The Sarah White Story

The Sarah White Story

TAKEN FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 1934

CARRIED AWAY BY INDIANS AS A GIRL, SHE HAS SPENT 65 YEARS NEAR THE SCENE OF THE AWFUL ATROCITY

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Sixty-five years ago last summer, when all the western half of Kansas was thinly-settled frontier, a horde of savage Indians swarmed up from the Southwest and overran it in a tiger-like foray of raping and murder.

Within a few weeks they had swept eastward to the valleys of the Solomon and the Republican and had slain 158 settlers and wounded fifty-seven more. They had scalped forty-one, had outraged and murdered fourteen women, burned scores of houses, pillaged and destroyed eleven stage coaches and fourteen wagon trains and slain the drivers and passengers, and had driven off thousands of horses and cattle.

Then, they had ridden off to the southwest, carrying with them into captivity and to a fate worse than death, four women, one a young bride of only a month, another a beautiful girl of 17, and twenty four children, fourteen of whom afterward froze to death in the Indian camps.

The whole country was wrought up over this savage invasion of Kansas, and especially over the capture of the women and children. To punish the Indian and rescue the captives, General Sheridan took the field at the head of a force of United States soldiers and Kansas volunteers.

Sixty-five years ago this month, two of the women, Mrs. Anna Brewster Morgan and Miss Sarah White, were rescued by the regiment of Kansas volunteers and gallant General Custer and his 7th cavalry regiment. This latter regiment was wiped out by the Indians seven years later in the battle of the Little Big Horn.

Last week A. B. Macdonald of The Star's staff discovered that this same Miss Sarah White, now Mrs. Sarah Brooks, was living on her farm, nine miles west of Concordia, Kansas, within a mile of the spot where, sixty-six years ago, the Cheyenne's had captured her. He went there, talked with her, and has written the following account of his visit.

CONCORDIA, KANSAS, MARCH 3, 1934

It was hard to realize that the woman standing so sturdily behind the quilting frames, threading the red yarn with such steady fingers through the eye of her needle, was the same whose capture by Indians when a girl, sixty-six years ago had set the whole country aflame with pity for her and a call for vengeance against her captors. To rescue her, Governor Crawford of Kansas had called for volunteers, and thousands of men had quickly answered and formed the famous 19th regiment of Kansas cavalry. They, with Custer's 7th Calvary, had marched away through the March blizzards of that spring of long ago to create the most inspiring drama of courage, of stark suffering and heroism in the annals of Kansas. Yet their mission challenged courage-the strong bravery of crusaders. Men were searching and fighting desperately to rescue women and children carried away seven months before.

Sitting there, in that comfortable farm home, a pile of split black walnut behind the roaring stove, other farm houses in sight from the windows, motor cars speeding along the highway just beyond the end of the lane, modern towns only a few miles away on every side, it was difficult to sense the fact that within the life of this woman, now 83 years old, savages had come to this very spot on marauding raids, that they had slain her own father and carried her away.

Only an hour before, her daughter, Mrs. Carl Flitch, in another farm home a mile away, had led me to a window and pointed across fields of corn stalks checkering the snow, and said, "You can see the little church over there on top of that rise where Grandfather Benjamin White lies buried. He was murdered by the same Indian band that captured my mother."

Noticing that Mrs. Brooks stood in a pair of easy slippers I said to her, "Your daughter, Mrs. Flitch told me that, in the terrible blizzard, when the Cheyenne's were fleeing with you across the plains of Texas to escape from Custer and the Kansas cavalry, your feet were frozen."

"Yes," she answered. "Both my feet were frozen badly. My feet have bothered me a lot ever since, but with these slippers on I get around very easily."

She bent over the Quilt and stitched the red yarn into it in loops which she cut and tied into knots. As the scissors snipped the yarn she talked. "It was terrible cold on those prairies, open and unsheltered from the blizzard that swept down from the north," she said. "To make it worse, we had little to eat. The Indians had to kill and eat their dogs, and for days, while the soldiers were pursuing us, that was our only food. I suffered, yes, for all the clothing I had when I was rescued was a slip made from sugar sacks, and you know there is not much warmth in sugar sacks. Many of the white boys and girls captured in that raid into Kansas froze to death in that blizzard and were chucked aside by the Indians to be eaten by wolves of the prairie. Few of those children were ever rescued. What became of them is still a mystery."

The farm of Mrs. Brooks is on White Creek, named after her murdered father. When he came there as one of the first white settlers, this stream was known as Granny Creek, but after he had been killed by the Indians it was renamed White Creek in his memory. The log cabin in which Sarah White lived when the Indians captured her was a mile away from her present home. It crumbled to dust long ago and only a few scraggly currant bushes mark its site.

