Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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This suspense was at last broken by a murder of unprovoked, heartless atrocity, which the people felt it would be more criminal in them to overlook than it was in the perpetrators to commit. In January, 1863, that notorious scoundrel, Charley Reeves, bought a squaw from the Sheep Eater tribe of Bannack. She soon fled from him to her friends to escape his abuse. The tepee was located on an elevation south of that portion of the town known as “Yankee Flat,” a few rods in rear of the street. Reeves went after her. Finding her deaf to persuasion, he employed violence to force her return to his camp. An old chief interfered and thrust Reeves unceremoniously from the tepee. Burning with resentment, Reeves and Moore fired into the tepee the next evening, wounding one of the Indians. They then returned to town, where they were joined by William Mitchell, with whom they counter-marched, each firing into the tepee, and this time killing the old chief, a lame Indian, a papoose, and a Frenchman by the name of Cazette, who had come to the tepee to learn the cause of the first shot. Two other persons who had been influenced by similar curiosity were badly wounded. When the murderers were afterwards told that they had killed white men, Moore with a profusion of profane appellations said “they had no business there.”