OCR Text |
Show best land in the Territory. This creates much dissatisfaction among the Indians; excites them to acts of revenge; they attack emigrants, plunder and commit murder whenever they find a party weak enough to enable them to do so, thereby making the innocent suffer for injuries doen by others. I find also another calss of individuals, a mixture of all nations and although less powerful in numbers equally injurious to the country and the Indians. These are a set of traders called here Freemen, Etc. I am informed that they have induced Indians to drive'off-the"stock of emigrants, so. as to force them to purcahse of the Freemen at exhorbitant prices and after the emigrants have left make a pretended purchase of the Indians for a mere trifle, and are ready to kill again to the near harm that may pass, and who may have been served, in the same manner. These scenes are transacted so far from the officers of the law and by aVild men who are some what lawless that it will require some and som e force to relieve this country of them." With exception of a few, perhaps fifteen or twenty, whtie men at Fort Bridger and vicinity, who make no improvements nor raise grain, no settlement had been made or attempted upon the Shoshonee's or Unita Utes' land. Some twenty year ago the Shoshonees claimed a samll tract at the mouth of Weber upon which there is now a settlement, but abandoned it as the Buffalo receded, and it had since been held by the Cumembahs or Snake Diggers, who united by marriage with a broken off band of Shoshonees which the Shoshonee Indians do not claim as atall belonging to their nation At the time Major Holeman made the above statements he had never seen an Indians upon whose land the whites who made improvements and cultivated the earth had settled, and no Indians have ever been driven off these lands that I have ever heard of The Shonhonees and Unitas, to whom I more particularly allude being the only ones |