Next morning it was that our doom fell.  Two days’ journey beyond the last Mormon outpost, knowing that no Indians were about and apprehending nothing from the Indians on any count, for the first time we had not chained our wagons in the solid circle, placed guards on the cattle, nor set a night-watch.

My awakening was like a nightmare.  It came as a sudden blast of sound.  I was only stupidly awake for the first moments and did nothing except to try to analyze and identify the various noises that went to compose the blast that continued without let up.  I could hear near and distant explosions of rifles, shouts and curses of men, women screaming, and children bawling.  Then I could make out the thuds and squeals of bullets that hit wood and iron in the wheels and under-construction of the wagon.  Whoever it was that was shooting, the aim was too low.  When I started to rise, my mother, evidently just in the act of dressing, pressed me down with her hand.  Father, already up and about, at this stage erupted into the wagon.

“Out of it!” he shouted.  “Quick!  To the ground!”

He wasted no time.  With a hook-like clutch that was almost a blow, so swift was it, he flung me bodily out of the rear end of the wagon.  I had barely time to crawl out from under when father, mother, and the baby came down pell-mell where I had been.

“Here, Jesse!” father shouted to me, and I joined him in scooping out sand behind the shelter of a wagon-wheel.  We worked bare-handed and wildly.  Mother joined in.

“Go ahead and make it deeper, Jesse,” father ordered,

He stood up and rushed away in the gray light, shouting commands as he ran. (I had learned by now my surname.  I was Jesse Fancher.  My father was Captain Fancher).

“Lie down!” I could hear him.  “Get behind the wagon wheels and burrow in the sand!  Family men, get the women and children out of the wagons!  Hold your fire!  No more shooting!  Hold your fire and be ready for the rush when it comes!  Single men, join Laban at the right, Cochrane at the left, and me in the centre!  Don’t stand up!  Crawl for it!”

But no rush came.  For a quarter of an hour the heavy and irregular firing continued.  Our damage had come in the first moments of surprise when a number of the early-rising men were caught exposed in the light of the campfires they were building.  The Indians—­for Indians Laban declared them to be—­had attacked us from the open, and were lying down and firing at us.  In the growing light father made ready for them.  His position was near to where I lay in the burrow with mother so that I heard him when he cried out: 

“Now! all together!”

From left, right, and centre our rifles loosed in a volley.  I had popped my head up to see, and I could make out more than one stricken Indian.  Their fire immediately ceased, and I could see them scampering back on foot across the open, dragging their dead and wounded with them.