Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Another event prior to the Lawson incident (sometime between 1857 and 1859) was the murder of two pack train operators, John McMarlin and James Williams, in the high Sierra above Lake Tahoe. Arrows had been carefully placed in the bullet wounds. When the Pyramid Lake leaders were taken to task by their Comstock neighbors, they identified the arrows as Washo. The Washo chieftain was then ordered to bring in the culprits. Three Washo men were brought in to be interrogated, but on their way to prison they broke from their captors and ran. Frontier justice was immediately realized when their captors shot the three dead.⁶³ Later on, according to the testimony of Sarah Winnemucca, the actual culprits were two white men who were found with the money that had been stolen from McMarlin and Williams. They had planted the arrows so as to redirect the blame toward the Washo Indians.⁶⁴ In any case, it was just one more misplaced event that added to the increasing war fever of the Comstock crowd.

The final outrage of a series of transgressions by whites against Indians, including squatting on Paiute lands, stealing fish from Pyramid Lake, hunting and destroying their forests and game, and rape and murder, led to a retaliation known as the Williams Station Massacre of May 7, 1860. In this instance two brothers who ran Williams Station, a combination saloon and general store on the Carson River northeast of Carson City, kidnapped two 12-year old Paiute girls who had been out digging roots for food. They were taken back to Williams Station, held prisoner in a cellar hole, their mouths gagged with rags, and forcibly raped. Just before dark a party of nine Paiutes, including the father and brother of one of the girls, discovered the girls alive in the cellar. In their anger the Numu killed the two brothers and three other men at the station, and then burned the place down.⁶⁵ This was the Williams Station Massacre that led to the Pyramid Lake War that started on May 12 of that year.⁶⁶