Tyee George and Skookum John

The Infamous Black Bird Southern Oregon History, Revised

Tyee George and Skookum John

Sketch of Tyee George and Skookum John
Two Desperate Indian Outlaws Whose Tragic Deaths Occurred
the Same Day, Though a Hundred Miles Apart
Written Several Years Ago by the Late W. J. Plymale

    Since the hanging of Tyee George at Camp Baker in 1863 has been made the subject of so much comment and given rise to such diversity of opinion regarding the order for his execution, the justice or injustice of the proceeding can only be understood and appreciated by a recital of the facts and circumstances which led up to it.
    George was an intelligent Indian, large, powerful and aggressive, and had little respect for the authority of the whites and less for their personal and property rights. He was independent, captious and defiant, and considered to be a character dangerous to rebuke or oppose in his designs. Unlike the ordinary Indian, he possessed the faculty of accommodating himself largely to circumstances. He could be a courteous and considerate diplomat, suave and deferential, or the veriest outlaw and marauder, roving the country, killing stock, intimidating settlers and making himself generally a bad man. Up to the massacre of the Ledford party no specific charge of murder had been made against him.
    In April, 1859, a party consisting of Eli Ledford, S. F. Conger, James Crow, W. S. Probst and John Brown started from the valley to cross the Cascades for the purpose of looking over the [Klamath] Lake country. They took the Rancherie trail, and in going up the mountain soon came to where the snow was so deep they were unable to proceed farther, and they returned to Rancherie Prairie and camped. Some time during the night they were murdered, apparently while asleep. About a month afterwards, in May, Indian Agent Hi Abbott, with a small party, left Jacksonville to assume his duties among the Klamaths. They followed the trail of the Ledford party and passing up the mountain some distance beyond the point reached by that party finally encountered snow too deep to go farther and returned to Rancherie. While there they discovered the Indian camp had been burned, and certain camping odds and ends aroused them to believe that something serious had happened to the Ledford party. Abbott and his men, anxious that their suspicions should be investigated, returned to Jacksonville and related what they had seen. Henry Klippel and John Helman, two prominent young men, quickly raised a company of thirty and went out to investigate the matter. On arriving at the scene, search was at once instituted and four horses belonging to the murdered party were found tied to trees and shot. Further search discovered the bodies of Conger, Crow, Probst and Brown buried a short distance away in a thick clump of underbrush. Their throats had been cut and their bodies bruised and mutilated and showing every evidence of savage brutality. Ledford's body was not found. It was supposed he had been wounded and escaped in the mountains and died.
    The party remained there something like twenty days patrolling the country, with a view to the discovery of some clue to the murderers, but so completely had they covered their tracks and gone into hiding that nothing further than suspicion resulted from the search.
    This murder was committed after the close of the Indian wars, when the Indians had all been removed upon reservations.
    The agent at Klamath frequently gave permission to Indians to leave the reservation and hunt and trap in the Cascades and foothills of Rogue River Valley, and many took the liberty of leaving without permission. There was little control over the Indians at that time, and they went pretty generally when and where they pleased. Tyee George and Skookum John were always defiant malcontents and roamed at will from Pitt River to Walla Walla, but mainly between Klamath Lake and the mountainous Elk Creek country about the heads of the North and South Umpquas. They were a law unto themselves and brooked neither authority nor restraint from any source. Later, and after the establishment of Fort Klamath, more authority was exercised over the Indians. The agent had the military at the fort to enforce his commands, and they were obliged in some measure to obey.