To that homestead Benjamin White, his wife and ten children came from Wisconsin. The morning of August 13, 1868 (unlucky day), Mr. White and his son, Jack, had gone to the Republican River bottom to join other settlers in cutting wild blue-stem hay. Soon after they were gone that morning, six Cheyenne Indians came to the White home professing friendship, and after Mrs. White had cooked them a meal they seized Miss Sarah White, then a comely girl of 17, and ran outdoors with her. One of the savages leaped to the back of his horse, another lifted Miss White up, and, while she screamed and fought, he and the others road away with her. That day they took her to the Cheyenne camp on Buffalo Creek.

That same day another band of the same Indians attacked the settlers who were making hay on the Republican. The settlers saw them coming and ran for a stockade that had been built for protection. As they ran, Gordon Winbigler's hat blew off. He stopped to pick it up and thus, for a 10-cent straw hat, he lost his life, for an Indian on horseback, sweeping past, ran a lance through his body as he stooped to pick it up. A group of men and women in the stockade saw him killed. Among them was the mother of Gomer T. Davies, veteran editor of the Concordia Kansas. That same day the Indians killed Benjamin White and stole his team of horses.

"That evening they came to our camp with father's horses, and then I supposed they had killed him and my brother," Mrs. Brooks told me. "All through my captivity of seven months I believed that all of my family had probably been killed by the Indians. The last I saw of Mother, as I was carried off, she was running after me with outstretched arms, screaming in terror."

"I did not learn until after I was rescued that only father was slain, and that for seven months mother and my brothers and sisters had been mourning for me and wondering what had become of me. Can you imagine any torture more intense and cruel than what my mother suffered after I was carried off?"

At the Indian Camp on the Buffalo, Miss White found an old newspaper. This she hid in her dress, and the next day, as she road along with her captors, headed westward, she secretly tore off small bits of it and scattered them along to form a trail she hoped would be followed.

"Don't ask me where we went," she said to me. "As we journeyed I lost all sense of time and direction except that the sun told me we were heading west. We came in sight of mountains which I learned afterward were the peaks near Trinidad, Colorado. Then we traveled in a southeasterly direction."

Three months after she was captured, her band of Cheyenne's traded some ponies for another white woman, Mrs. Anna Morgan, who had been captured in the Solomon Valley. Mrs. Morgan was only 19 years old, and Mrs. Brooks says she was a beautiful young woman with blue eyes and thick lustrous hair of a yellow hue. Her maiden name had been Brewster. She had been married only a month to James Morgan, a neighboring farmer, when the Indians shot arrows into him as he worked in the field, leaving him for dead, and then dashing in the house, seized her and raced away.

The first question Mrs. Morgan asked Miss White when they met in the Indian camp was "What day of the week and what month is this?" Miss White could not tell her for she had lost track of time too.

The Indians made slaves of the two young women and the squaws forced them to fetch water, to cut wood until their hands were callused, to carry wood until their shoulders were raw, and they lashed their backs with whips until the blood ran. Once the two young women thought they were south of the Arkansas River and that Fort Dodge, garrisoned by soldiers, was just across from them. They made their escape that night and toiled through the snow toward the river, but were recaptured, beaten and more closely watched.

While the Indian warriors had been raiding in Kansas and Colorado, the squaws and children of the tribe stayed in a string of teepee villages in the narrow wooded and sheltered valley of the Washita River near the western border of the Indian Territory. There the warrior bands took the two young women and went into quarters for the winter.

Meanwhile, Governor Crawford of Kansas had petitioned President Andrew Johnson for help to punish the Indians and rescue the captives. General Sheridan was put into the field with the 7th cavalry, under General Custer, and four companies of infantry. With these Sheridan established a rendezvous at Camp Supply, 100 miles south of Fort Dodge, determined to carry out a winter campaign against the Indians, something that had never been done before. Governor Crawford had recruited the 19th Kansas volunteer cavalry and he resigned temporarily as governor to take charge of it and joined Sheridan at Camp Supply.

From Camp Supply, General Sheridan sent Custer and the 7th cavalry, with the famous California Joe as chief scout to make a swing to the southwest and see if he could find trace of the Indians. They started from Camp Supply November 23, and one evening, four days later, California Joe, scouting to the summit of a hill that overlooked the Washita, sighted the Indian village.

