Jim Bridger then said, “You two men are the luckiest chaps I ever heard of.  You may be sure that the Indians did not see you that night, or they would have trailed you up and had your scalps before the next morning.”

One of the committee men came to where Jim and I were sitting and said, “What shall we do about finding and burying those bodies?”

Jim answered, “That, sir, is your business, not ours.  It is our business to see that the people under our care do not meet with the same fate these men have met, and I do not intend to put the lives of all this train in danger by stopping to hunt for the remains of men who refused with scorn to stay with us and share the protection we offered them; they brought the trouble and their own deaths on them selves, but I will say this, if any of you men want to hunt for these bodies and take the time to bury them, I have no objection, but you must understand that when you get outside of the scout force we shall not be responsible for any thing that may happen to you.”

At that moment more than twenty men spoke together, saying, “Mr. Bridger is right, Mr. Bridger is right; he proposes to do just what he agreed to do, and no one can blame him.”  One of the men then asked if we would be willing to stop long enough to bury the bodies if we found them; Jim said, “We have no objections to stopping if it is a suitable place to make our camp, but if it isn’t we can’t afford to lose the time, as we must make certain places to camp every day, for we are now in a hostile Indian country, and in order to protect our selves we must camp in certain places, for without we take this care this train will not be in existence a week, and Will and I feel the responsibility that rests upon us, for the lives of your women and children as well as your own are in our hands.”

At this moment a middle-aged lady who stood near us with the tears running down her cheeks said, “Why don’t you let Mr. Bridger and Mr. Drannan have their way?  You see what these other men came to by not obeying their orders, and do you want to bring us all to the predicament they are in?” At this Jim said, “I’ll be dog goned if they will.”

This settled the controversy for the time being.

That evening before we turned in for the night Jim and I talked the matter over together; and we decided that after I put out the scouts in the morning I would take ten men all mounted on horses and keeping about five miles ahead of the train, and if we found the bodies I should set the men I had with me to work digging graves, and I should turn back and report to Jim what we had found, and the condition we found them in.

As soon as possible the next morning the men I had selected and myself pulled out.  We had made eight or nine miles when we found the bodies we were looking for.  They were all laying near together, around what had been their camp fire, and all of them were scalped.