I rarely post guest blogs, but I'm going to make an exception in this case. As many of my readers will remember, I've posted about the Almo Massacre that was alleged to have taken place near the town of Almo in 1861. A monument commemorating the incident was erected there in 1937. My conclusion, and the conclusion of many prominent historians, is that the massacre did not take place.
Now, along comes Bill Breihan. Mr. Breihan has developed a theory after extensive research that a massacre did take place, but not in 1861 and not of 300 people. I'll let him tell the story:
By Bill Breihan
Controversy has arisen in recent years over the story of the 1861 Almo Creek Massacre near the current City of Rocks National Reserve in southern Idaho. As the story goes, three hundred emigrants with sixty wagons on the trail to California were set upon by Shoshone warriors and slaughtered with only five survivors. A monument was erected in 1938 in the town of Almo at the site of the supposed massacre. Historians have challenged the story pointing to the lack of evidence for such an event. The noted author Brigham D. Madsen examined the story in detail some years ago and deemed it legend. Others have come to the same conclusion.
The question historians have posed is, did a massacre occur at Almo Creek in 1861? This is what is asserted in the story told in 1927 by writer Charles S. Walgamott, based on interviews with the old Idaho settler W. E. Johnston. This is what it says on the Almo monument. In assessing the record, Madsen did not stop at 1861, but carefully surveyed all the civil war years. So too had a researcher some years earlier at the Idaho State Historical Society. Both came up with only a few emigrant-Shoshone skirmishes in the City of Rocks area resulting in perhaps three or four deaths. 1861 was in fact a quiet year. The only real massacres carried out in the area were by the U. S. Army, when numerous Shoshone prisoners were "shot trying to escape" in 1862 and at Bear River some months later when 250 were slaughtered.
But had Madsen and others gone back and not forward, had they looked at the previous decade, they would have perhaps had a different result. There was a massacre at Almo Creek massacre – not in 1861 or 1863, but in early August 1851. There were six survivors, not five. The survivors were not three men and two women as the story goes, but all men. The party of emigrants was not three hundred men, women and children, but rather fourteen men, eight of whom were killed, not 295. They were traveling not by wagon but by pack mule and horse. They were killed not with arrows but with bullets. The siege lasted thirty minutes, not four days.
The following is an account of the real Almo Creek Massacre. The story comes close to home, as the youngest victim, Luke Berry, was my ancestor's cousin. They grew up together in the 1830s in the old lead region of southwest Wisconsin.
In the spring of 1851 a group of prospective California emigrants styling themselves the Galena Company gathered in the northwest Illinois town of that name. With a population of nearly 14,000 Galena was the hub of the lead mining district and at one time a larger commercial center than the fledging hamlet of Chicago. After 1849 some communities and digs in the region experienced a dip in population as miners traded lead for gold and headed west by the hundreds in well-organized wagon trains.
Departing on April 7th, the Galena Company was led by longtime constable and city marshal John W. Woods, 46, a native of Ireland, and Captain Macomb Russell, a 32-year-old Tennessean raised in Illinois, who lived on the East Fork of the Fever River near Galena. The names and identities of most of the others are known. All lived in or near Galena, four from just across the border in Wisconsin. Two had recently arrived from Indiana – John Burton and another with the same last name, who may have been a brother. As the name is spelled four different ways in the accounts, little more is known of this pair.
The four from Wisconsin lived only a few miles north of Galena. Warren and Daniel Smith were from the lead mining town of Platteville in Grant County. A Vermont native, John R. Chamberlain, 34, lived at White Oak Springs in Lafayette County and worked as a teamster. Louis Berry, 19, was from neighboring Shullsburg, another mining center. Born in Wisconsin at the time of the Black Hawk War, he was the only native son in the party.
In addition to U.S. Marshal Woods, four others lived in the city of Galena, including Henry Garlinger, a 24-year-old miner from Philadelphia, and Jordan Underwood, 41, from Kentucky. There were other miners in the company, including James Edward Whitson, 31, from nearby Council Hill, another Kentucky native. Also from Kentucky was 38-year-old James Lightfoot.
The oldest members of the party were Wesley Crane, 46, a veteran of the 1832 Black Hawk War, who lived on Small Pox Creek south of Galena, and neighbor Nathan Stewart, 51, a South Carolina native, who farmed on Mill Creek.
The company appears to have travelled by steamboat south to St. Louis, then up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, Missouri. They departed from St Joseph on May 7th by wagon en route to Fort Kearney and South Pass. In July at Bear River on the current Wyoming-Idaho border – probably at present day Montpelier, Idaho – they traded wagons and oxen for horses and mules and commenced to pack through. At Soda Springs they appear to have taken Hudspeth's cutoff by the description of distance traveled, then on to the Fort Hall Road south of the Parting of the Ways – the California Trail.
