Indian Scare in Sheridan, Wyoming

Pounding on the door startled Thomas Cotton, a rude wedge between him and his new bride on their wedding night.

Then the voices – nervous. Frightened. “The Crow are on the warpath! They’ve burned Dayton and murdered the people! They’re on their way here now, killin’ as they come!”

Cotton, founder and editor of the fledgling Sheridan (Wyoming) “Post” newspaper, struggled awake, his wife, Ella, sitting up beside him, the two of them casting off bedcovers, seeking robes. The voices at the door of their home on Brooks Street added, “Everybody’s gatherin’ at the Windsor Hotel!”

Ella Cotton could still vividly recall that event – shortly after midnight on Nov. 4, 1887 – half a century later (and did so, for an interview later published in the 1937 Sheridan Press – successor to the Post). Her husband, apparently not a man easily spooked, wanted to dismiss the entire incident, hysterical townspeople and all, and go back to bed, but Ella and a gathering number of neighbors insisted that he should at least check out the report.

Accordingly, Thomas Cotton went to the Windsor, then one of the focal points of Sheridan’s downtown, where he found ranchers arriving with their families from the Tongue River Valley. Cotton would, in the next day’s edition of the Post, reported that he saw one citizen, “shaken and bewhiskered,” sitting on a box in a corner of the hotel lobby with a “mammoth” rifle across his knees , while elsewhere in the hotel, women clustered in “fearful groups.”

Meanwhile, rumors of “Indian restlessness” added to the tension in the building. Crow Agency then as now lies in southern Montana not many miles from Sheridan, and people readily recalled reports from newspapers of the day of skirmishes between Indian police and “rebellious tribesmen,” as well as accounts of raids on the Crow by the Piegan and of reprisals by the Crow.

Eventually, being a good newspaperman, Cotton tracked the story to its source – and found not Indians, but one drunk, a bunch of pranksters and a couple of nervous individuals, either ranchers or cowhands. Cotton didn’t specify in his published account.

It started, according to Cotton’s report in the Nov. 10 issue of the Post, with a citizen of Dayton who became “filled up with common disturbance.” While the citizen was in that condition, a landlady and cook took advantage of the occasion to “settle up old scores” with the inebriated individual, at which point, he sought refuge on the banks of the Tongue River.

Even there, however, the Dayton citizen couldn’t escape his tormentors. “Some of the boys,” Cotton wrote, found his hiding place and fired a number of shots so close to the individual that he dived into the river and swam to the other side. There, “cold, wet and disgusted,” he set fire to an old straw stack.

Shift the scene a few miles to the south, to two men who had left Dayton reportedly “a few hours” earlier. They heard gunshots – about 20, according to the subsequent report – and when they looked back, they saw “considerable light” coming from the direction of the town they had recently departed.

It can be inferred that the light was the stack of straw going up in flames. At the time, the two riders had no trouble envisioning warpainted Indians burning down the town of Dayton and slaughtering the inhabitants as they fled from the fires. The men, according to Cotton’s account, hurried immediately to their own homes, bundled their families into wagons and lit out for Sheridan, “raising the alarm as they came …”

It was only – as Cotton later called it – a “nonsensical scare.”

But for a few hours, it sure held peoples’ attention.