Attacks on the Trail

Louis L. Simonin wrote a series of letters about his trip west in 1867. From Denver, he wrote of traveling through the Fort Morgan area, but he ends his letter from Julesburg with a dark joke:

[from Julesburg] …We have one portion of our journey yet to make, my companions and I, a stretch of 190 miles across the great desert. We have with us an escort of six soldiers, perched on our vehicle, from where they survey the terrain. I shall write you from Denver if we arrive safe and sound, or if we are scalped en route by the Cheyennes and Arapahos, whose territory we cross, and have to buy a wig to adorn our occiput....

[from Denver] Fortune favors the bold. Here we are, having arrived without any unpleasant encounters during the trials of the journey.... We left Julesburg on the evening of the second, and entered Denver yesterday toward midnight. Thirty hours by coach.... Shall I give you a description of the vehicle which brought us here.... Imagine a kind of Louis XIV coach... Within are nine seats, all priced alike: three in front, three behind, three in the middle. Ladies have the right to the front seats... Little baggage is carried, the least possible, sometimes none at all.... On top of the coach we carried only the well-armed soldiers, on the watch, which is worth more than baggage. The coach is drawn by six horses, driven

four-in-hand at full gallop across the prairie, level as a petrified sea.... All along the route are written the ineffaceable proofs of the battle of white against the Redskin. Everywhere pothouses and farms are burned.... One day, as our coach was crossing these solitudes, a naked man, perched on a rise of land, made signs to the driver. He, thinking he was dealing with an Indian, whipped up his horses. One of the travelers observed that he could well be a white. We paused for a moment, and the man came running and out of breath. He had just been captured by the Indians, who had stripped him of his clothing and given it to their women.... With their customary cruelty toward the palefaces, they prepared to submit their prisoner slowly, coldly, to all the tortures which they could imagine. They would pluck out his eyes, his nails, his tongue; they would cut off a foot or a hand; they would peel off a bit of flesh; they would tear off his skin; and finally, as a climax, they would bind the prisoner on the ground and light a fire on his abdomen, dancing an infernal circle around him. Our poor captive was about to undergo one by one all of this kind of torture when he managed to escape. The coach was passing at this moment and rescued him at the opportune time.... Would you not suppose you were hearing a romance or reaching a page of Cooper or Irving? Well, all this happened yesterday....

As our coach moved rapidly over the flat and dusty route amid the prairies...all these stories which were told me fixed themselves in my memory.... I must not speak more of our soldiers, whom we left one by one at the forts scattered along our route as we drew farther from the points of greatest danger. We have crossed the great American desert. Little by little prairie has given way to fields of sand where the red ants have heaped up enormous piles of siliceous gravel, their own pyramids of Egypt. Here and there the prairie reappeared; some flowers whose brilliance was now faded still shone amid the yellowed grasses.... We encountered no hostile Indians....

Simonin’s party had no problems with Indians, but it is clear from his description of what might have happened to the rescued traveler that the emigrants traveled in fear.
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Photo Source: Overland Stage. In Frank Root’s The overland stage to California, 1901, p. 10

Source: Simonin, Louis L. & Wilson O. Clough, Rocky Mountain West in 1867, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp 25-31.