Then tragedy struck. As one of the packers, James Lightfoot, recounted from Sacramento months later:
'We were getting along very well 14 in company, when we were attacked by about 50 Indians. Eight out of the 14 were killed. The Indians were well armed, while we had but 5 guns and but 2 of them in a condition to be fired. The attack was on 3 sides and through the opening thus left what were not killed escaped. I had a ball through my hat. We lost 12 horses and all our clothing. We went 50 miles on the S[alt]L[ake] road and met a train which we joined."
Another survivor, James E. Whitson, also writing from Sacramento a few weeks after the assault, said he was shot at by the Indians, and fought them for half an hour:
"They were all armed with rifles, and concealed in a bunch of willows. The attack was made on the 3rd of August, about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. At the first fire they killed five of our company, and kept on firing till they had killed eight of the 14 of us, viz: Nathan Stewart, Henry Garlinger, Macomb Russell, Jordon Underwood, John Woods, John Chamberlain, Lewis Berry, and John Bunton."
There were other reports of the attack gathered from survivors. One was dispatched from Fort Bridger to the St. Louis newspaper Missouri Republican. But the account most widely circulated was one by the renowned daguerreotypist John Wesley Jones, a witness to the aftermath of the slaughter. As he told it, the six survivors who managed to fight their way out of the ambush fled south to the Salt Lake cut-off, where they proceeded about fifty miles toward Brigham City. Meeting a wagon train, they returned with them to the scene of the attack. On the way they encountered Jones' party coming from California engaged at the time photographing Steeple Rocks. The Missouri Republican reported on his project some months later:
"Grand Panorama of California, Salt Lake and the Plains.––A party, composed of four artists, to wit: Messrs. J. Wesley Jones, Sheldon Shafelt, Joshua Prugh and J. Arrick, has just arrived in our city after a long and tedious journey over the plains and through California. Their daguerreotype and crayon views embrace every scene of interest along the road...Mr. Jones, we understand, will proceed immediately to the east, where he designs to employ the best painters in the execution of his work."
From Steeple Rocks Jones joined the wagon train and survivors and headed up the road to the site of the massacre. He later gave detailed reports of what he saw and learned about the attack to the Salt Lake City Deseret News and to the U. S. Indian Agent – likely the correspondent from Fort Bridger. Jones said the ambush took place on August 9th. This is what was reported by most newspapers around the country, though a few said August 7th or 8th. One of the survivors was, however, quite precise in saying the attack took place "on the 3rd of August, about 4 o'clock."
It is likely the ambush occurred on August 3rd. On July 7th Jones and his party started east from Sacramento on the California Trail photographing and sketching as they went. By July 20th they had gone as far as Carson City, a distance of 130 miles – a rate of ten miles a day. Had they doubled their pace to 20 miles a day thereafter, they would have reached Steeple Rocks – a distance of 400 miles – only on August 9th. Here's what James Lightfoot said he and the others did after their escape: "We went back after 5 days and tried to bury them but the ground was so hard that we could not." Five days would have been August 8th – or August 9th, as the attack took place, by his account, at the end of the day on the 3rd.
Jones reported what he saw on the August 9th, when he got to the scene of the ambush. The Salt Lake City newspaper apparently reported that as the day of the massacre. If the attack had taken place on August 9th and the survivors returned five days later to try to bury the dead, it would have been the 14th. It would probably have been the 15th before Jones and his party left for Salt Lake City, a 180-mile trek. They could not have made it there in time for Jones to give his report to the Deseret News for publication on August 19th. The attack took place on August third.
Perhaps the first report of the massacre to reach the east arrived at St. Louis on October 6th. The Missouri Republican had this to say the following day:
"It is stated on the authority of Mr. [J. Wesley] Jones that a company of packers were attacked on the 9th of August, about seven miles north-east of Steeple Rocks, on the Fort Hall Road, by about fifty Indians, supposed to be Snakes and half-breeds...The packers were but poorly prepared for fighting, their ammunition being mostly in their packs. Eight were killed, the remaining six succeeding in making good their escape to trains in the rear and across on the Salt Lake road."
As was usually the case, the attackers were after horses and valuables. As Jones reported, the party lost $2000 in property in the raid including a dozen horses and $1000 in cash. One newspaper had it that the emigrant party was "attacked by a band of Snake Digger Indians, supposed to be Ka-to-Too's band" and "that these Indians were instigated by the traders of the Hudson Bay Company, and those of the band of Bear River."
The site of the ambush was seven miles northeast of the Steeple Rocks – now called the Twin Sisters – as the party headed south toward the junction with the Salt Lake Road. Their plan had been to continue west on the California Trail to Sacramento. Seven miles northeast on the old Fort Hall Road – a segment of the California Trail – we today find the town of Almo, Idaho, situated on Almo Creek. In fact, this is almost exactly the location of today's Almo Massacre monument. That was site of the real Almo Creek Massacre.