Custer divided his command into four columns and waited for the dawn. There was more than a foot of snow on the ground, the thermometer was below zero and a fierce wind blew from the north. Custer's order was for all to wait until the bugle sounded the advance, when all were to gallop at once upon the camp. At the first faint streaks of daylight the bugle blew, the regimental band struck up its famous "Garry Owen," and the charge swept down upon the startled camp.

Indian warriors and squaws fought together, but when the battle was over 103 Indians lay dead upon the field, all others had fled and the women and children were captives. Farther down the river were other villages with 2,000 warriors, enough to overwhelm Custer's command, but he advanced until the middle of the afternoon, pretending that his force was greater than it was, and as night began to fall he retreated to Camp Supply.

There was one bitter disappointment in that battle of the Washita, Mrs. Morgan and Miss White were not there. But in the red and trampled snow beside the body of chief Black Kettle were found the bodies of a white woman and her little boy. She had been shot through the head and the child had been dashed against a tree. It was supposed that Black Kettle had done this to keep her from falling into the hands of the white soldiers.

As she and the boy lay on the snow, Custer filed his soldiers past the bodies to see if any could identify them. Then it was discovered that she was Mrs. Clara Blinn, who with her son, Willie, had been captured when the Indians had descended upon a wagon train on the road between Ft. Lyon and Ft. Dodge, and had murdered her husband, R. F. Blinn. In the apron of the dead woman was found a chunk of dried bread, which led to the supposition that she was planning to escape when the camp was attacked. She was the daughter of W. T. Harrington of Ottawa, Kansas.

From Camp Supply, General Sheridan and all his force moved down toward the Washita with the intention of pursuing the Indians that had escaped and recovering Mrs. Morgan and Miss White. In his book, "My Life on the Plains," General Custer tells that the day before they were to start a young man named Brewster, brother of Mrs. Morgan, came to him and asked permission to go with the expedition.

"Mrs. Morgan is my only sister," he said. "I know not whether she is alive or dead, but when I think of what must be her fate I almost wish she was resting quietly among the dead. Hearing of your expedition, I came to join it in the hope that I may, at least, learn my sister's fate."

Custer gave him a horse and arms and took him along and he writes in his book, "He displayed more genuine courage, perseverance and physical endurance and a greater degree of true brotherly love and devotion that I have ever seen combined in one person."

On the present site of Ft. Sill, the Indian chiefs Satanta, Lone Wolf and Little Raven and their bands surrendered, but 1,200 Cheyenne's holding Mrs. Morgan and Miss White fled to the westward. Sheridan sent Custer and the 7th cavalry and the 19th Kansas cavalry in pursuit, with orders to rescue the two women alive, if possible. For two weeks the trail was followed over a barren desert, in cold that often went below zero, and on shortened rations, with the Indians always a day or so ahead. On the banks of the Sweetwater, in what is now Wheeler County, Texas, Custer caught up with the savages, who raised the white flag and asked for a powwow.

There, on the bank of the frozen river, the 1,000 American soldiers and the 1,200 Cheyenne warriors faced each other. The Kansans remembering the mother lying dead on the Washita with her dead babe beside her, were eager to annihilate the cruel enemy, but Custer sent word along the line, "Don't fire on those Indians."

He feared that if shooting began the Indians would kill the two white women as they had killed Mrs. Blinn and her child. Instead, he sent for the chiefs Dull Knife, Fat Bear, Big Head and Medicine Arrow, and when they came he demanded the surrender of the two white women. The Indians protested that no white woman was in their camp or anywhere near it.

Then Custer arrested the four chiefs and led them out to a cottonwood tree. He put a rope around the neck of Dull Knife, hoisted him up to a limb of the tree, lowered him again and said to the four chiefs, "Unless those two white women are delivered safe and well to me here before sunset tomorrow, I shall hang all four of you."

The next day the Indian warriors, armed for battle, galloped around and around the camp of the whites, made threats and begged for the deliverance of their chiefs, denying that the white women were with them, but Custer assured them that the four chiefs would be hanged at the moment of sunset.

General Custer has described in his book the drama, rarely excelled in tragic interest in American history, that occurred there just as the sun like a ball of fire was about to sink below the horizon. I asked Mrs. Brooks to describe it for me and she looked quickly up from her quilting and asked. "Have you ever read the book "The Price of the Prairie," by Margaret Hill McCarter of Topeka? If you haven't get and read her description of how the Indians surrendered Mrs. Morgan and myself to the 19th Kansas cavalry. It occurred just that way and it is a better description than I can give."

