the Indians who belonged to reservations had already gone, and that the Indians who were on the farm now were resident Indians, apiece. Their action is best accounted in this Deseret News story of Sept 1, rescue-Corinn- YEARS SERVING BOX ELDER COUNTY 4 one of the great lieutenants had stepped forward and had no reservation to go to. as they never belonged to any Nevertheless, the orders had to be obeyed. This was about three oclock in the afternoon,' says Mr. Hill. Immediately afterwards I called the Indians together, told them that dt would all come out right and advised them to return to their former haunts. By sunset not an Indian could be found in the camp all had scattered out to wander from place to place as in former years, leaving their crops for which they had toiled so Chief Sagwitcb Chief Washakie eloquently to know what he had stolen, whom he had killed, what meanness he had committed, that the soldiers should come to drive him away from, his trops. Sagwitch, from whose mind Hill had tried to erase bloody ' memories of the frightful Battle Creek massacre near Preston in 1865. Next day, with Hills reluctant agreement, the Indians had gone, he reported, and "a man styling himself States Marshal, with three or four others from- - Corinne, rode into the Indian camp and stole . everything to which they One of the first attempts to help Western Indians live by American economics was fin- Industriously, and on which they depended for their winter food, neither cut nor garnered.' The eyewitness who wrote this Mr. Hill wasnt there just by chance when the soldiers came. He was George W. Hill, the Mormon ambassador to mountain Indians. - For twenty years1 he had moved among Shoshones, Bannocks, Nez Perce, Piute, Na-- ' vajo speaking their languages, telling them the Book of Mormon story, convincing them these white men meant peace and plenty. He was Enga Pom-b- i, which Is Shoshone for Bed Head. A few In Washakie 6till speak of him by that name, though hes been dead 60 years. Hill must have been bitterly sorry when he wrote his account for the Salt Lake paper that fall; for be looked across "one hundred acres of wheat, twenty-fivof corn, five and a half to six acres of potatoes, three to four acres of melons, peas, beets and other vegetables, and reported that the Indians were in the fields with two reapers and had commenced harvesting just when the first news of trouble reached us. This band of 300 all baptized by Hill ten days before the soldiers came was the climatic accomplishment of his mission. He had not only made here his biggest lot of converts to his religion but he had guided this group into something like the productive Mormon town pattern of those years. Hill had settled his Indians near Bear Biver City that spring because the Scandinavian Mormons here were willing to share their newly-duirrigation system with their Lamanite brethren, as the Book of Mormon called Indians. He had adapted the Shoshone tribal government to the purpose of a cooperative farm, and that summer he had proudly watched his children, as he called them in his diary, join the whites in commemorating Brigham Youngs arrival in Utah. Now he could only record that took-fancy- ished. . a field the Indians were compelled to abandon. I do not remember what other crops they had In that vicinity, but I remember the corn for one reason in particular; After a few days of work of that kind I had very sore and blistered hands. No doubt the other boys were they now still living, could 6ay the same. had not been . If the Indians driven away from their crops, perhaps the sore hands would have been those of Amman Pub-igeArfi'mon, now 84, is one of four living Indians who were there. As it is, he remembers: "I was about 10 year old. I belong to Sho6shone tribe from Wind Biver In Wyoming. I was baptized by George W. Hill we Cali him Pombi in Bear Elver at Horseshoe Bend between Bear River City and Elwood. It was year 1875. Indians there from Bannocks Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada. Soldiers came, so Indians go back to their own .... e e. two-decad- e country. A new leader, Lowell Cutler, has been called to Washakid recently to help the Indians get the most from their land and their religion. Hes the 6ixth, counting Hill. Twenty miles down Highway 91, Corinne as Mormon as most any town now dozes comfortably behind a historic-plac- e marker of the read from ihighway variety: Corinne, onoe a city of 20,000 . . . Bear River City barely remembers that it was the first Mormon town to ally with the Indians. It was a long time ago about the year somebody officially noticed there werent any buffalo left on the plains, in fact g 5 I - "Along with, other boys from Bear Elver City I was asked to help Cut and shuck the corn on - i i Your Family Store... 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