“Now, will you go?” he cried, defiantly.

The Indians were sober, and they went.  As they came abreast of the pier under the bridge the toll-keeper jeered and laughed at them, and pelted them with rocks.

They looked up with hate, but went stolidly on their way.

With darkness, the roistering at the barbecue became louder.  The Indians’ money was gone by this time, and the fun was getting rougher.  The toll-keeper, after a weary day, was dozing beside his candle.  He did not see nor hear the stealthy forms which crept up the bridge.  A board creaked, and he jumped up and swung about, to find himself quickly overpowered by a dozen lithe redskins.

They robbed the till, then held a palaver as to the disposition of their prisoner.  They finally left him tied with his own new rope to a huge drift log at the base of the pier, and went back to buy more firewater.

It was a wild night!

John noticed, very late, that the Indians seemed to be having a special pow-wow of their own on the river bank near the bridge.  There was a great fire, and mad dancing and war whooping.  He started toward them.

“Don’t go there, pardner,” called an old trapper.  “Them bucks is crazy with drink, an’ if I knows anything about Injuns, it won’t be no safe place for a white man.”

So passed Longley’s last chance for his life!  His cries for aid were mingled with the savage whoops of his ferocious enemies.  Even the people living across the river who heard his continued shouts, took them to be part of the celebration.

Maddened by drink and by the ever mounting excitement of their incantations, one of the most ghastly deeds ever perpetrated by Indians upon the whole river was finished before daylight.

The condition of Longley’s body upon its discovery roused the entire settlement, but the Indians had vanished over the hills and across Bear river.  The chief had gone home at sundown, and it was as impossible to find those who were on the bar that night, as to distinguish one grain of sand from another.

The old pier stands to this day, notwithstanding the fierce battering of the floods of nearly seventy years; a monument enduring long after the Digger Indians are gone off the face of the earth, as though to commemmorate the power of the white race and that member of it who gave up his life at its base.

Grizzley Bob of Snake Gulch

VI

“Be the battle lost or won,
Though its smoke shall hide the sun,
I shall find my love — the one
Born for me!”

- Bret Harte.

Names of settlements in the ’49 days were often as “Rough an Ready” as the reasons for their being!

Most of them spoke, more or less eloquently, for themselves and no man picked by fame in glowing wise from the heterogeneous mass of persons could hope to escape a nickname.