The account follows, taken from that book; "Suddenly, for there had been nothing there a moment before, all suddenly an Indian scout was outlined on the top of the bluff nearest us. Motionless he sat on his pony a moment, then he waved a signal to the farther height beyond him. A second pony and a second Indian scout appeared. Another signal and then came a third Indian on a third pony farther away. Each Indian seemed to call out another until a line of them had been signaled from the purple mist, out of which they appeared to be created. Last of all and farthest away was a pony on which two figures were faintly outlined." Down in the valley we waited all eyes looking toward the hills as these two drew nearer. Up in a group on the bluff beyond the valley the Indians halted. The two riders of the pony slipped to the ground. With their arms about each other, in close embrace, they came slowly toward us, the two captive women for whom we waited. It was a tragic scene, such as our history has rarely known, watched by a thousand men, mute, motionless under its spell.

"We had thought ourselves the victims of a hard fate in that winter of terrible suffering, but these two women, Kansas girls, home-loving, sheltered, womanly, a maiden and a bride of only a few months-shall I ever forget them as they walked into my life on that March day in the sunset hour by the Sweetwater? Their meager clothing was of thin flour sacks with buckskin moccasins and leggins. Their hair hung in braids, Indian fashion. Their haggard faces and sad eyes told only the beginning of their story. They were coming now to freedom and protection. The shadow of Old Glory would be on them in a moment, a moment, and the life of an Indian captive would be but a horror-seared memory.

"Then it was that Custer did a graceful thing. The subjection of the Cheyenne's could have been accomplished by soldiery from the East, but it was for the rescue of these two, for the protection of Kansas homes, that the 19th Kansas cavalry had volunteered. Stepping to our commander, Colonel Horace Moore of Lawrence, Kansas, Custer asked him to go forward to meet the captives. With a courtesy a queen might have coveted the colonel received them-two half-naked, wretched, fate-buffeted women.

"The officers nearest wrapped their great coats about them. Then, as the two, escorted by Colonel Moore and his officers next of rank, moved toward General Custer, who was standing apart waiting to receive them, a thousand men watching breathless with uncovered heads the while, the setting sun sent down throughout the valley its last rich rays of glory, the motionless air was full of an opalescent beauty, while softly, sweetly, like dream music never heard before in that lonely land of silence, the splendid 7th cavalry band was playing "Home Sweet Home."

Custer, in his book, tells how Mrs. Morgan's brother ran to clasp her in his arms, her first question was "Where is my husband?" She was told that he was recovering from his wounds in the army hospital in Ft. Hays.

The women were taken in an ambulance to Ft. Dodge and then restored to their relatives in Kansas. Mrs. Morgan rejoined her husband in the Solomon Valley and they had two children afterward and seemed happy, but she could not forget the tortures of her captivity. She would dream at night that she was again a captive and would awake screaming. She brooded over those memories until her mind gave way and she died in the Kansas state insane asylum.

When I pressed Mrs. Brooks to tell more of how the Indians treated her in her captivity she said, "For sixty five years I have been trying to forget it all. I put it out of my mind. Had I not done so I would have become insane, as did Mrs. Morgan. It was just like a nightmare and at this distance of time seems unreal."

Then, as she threaded her needle, she began to laugh softly. "I was just thinking," she said, "about when Mrs. Morgan and I were going back from the Indian country to Fort Dodge, with the soldiers that had rescued us, and the four Indian chiefs were along, too, prisoners. They were sulky at times and the soldiers, eager to kill them if they only had an excuse, would occasionally prod them with their bayonets. Then it was the turn of Mrs. Morgan and me to laugh at them. That was sweet revenge.

"When the chiefs got to Ft. Hays they were put with other Indian prisoners into a stockade there. Fat Bear became mean one day and stabbed a guard, Sergeant Hogan, in the back with a knife. The other soldier guards ran both Fat Bear and Big Head through with their bayonets and killed them and wounded Dull Knife, but he recovered."

Soon after her release Miss White, who had attended a boarding school in Wisconsin, began teaching school in Kansas. While teaching near Clyde, Kansas she met E. O. Brooks, a veteran soldier of the Civil War, and they were married and later moved to where she now lives. They had six daughters and one son. Mrs. Brooks lives with her son, Walter. Four of the daughters are living, Mrs. Edna Charles Jackson of California, Mrs. G. W. Brassfield of Maryville, Kansas, Mrs. B. F. Medcalf of Concordia, and Mrs. Carl Flitch of near Concordia. Altogether Mrs. Brooks has eighteen grandchildren.

This concludes the article from the Kansas City Star Sunday, March 4, 1934.