Now, along comes Bill Breihan. Mr. Breihan has developed a theory after extensive research that a massacre did take place, but not in 1861 and not of 300 people. I'll let him tell the story:
By Bill Breihan
Controversy has arisen in recent years over the story of the 1861 Almo Creek Massacre near the current City of Rocks National Reserve in southern Idaho. As the story goes, three hundred emigrants with sixty wagons on the trail to California were set upon by Shoshone warriors and slaughtered with only five survivors. A monument was erected in 1938 in the town of Almo at the site of the supposed massacre. Historians have challenged the story pointing to the lack of evidence for such an event. The noted author Brigham D. Madsen examined the story in detail some years ago and deemed it legend. Others have come to the same conclusion.
The question historians have posed is, did a massacre occur at Almo Creek in 1861? This is what is asserted in the story told in 1927 by writer Charles S. Walgamott, based on interviews with the old Idaho settler W. E. Johnston. This is what it says on the Almo monument. In assessing the record, Madsen did not stop at 1861, but carefully surveyed all the civil war years. So too had a researcher some years earlier at the Idaho State Historical Society. Both came up with only a few emigrant-Shoshone skirmishes in the City of Rocks area resulting in perhaps three or four deaths. 1861 was in fact a quiet year. The only real massacres carried out in the area were by the U. S. Army, when numerous Shoshone prisoners were "shot trying to escape" in 1862 and at Bear River some months later when 250 were slaughtered.
But had Madsen and others gone back and not forward, had they looked at the previous decade, they would have perhaps had a different result. There was a massacre at Almo Creek massacre – not in 1861 or 1863, but in early August 1851. There were six survivors, not five. The survivors were not three men and two women as the story goes, but all men. The party of emigrants was not three hundred men, women and children, but rather fourteen men, eight of whom were killed, not 295. They were traveling not by wagon but by pack mule and horse. They were killed not with arrows but with bullets. The siege lasted thirty minutes, not four days.
The following is an account of the real Almo Creek Massacre. The story comes close to home, as the youngest victim, Luke Berry, was my ancestor's cousin. They grew up together in the 1830s in the old lead region of southwest Wisconsin.
In the spring of 1851 a group of prospective California emigrants styling themselves the Galena Company gathered in the northwest Illinois town of that name. With a population of nearly 14,000 Galena was the hub of the lead mining district and at one time a larger commercial center than the fledging hamlet of Chicago. After 1849 some communities and digs in the region experienced a dip in population as miners traded lead for gold and headed west by the hundreds in well-organized wagon trains.
Departing on April 7th, the Galena Company was led by longtime constable and city marshal John W. Woods, 46, a native of Ireland, and Captain Macomb Russell, a 32-year-old Tennessean raised in Illinois, who lived on the East Fork of the Fever River near Galena. The names and identities of most of the others are known. All lived in or near Galena, four from just across the border in Wisconsin. Two had recently arrived from Indiana – John Burton and another with the same last name, who may have been a brother. As the name is spelled four different ways in the accounts, little more is known of this pair.
The four from Wisconsin lived only a few miles north of Galena. Warren and Daniel Smith were from the lead mining town of Platteville in Grant County. A Vermont native, John R. Chamberlain, 34, lived at White Oak Springs in Lafayette County and worked as a teamster. Louis Berry, 19, was from neighboring Shullsburg, another mining center. Born in Wisconsin at the time of the Black Hawk War, he was the only native son in the party.
In addition to U.S. Marshal Woods, four others lived in the city of Galena, including Henry Garlinger, a 24-year-old miner from Philadelphia, and Jordan Underwood, 41, from Kentucky. There were other miners in the company, including James Edward Whitson, 31, from nearby Council Hill, another Kentucky native. Also from Kentucky was 38-year-old James Lightfoot.
The oldest members of the party were Wesley Crane, 46, a veteran of the 1832 Black Hawk War, who lived on Small Pox Creek south of Galena, and neighbor Nathan Stewart, 51, a South Carolina native, who farmed on Mill Creek.
The company appears to have travelled by steamboat south to St. Louis, then up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, Missouri. They departed from St Joseph on May 7th by wagon en route to Fort Kearney and South Pass. In July at Bear River on the current Wyoming-Idaho border – probably at present day Montpelier, Idaho – they traded wagons and oxen for horses and mules and commenced to pack through. At Soda Springs they appear to have taken Hudspeth's cutoff by the description of distance traveled, then on to the Fort Hall Road south of the Parting of the Ways – the California Trail.