    Some time before the arrival of Tyee George, Indian Agent Rogers had given permits to George and several others to leave the reservation for an extended hunt to the mountains. George was of course the leader and controlling spirit of the party. They crossed the Cascades and ranged mostly along the low hills of the valley, where they became a great annoyance to isolated citizens. There were many stockmen and settlers in the outskirts, and complaints were constantly coming in that the Indians were insolent and overbearing and were trespassing upon them and killing their stock. Finally appeal was made to Colonel C. S. Drew at Camp Baker to compel the Indians to leave the valley and go east of the mountains. The colonel met George a short time afterwards and told him of the complaints, and directed him to take his Indians and go at once to the reservation. George informed him that he and those with him had permits from the agent to hunt and fish in the foothills, and that if he, Drew, would attend to his soldiers, he, George, would take care of his Indians. This offended Colonel Drew, and he said to George: "If you don't quit terrorizing the settlers and killing their stock, and take your band and go back to the reservation, I will hang you. Now obey my order or take the consequences." George shrugged his shoulders and went away, but with no thought of respecting the command. The order was no doubt inspired as much by the colonel's dislike of Agent Rogers for his lax methods of dealing with the Indians as his desire to get rid of George and the complaints concerning him.
    Suspicion had long rested upon George and Skookum John as being the chief actors in the massacre of the Ledford party. John was a powerful and desperate character and more dangerous and daring, if possible, than George, and his suspicion, through certain facts which had come to light, had crystallized in the public mind into a conviction that these two men were responsible for the murder, if they did not actually participate in it. Yet the evidence against them was so general in character that it would have been insufficient in any court of justice to have convicted them of the crime.
    George paid no attention to the order of Colonel Drew and remained with his comrades in the foothills. Complaints continued to come in from the settlers, and Colonel Drew ordered his soldiers to arrest George the first opportunity. Some time after [omission] November 18, 1863, George went to Jacksonville and was immediately arrested by volunteers who happened to be in town. He was confined overnight and the next day taken to Camp Baker. Upon his arrival there a short consultation was held among the officers, when the order came from Colonel Drew to hang George at once. A pair of mules was hitched to a wagon, a goods box placed in the bed, the condemned man pinioned and lifted on the box, a rope put around his neck, and with two men holding him, the wagon was driven just outside the parade ground, the rope thrown over the limb of a tree, the wagon driven from under him, and all that was mortal of Tyee George was left suspended in the air. This summary execution gave rise to much severe and adverse criticism, while many endorsed and applauded the act. It must be understood that there was no specific charge against George. He was arrested upon no indictment or information, arraigned before no judge or magistrate, had neither attorney, judge nor jury, and was not court-martialed, but hanged solely upon his reputation as a vicious character and a menace to the public. There appears to have been nothing to warrant this infliction of the death penalty, no condition of affairs that would justify it, and no excuse for the savage and unseemly haste with which the extreme order was carried into execution. In taking an unbiased retrospect of the matter after the smoke has cleared away, and all passion and prejudice have been eliminated, there is no position from which the action can be viewed that will relieve the officers who ordered his execution from the imputation of the most arbitrary and shameful exercise of power. The straight, undisguised English of the fact is that he was unwarrantly lynched under cover of military authority, and the barbarous proceeding cannot be otherwise fitly characterized. This will more fully appear when it is understood the civil courts were in no way under restraint, that they were free to act and open to investigate criminal charges and punish violations of law.
    The government had decided to build a military post in the Klamath country, and had stationed a company of volunteers on the site selected. D. Linn had been awarded the contract for cutting the lumber and, later, of building the post. The mill had been in operation but a short time when George was hanged. A day or two prior to his execution word came to Colonel Drew from Klamath that a conspiracy had been set on foot by Skookum John and Tyee George to surprise and murder the volunteers and mill men, of whom there were about a hundred in all, scattered over a half mile square and living in tents. Upon receipt of his information the colonel dispatched a fast courier to Klamath with an order to arrest Skookum John at once. It was night when the messenger arrived, and John had not been seen about the camp during the day. The commandant, Captain Kelley, knew the desperate character of the man with whom he had to deal and knew that every precaution must be taken in making the arrest to avoid a clash and possible serious consequences. The