Thursday, January 15, 1903
Elk
City
THE STORY OF A DESPERATE FIGHT
TWO WHITE MEN BATTLED WITH INDIAN BAND
The following narrative from the Wichita
the parties mentioned were well known to the older citizens of this county. The leading figure in the narrative is W.J. Miller, the account of whose death appeared in last week’s issue of the Democrat.
CHEYENNE,
O.T.
– Jan 3 – To be surrounded by hostile Indians at such close quarters
that the twang of their bowstrings can be heard, to be shot with arrows
until one’s body is pierced with twenty-seven wounds and then live to an
old age is an experience that comes to few men. But this is what
happened to William J. Miller, a ranchman who lives of the Sweetwater in
Miller comes frequently to
“In 1869 I
lived in San Saba County, Texas. On
the night of January 17 in that year, A.W. Morrow, [one account calls
him Morell] a neighbor now dead and myself camped near the watermill of
Major J.A. Rose where Brady Creek empties into the Colorado River.
[The water mill of J. A. Rose
was 15 miles up the San Saba River from
We could
see them unslinging their bows and shifting their arrow quivers into
position and knew that the worse of the fight was to come.
The first arrow struck Morrow in
the hand; the Indian who shot it tumbled yelling from his horse with a
bullet in his chest. In the
runaway our horses threw the wagon into a ditch where we stuck fast.
We were reduced to less than a
dozen cartridges and saw that we must make every bullet count.
We never fired at an Indian more
than ten feet away. The Indians
charged us time and again, often coming within eight or ten feet of the
wagon. We could have hit them
with clubs. They talked to each
other in the sign language, making as little noise as possible and
pressing closer and closer upon us. Their
leader came within six feet of me and I shot him through the hips.
He yelled clutched his saddle
and galloped away.
A squaw
shot me in the right cheek with an arrow that protruded from behind my
ear. Six more struck me in the
head, the points kinking against my skull, making it difficult and
painful to pull them out. Seven
more lodged in my body between my neck and waist. I pulled one arrowhead
from my abdomen that was as long as my finger and so keen that a person
could whittle with it. The
Indians were at too close range for their arrows to acquire speed or
else we would have been shot through and through.
In pulling one arrow from my
left side, the head slipped from the shaft and remained in my lung.
It is still there.
Another hit me squarely in the
middle of the chest sticking in the bone and standing out as straight as
if it had been shot into a tree. Another
missed the femoral artery in my left leg by the width of a knife blade.
I carried a steel barb in my
right thigh till 1874, when Dr. Dowell at
Poor Morrow
was as desperately wounded as myself.
An arrow struck him squarely in the left ear and while I was
pulling it out, another went whizzing into his right ear.
He could see both shafts and
imagined that one arrow had passed entirely through his head.
He groaned and said that he was
killed. Before I could reassure
him an arrow hit him in the left eye and glanced under the skin in his
ear. Blood poured down his face in a stream and covered my hands and
arms. ‘They have shot my eye
out,’ he exclaimed. ‘No, it
glanced,’ I replied, pulling the arrow from the wound.
Morrow was hit three or four
times before I was touched. When
the Indians got under good headway, the arrows came so rapidly that I
couldn’t put them out as fast as they went in.
We were
then in desperate straights suffering with dreadful wounds, out of
ammunition save one load in Morrow’s pistol and our horses unable to
pull the wagon from the ditch. The
Indians in their excitement had shot away most of their arrows.
The “chuck” box fastened to the
end of the wagon, bristled like a porcupine.
I believe that a double armful
of arrows was sticking in the wagon and ground.
I told Morrow that our only hope
to escape was to cut the traces and make a run on horseback.
The Indian had withdrawn to
parley knowing that they had only a few arrow left in their quivers and
fearing that we still might have ammunition.
Morrow and I mounted a horse
each and started. An arrow
whizzed and struck his horse in the hip, causing the animal to pitch.
Morrow was thrown fully ten feet
high falling on his head. He
called to me that he was killed. I answered, by pulling him up behind
me, and I was thankful to find that he still held to his pistol with its
remaining load. We ran our horse
as rapidly as possible toward a clump of trees.
The Indians shot at us about
twenty times while we were cutting the traces, but upon reaching the
wagon they replenished their supply and stream of arrows poured after
us. A friend afterwards trailed
us for 150 yards by the line of arrows sticking in the ground.
We rode but
three-quarters of a mile before reaching cover in the timber.
Then a singular thing happened.
Whether it was due to their
savage admiration of our pluck and seemingly charmed lives, I am unable
to say. We had killed, as
later reports showed, about seven Indians.
The remainder of the band now galloped to within sixty feet of
where we crouched in the timber and stopped.
Their leader rode out and looked
steadily at us for a few seconds, without saying a word and returned to
his former position. Each Indian
in turn did the same thing and then the band rode away and disappeared
over the ridge. Although
expecting death, we were in too much anguish to feel thankful for our
immediate deliverance. Fearing
that they would return we secreted ourselves as closely as possible in
the timber. Both of us soon
nauseated and burning with fever. We
remained hidden till about nine o’clock next day.
Early in
the morning of the fight, Jack Flood was cutting cedar posts in a canyon
when he heard the Indians coming, secreted himself and saw them pass by.
The appearance of a Comanche in
The Indians
escaped from
The Indian
I shot in the hips proved to be old Asaharbar, who died in 1884.
I saw him in 1883 for the first
time after the fight at a cow camp in the Panhandle where I had gone to
run horse races with the Indians. He
was in the grub shack eating when I entered.
He stopped instantly and
watching me carefully got up and went outside, keeping his face
constantly toward me. Through an
interpreter he said that he knew me.
I replied that there was no doubt of it and felt an itching to
kill him. Next morning his camp
at the mouth of Sweetwater had disappeared: he had headed for
‘I hate
Indians’ said Uncle Billy, his eyes flashing with anger.
Then in greatest scorn: ‘the
poor homeless man of the forest? I
want to kill a man when he talks that way.
These devils did enough in that
raid to turn any white man against their whole race.
They stole a 10-year-old boy,
William Herbert in
Bill Miller
died about one year following his relating the above story.
Bill Miller is buried in the “Old Rock” Cemetery in Wheeler Co. Texas.