Battle of Kelley Creek

Kelley Creek, sometimes remembered as the Last Massacre, stands among the final documented clashes between Native Americans and United States forces, marking a near-final chapter in the long era of American Indian warfare. The trouble began in January 1911, when a small group of Shoshones found themselves accused of stealing cattle and, in the aftermath, killing four stockmen believed to have arrived investigating the missing animals. In response, a posse made up of policemen and local citizens set out to hunt down the group, eventually locating them camped near Winnemucca, Nevada, in an area called Kelley Creek. What followed on February 25 was a lopsided fight that left nine people dead outright, eight of them Daggetts along with one member of the posse. News of the incident was initially framed as an uprising among Native Americans, but historians now generally view it instead as a family's desperate bid to flee capture by the law.

Background

Before his death gave him the name Shoshone Mike, the man known as Mike Daggett headed a modest band of Shoshone. In the spring of 1910 he guided eleven people away from the Fort Hall Reservation, departing from Rock Creek, Idaho. With only two exceptions, every man in the party belonged to Mike's own family, a group that also included three women and somewhere between four and five children. Their route took them south into the northern reaches of Nevada. There, a son of Mike's known as Dugan suffered a fatal wound at the hands of white men rustling cattle. Seeking retribution, the band killed a man named Frank Dopp in May of 1910 and buried his body, which would not be discovered until two months afterward.

Convinced that fair treatment from white authorities was unlikely, the family moved westward toward Oroville, California, then doubled back into Nevada, settling in for the winter within Little High Rock Canyon in the northern part of Washoe County. By January 1911 their food supplies had dwindled, prompting them to take and slaughter cattle owned by a rancher in the area. A Basque herder of sheep named Bert Indiano happened upon this act but was chased off by the group. He subsequently crossed paths with three stockmen from Surprise Valley, California, who had come to check on livestock during the winter grazing season. These men were Harry Cambron along with two well-known Basque sheep owners, Peter Erramouspe and John Laxague. Shortly before these four men arrived, the band had already taken goods from the camp of a Chinese man whose name went unrecorded; when he later encountered them and threatened to kill them, they killed him instead and buried his remains. When the four-man posse reached the canyon, they found themselves face to face not with fleeing suspects but with Mike Daggett and two of his sons, who seemed to be lying in wait.

It appears the Daggett family had anticipated the stockmen's search, for on January 19, as the posse pushed into the canyon, gunfire from rifles and pistols erupted from the native fighters, cutting down all four visitors: Cambron, Indiano, Erramouspe, and Laxague. Nearly three weeks later, on February 8, a search party out of Eagleville, California, located the bodies lying in a creekbed. The corpses showed signs of mutilation, were partly stripped of clothing, and bore many bullet wounds. As news of the deaths spread through nearby communities, fear drove numerous residents to

Battle

Donnelley's group of pursuers numbered at least five lawmen, a handful of armed citizens, and a man serving as both county coroner and physician. They paused in Little High Rock Canyon on February 13 before pressing on through bitter cold and harsh winter conditions. After covering more than 200 additional miles, they located Daggett and his kin on February 25, concealed in a spot called Kelley Creek, lying northeast of Winnemucca. No one could say for certain who fired the opening shot, but what followed was a clash stretching across roughly three hours. Accounts held that the women took up arms alongside the men with equal ferocity. Mike Daggett, the family's patriarch and chief, fell among the earliest casualties, yet his death seemed only to harden his relatives' resolve, driving them to resist even more fiercely as they were steadily pushed backward. At some point in the fighting, the family exhausted its supply of bullets and turned instead to bows, spears, and tomahawks. When the violence finally ceased, just four of the twelve Daggetts who had begun the encounter remained alive, a girl of sixteen and three small children, all of whom were placed into police custody. Among the posse, Deputy Ed Hogle of Eagleville lost his life in the exchange. Two additional young Daggett children were believed to have been struck down by accident.

Once the fighting had ended, the posse u