Indian village was about six hundred yards east of the volunteers' quarters, and in order to learn John's whereabouts and make the arrest quietly before daylight, "Chalk Line" Cardwell, a reckless roustabout, who was in the habit of visiting the Indian camps at all hours during the night, was sent out to locate him. Before Cardwell returned, conversation was heard in a wigwam a short distance back of the captain's tent, which belonged to an old Indian and his squaw, who did chores about the quarters. Upon listening, Skookum John's voice was recognized among those who were talking. The captain detailed fifteen men, and with this guard he and Sergeant Underwood went to the wigwam. It was a winter hut, but the entrance to it was so small a man had to stoop low to get into it. The guard formed a semicircle around the door, and the captain and Underwood went in to make the arrest. There were six or seven Indians sitting around the little fire that burned in the center. On entering, Captain Kelley said, "John, I have orders to arrest you." John jumped to his feet, and seizing the captain around the throat said "No," at the same time reaching for his belt knife. He had been out on horseback during the day and had securely tied the knife in the scabbard to prevent losing it, and though he wrenched at it desperately he was unable to free it. While grappling with the captain, and resisting arrest in the most vicious manner, the captain drew his revolver and shot him. The shot took effect in the face, but too low down to check his resistance, and he continued to clutch for his knife and to endeavor to overcome the captain with his great strength. The sergeant grasped the dangerous situation and, reaching around the captain with his pistol, shot the infuriated man near the heart. His body pitched forward and fell on the little camp fire, and he died almost without a struggle. The other Indians rushed from the wigwam after the firing, only to be confronted by the guard at the door, who arrested them as they came out, chained them together and marched them to the rude log building that had been erected for a guard house. La Lake [also spelled Leylek or Lalek], the chief, who was friendly to the whites and opposed to war, was with the Indians in the wigwam reasoning with them and endeavoring to dissuade them from carrying into execution their plot to murder those at the camp and mill. As he was known to be a peaceable Indian with no evil designs against the whites, he was not arrested.
    Fearful of what might result from the killing of Skookum John the commandant at Camp Baker issued an order requiring all Indians who had firearms to bring them to the quarters by the Saturday night following and deposit them with the captain, and the order forbade their coming in numbers exceeding twenty. The order also warned all who refused to do so that they would be arrested and hanged. It was necessary under this iron-clad and double-riveted order that the Indians should be notified. How best and most safely to do it, in the excited condition of the Indians, was the question. In consultation with La Lake, he expressed the wish to send Celia [also spelled Celie], a sister of Tyee George, who like her brother was a cordial hater of the whites and, like him, brave and fearless. Celia was summoned, and on being informed by the chief of the mission upon which he designed to send her, she became at once violently angry and insulting and protested that she would be hanged on the nearest tree before being a party to a surrender so cowardly and humiliating. She denounced the chief as an old woman unfit to be at the head of the tribe, defied all authority and peremptorily refused to go. This was the same independent and daring spirit that had always been manifested by George. Celia said if she were the chief she would resist the order to the death and die fighting rather than surrender the rights and liberties of her people. Other couriers were sent out in her stead, and by Saturday night the arms of the tribe were in the custody of the captain and under a strong guard.
    Tyee George's body, after the execution, was delivered to his mother, "Old Mary," who buried it near her wigwam on the slope of a hill in the southern limits of Jacksonville with many bitter tears and wails of heartbroken anguish. Mary was a fixture about Jacksonville for many years and was a kind, inoffensive old creature who was pitied and helped by all. After her death she was immortalized by Oregon's peerless poet, Samuel L. Simpson, in a touching tribute which will live and perpetuate her memory long after many distinguished persons now living have passed into the shadows beyond and been forgotten.
    The deaths of Tyee George and Skookum John, who had always been roving, restless and dangerous agitators, were the last of the Indian troubles in southern Oregon and northern California until the Modoc War of 1871-72.