Then tragedy struck. As one of the packers, James Lightfoot, recounted from Sacramento months later:
'We were getting along very well 14 in company, when we were attacked by about 50 Indians. Eight out of the 14 were killed. The Indians were well armed, while we had but 5 guns and but 2 of them in a condition to be fired. The attack was on 3 sides and through the opening thus left what were not killed escaped. I had a ball through my hat. We lost 12 horses and all our clothing. We went 50 miles on the S[alt]L[ake] road and met a train which we joined."
Another survivor, James E. Whitson, also writing from Sacramento a few weeks after the assault, said he was shot at by the Indians, and fought them for half an hour:
"They were all armed with rifles, and concealed in a bunch of willows. The attack was made on the 3rd of August, about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. At the first fire they killed five of our company, and kept on firing till they had killed eight of the 14 of us, viz: Nathan Stewart, Henry Garlinger, Macomb Russell, Jordon Underwood, John Woods, John Chamberlain, Lewis Berry, and John Bunton."
There were other reports of the attack gathered from survivors. One was dispatched from Fort Bridger to the St. Louis newspaper Missouri Republican. But the account most widely circulated was one by the renowned daguerreotypist John Wesley Jones, a witness to the aftermath of the slaughter. As he told it, the six survivors who managed to fight their way out of the ambush fled south to the Salt Lake cut-off, where they proceeded about fifty miles toward Brigham City. Meeting a wagon train, they returned with them to the scene of the attack. On the way they encountered Jones' party coming from California engaged at the time photographing Steeple Rocks. The Missouri Republican reported on his project some months later:
"Grand Panorama of California, Salt Lake and the Plains.––A party, composed of four artists, to wit: Messrs. J. Wesley Jones, Sheldon Shafelt, Joshua Prugh and J. Arrick, has just arrived in our city after a long and tedious journey over the plains and through California. Their daguerreotype and crayon views embrace every scene of interest along the road...Mr. Jones, we understand, will proceed immediately to the east, where he designs to employ the best painters in the execution of his work."
From Steeple Rocks Jones joined the wagon train and survivors and headed up the road to the site of the massacre. He later gave detailed reports of what he saw and learned about the attack to the Salt Lake City Deseret News and to the U. S. Indian Agent – likely the correspondent from Fort Bridger. Jones said the ambush took place on August 9th. This is what was reported by most newspapers around the country, though a few said August 7th or 8th. One of the survivors was, however, quite precise in saying the attack took place "on the 3rd of August, about 4 o'clock."
It is likely the ambush occurred on August 3rd. On July 7th Jones and his party started east from Sacramento on the California Trail photographing and sketching as they went. By July 20th they had gone as far as Carson City, a distance of 130 miles – a rate of ten miles a day. Had they doubled their pace to 20 miles a day thereafter, they would have reached Steeple Rocks – a distance of 400 miles – only on August 9th. Here's what James Lightfoot said he and the others did after their escape: "We went back after 5 days and tried to bury them but the ground was so hard that we could not." Five days would have been August 8th – or August 9th, as the attack took place, by his account, at the end of the day on the 3rd.
Jones reported what he saw on the August 9th, when he got to the scene of the ambush. The Salt Lake City newspaper apparently reported that as the day of the massacre. If the attack had taken place on August 9th and the survivors returned five days later to try to bury the dead, it would have been the 14th. It would probably have been the 15th before Jones and his party left for Salt Lake City, a 180-mile trek. They could not have made it there in time for Jones to give his report to the Deseret News for publication on August 19th. The attack took place on August third.
Perhaps the first report of the massacre to reach the east arrived at St. Louis on October 6th. The Missouri Republican had this to say the following day:
"It is stated on the authority of Mr. [J. Wesley] Jones that a company of packers were attacked on the 9th of August, about seven miles north-east of Steeple Rocks, on the Fort Hall Road, by about fifty Indians, supposed to be Snakes and half-breeds...The packers were but poorly prepared for fighting, their ammunition being mostly in their packs. Eight were killed, the remaining six succeeding in making good their escape to trains in the rear and across on the Salt Lake road."
As was usually the case, the attackers were after horses and valuables. As Jones reported, the party lost $2000 in property in the raid including a dozen horses and $1000 in cash. One newspaper had it that the emigrant party was "attacked by a band of Snake Digger Indians, supposed to be Ka-to-Too's band" and "that these Indians were instigated by the traders of the Hudson Bay Company, and those of the band of Bear River."
The site of the ambush was seven miles northeast of the Steeple Rocks – now called the Twin Sisters – as the party headed south toward the junction with the Salt Lake Road. Their plan had been to continue west on the California Trail to Sacramento. Seven miles northeast on the old Fort Hall Road – a segment of the California Trail – we today find the town of Almo, Idaho, situated on Almo Creek. In fact, this is almost exactly the location of today's Almo Massacre monument. That was site of the real Almo Creek Massacre.
Does this monument need an edit?
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