Measure of Two Men

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Measure of Two Men

by Robert Welles Ritchie

NOTE in the already dimming tapestry of the Indian Wars with its thousand threads of individual experience this short red strand of terror almost obscured by the general pattern:

It was during the time of California's Inyo County War, so-called, when in the early 'sixties the incursion of prospectors and stock men—none too scrupulous in their dealings with the Indians'—roused the Piutes to a pitch of desperation. Nasty guerilla warfare ensued all up and down the semi-desert Owens Valley lying east of the Sierras in the east-central part of the State. A detachment of rough-neck California Volunteers initiated a private massacre of which not even the settlers could be proud. Joaquin Jim, chief of the Piutes, hung out his flag of red flannel bordered with raven's feathers, which meant no quarter for the whites.

During the height of the trouble three prospectors named Crow, Matthews and Byrnes went out from the little settlement of Independence and located the Cinderella claim in the White Mountains which mark the eastern border of the Owens Valley. On a November day in 1864 Matthews was guarding camp while his two partners were working on their shaft a few hundred yards away.

A ragged Piute and his squaw approached Matthews and asked to share the contents of a pot which was bubbling over the cook fire. When the white man turned to spoon out some of the slumgullion the Indian buck whipped a revolver from beneath his blanket and shot him through the jaw. At the same instant a shot sounded from up by the shaft mouth and Matthews saw Crow slump over the handle of the windlass at the shaft mouth.

Matthews, say the buried newsprints of the day, had some fight left in him and sent shot after shot after the retreating attackers. They appeared only to flee. Without ever a thought for his companions—Crow who had apparently been killed at the windlass and Byrnes who was at the bottom of the shaft—this fellow Matthews set out for Independence. He was that kind of man. The contemporary accounts recite that in his flight over the desert he threw away his shotgun and revolver and after two days was found near dead of thirst by a horseman.

But what of the other two?

Take the story of Byrnes, who was down at the bottom of a seventy-foot shaft. Of course he was ignorant of events above ground until the body of his partner Crow came hurtling down upon him—thrown down by the Indians whom Matthews had thought to drive away. Then came a rain of rocks which the luckless miner in semi-darkness could only fend by warding with his shovel. Next the windlass rape was pulled up by the savages on the surface; maybe they thought they'd killed Byrnes with their rocks or else they just wanted the rope.

At any rate, there was the man Byrnes seventy feet below the surface of the desert and with a dead man for companion. No food, no water.

Fill in for yourself the agony of Byrnes, alone with a dead man in a seventy-foot hole in the desert for five days. Five days!

His rescue was accomplished by a friendly Indian known as Joe Bowers, who, led by curiosity, had peered down a hole and heard a man's faint hail.

And how did the man Byrnes reward Joe Bowers, who had ridden to the nearest settlement upon his discovery and brought white men with a seventy-foot rope?

By a suitably engraved watch? No. By even so much as a couple of sticks of Old Peach? Ah, nay!

By attempting, a few years later, to crowd Joe Bowers off the land and water rights he possessed at Antelope Springs; an action which rallied all the decent white folks of Independence to support of the Indian.