Medford Sun, April 26, 1911, page 3 For another version of the Tyee George/Skookum John story, Google "On the Trail of Skookum John" and read the story beginning on page 479 of the October 1908 issue of Sunset magazine. The tale is also told online in A. G. Walling's History of Southern Oregon, 1884, pages 347-348, and on my William M. Colvig page.

THE MOTHER'S VIGIL

The day and the year were a-dying together,
The crimson to crimson and gold unto gold,
While the pine, dropping burrs in the sweet autumn weather,
All sadly and softly its rosary told.
We leaned on our guns, and looked over the city,
Enthroned in the days that eternally thrill;
While one stood in silence, and one hummed a ditty
Of a love that was lost, and a wheel that was still.
And there were the scars of the days of endeavor,
The ditches and reservoirs, sluices and all,
Debris of a battle, pathetic forever,
As part of the resonant age they recall;
For silence had stooped on the desolate ditches--
Save only the querulous call of the quail
A-scolding her brood, from the tunnels and pitches
To chaparral shades and the leaf-covered trail.

A silence was there, but that silence sang dirges,
O hopelessly sad to the sorrowing soul,
So hopelessly sad, like the wail of wild surges
Gone mad in the gleam of their wandering goal.
"Ah! whither," I murmured, "in chances and changes,
Gilding or soiling, a curse or caress,
Now wanders the spoil of the gold-glutted ranges--
A crown for dishonor, a balm for distress?
The toilers, where are they, the bronzed and the knighted,
As gentle as childhood, and cruel as fire?
What hope was fulfilled, and what love was requited--
Ah! what was the fate of their kingly desire?
Lo, dirges of silence, the crested quail calling,
Answer me vaguely in mystical woe,
The glory of sunset, in benison falling,
Filled all the deserted old gulches below.

"The pick and the shovel are rusted and broken,
Faded the fires of the cabin and tent,--
The long roll has sounded, the Chieftain has spoken,
The owl sobs alone on the hills that were rent.
With a whispering sound, as of autumn robes trailing,
October is furling her banners of red,
And my heart is bowed down in the infinite wailing
That times the innumerous march of the dead."

"It is true," said my comrade, regretfully, lowly,--
"Death and expenses are all that are sure,
And we con the old lesson though hardly and slowly,
To follow and follow some fanciful lure;
But, yet" and he thoughtfully levelled a finger
Over the sheen of the storm-cradled town,
"There's a smoke on yon hillside that somehow will linger,
Like a mist on the shore when the tide has gone down.

"Have you marked it--a luminous violet column
On the gold and the bronze of the frost-tinted trees--
Soaring to victory, saintly and solemn,
With the wreathed immortelles that Fidelity weaves?
It is only the smoke of a cabin so humble
The squirrels romp o'er it unchecked by reproof,
Grimy and shaky, I wonder the rumble
Of the wagons down there do not shatter its roof.

"In the tempests of years that we fain are forgetting,
When the cards were religion and pistols were priests,
While the sun rode in scarlet at dawning and setting,
And a Bourbon was crowned at our funerals and feasts--
Yon oak that leans grandly, a culdee extending
His priestly hand over that ruinous cot,
Once thrilled to the shock of a ghastly descending,
And the Law was avenged with a loop and a knot.

"He was only an Indian, the son of Old Mary,
Swarthy and wild, with midnight of hair
That arose, as he sped to the Lethean ferry,
Like a raven of doom in the quivering air.
Ah, his crime? I've forgotten,--it was something or other
Judge Lynch's decisions were never compiled;--
But we left him, at last, with his forest-born mother,
As she camped by the tree that had strangled her child.

"Alone when the sombre and skeleton branches
Thrilled in the rush of the ship-wrecking storm,
And the glad little children, in hamlet and ranches,
Laughed at the ingle-side ruddy and warm;
Alone, when the sibyls of springtime, returning,
Flung over the forest an emerald mist;
And alone, when the stars of midsummer were burning,
When the musk roses dreamed of the god they had kissed.

"While the years have gone on, and the flush times have faded,
Forever the smoke of her vigil ascends,
And the oak, all the while, that poor altar has shaded,
Like a penitent soul that would make some amends.
And still, from his ashes, the dead day arises
A blossoming wonder of beauty and truth,
While the myrtle-wreathed moon in all gentle disguises
Remembers, and twines her a chaplet of ruth.

"Te Deums may roll in the gloom of old arches,
Where the white-handed preacher coquettes with his God,
But Truth finds her own in long battles and marches,
And the flowers will shine on that tear-sprinkled sod.
When the fire has gone out and the vigil is ended,
Poor Mary may sleep with the loved and the leal,
For the stars will mount guard o'er the ashes she tended,
And the beauty of morning return there to kneel."
Samuel L. Simpson, The Gold-Gated West, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1910, page 132

Last revised December 23, 2010