Life and death in the western wilderness

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Sept. 13, 2002
Last week in this space we addressed the importance of wild game and predatory animals in the lives of Native Americans and settlers of the West. As I looked at the history of northwestern Colorado, where I once worked and often hunt, endless stories involving wild animals emerged.
The importance of game for food in the early days is evident in an incident that happened in 1897 where the Little Snake River joins the Bear River (now called the Yampa) in Moffatt County. Elijah B. (Longhorn) Thompson, born in Virginia and whose family had moved to California during the gold rush, bought a ranch of 320 acres at the confluence of the two rivers. The land happened to be in the heart of excellent deer and elk country. In October of 1897, two game wardens and five Indians were killed in a battle over game on Thompson's ranch.
Indian hunters
The Ute Indians from Diamond Mountain in Utah hunted the area. They claimed they had the right to kill all the deer and elk they wanted in October while the animals were fat. They were ignoring the game laws, yet another of the white man's rules they saw as annoying. Longhorn Thompson, who had made cattle drives from Texas to Colorado, spoke Spanish, as did many Indians, and he served as interpreter in settling disputes between the whites and Indians. Apparently he was unable to stop the battle on his own ranch.
Amos Hill, former outlaw, came to the area near Diamond Mountain as a hunter. His job was to supply wild game for the Dyer Mine cook shack in northeast Utah. When the mine played out he settled on the Green River in Red Canyon and lived alone in a crude wooden teepee that covered a small hole in the ground. He became known as the Red Canyon Hermit, having lost all his family to some disease.
Hill's clothes consisted of a shirt made from a piece of dirty canvas with a hole cut in it for his head to pass through. He wore ragged and patched overalls that remained on him even when worn completely out. He would buy new overalls with gold he panned from the river and put them on over the old ones, sometimes wearing three or more layers of overalls. He hunted, raised a garden and lived on the river for more than 20 years.
Goodwill commonplace
There were plenty of incidents involving Ute Indians on and around Diamond Mountain that demonstrated compassion by both Indians and whites. Phil Stringham and Black Mark Hall were invited to a pow-wow on Diamond. The food served were prairie dogs and woodchucks. They were impaled on sticks so the hair could be burned off over a fire and then they were roasted whole on the sticks. The two guests lost their appetites and left the gathering early.
Black Mark Hall spoke the Indian language and was their friend. He stopped off at an Indian camp on Diamond Mountain one day and was invited to stay for dinner. The meal was prairie dog soup and when Hall started to dish himself a bowl of soup, he took a good look into the pot. He saw "two round eyes" staring up at him and various internal prairie dog organs floating in the soup. He quickly told the Indians he had to meet someone and that he would return later.
A hard winter occurred in the area in 1879 and the Iowa Hall family almost didn't survive. Close to starving and freezing to death, they made the winter after Indians brought them blankets and food. A relative remembered that the children wore moccasins for a time, so the Indians must have brought them as well.
The Indians tanned many deer and elk skins as well as skins of smaller wild game. Unca Sam, a medicine man, hunted game. And his wife, Red Rock, tanned the hides and made enough jerky in the summer to last all winter. Indians stayed away from towns to make jerky. One of them said, "Too many flies in town. Can't get jerky made. Flies too friendly."