Other Rosie Stories… ~ Index
Girl Stolen at Wellsville, Never Recovered
On April 7th, 1868, a beautiful little daughter of a Mr. Thurston who lived about three miles (north) from Wellsville, Cache County, was captured by some of Pocatello's band of Indians and in spite of every exertion she was never recovered. She was about three years of age, idolized by her parents and her loss was to them a dreadful blow; far worse indeed than her death would have been, she was never heard from with certainty again, except that she was dead.1
Brother Hughes Letter
Did you by any chance see the picture called The Covered Wagon?
Sometime ago it was shown in Los Angeles in one of the big theaters. There were a number of Indians brought from Blackfoot, Idaho to appear in the prologue. One of the Thurston brothers saw the picture there and one of the squaws bore such a startling resemblance to the family that he inquired of the manager where the Indians were from. He was told that there was a white woman among them, a wife of the chief. When he went back to see them in a few days he found out that they had all left breaking their contract with the theater. Someone must have told the chief about what the brother was inquiring about and so they disappeared the next day. No word of them was ever heard (from again). They think this was the Little Thurston Girl.2
The Missing Girl
On April 7th, 1868, the town of Mendon was plunged into sorrow, owing to the fact that George Thurston's daughter, two years and five months old, suddenly disappeared from Gardner's Creek on Mendon Mill. Gardner's Creek is located midway between Mendon and Wellsville. This event produced profound sorrow throughout Cache Valley and particularly among the people of Mendon and Wellsville. These residents turned out en masse to drag the great mill pond. A posse of volunteers were raised who followed the directions of a professed astrologer, Enoch Hargraves of Providence, Cache County, in quest of the Indian tribes whom he said had kidnapped the child.
At times he would look through his Peep-Stone
and the tears would gush from his eyes. On one occasion he said: See! That filthy black squaw is trying to make the little white girl nurse at her black breast.
Two weeks were spent in vain, searching for the lost girl. It was never definitely known whether she went to a watery grave, or spent the remainder of her days dwelling in tents and roaming with the nomadic Indians.3
Journal Entry
Here we were trying the echoes very faithfully when we descried first one, and then four Indians making towards us furtively. Whether we were in danger or not prudence counselled our making a prompt retreat which we did just in time to prevent their intercepting us. They moved toward us obliquely, rapidly until they saw that they were no longer betwen us and the town, (St. George, Utah) and then as Willie said lifted their blankets like geese going to fly,
dropped over the rock and vanished.
In the evening I asked the Bishop of one of the Wards if there was any excuse for our being scared, and he replied, None at all; but it would be best on the whole not to go off quite so far by yourselves. Not that I think the Indians worse than whites; rather better: but would you let little well-dressed children stray of an evening on the outskirts of a town at home alone? Besides the Indians have a temptation whites don't. They value white children so much! There's Mrs. Artemisia's Snow's (wife of Erastus Snow) daughter, who married Brother Thurston, lost a little girl of four years old that way. She was stolen in Weber Canyon (Cache Valley) by Shoshone's.
Have they never recovered her?
I asked. No,
he said, sometimes they heard of Indians who had seen her. The father spent all he had trying to get her but they have given up and gone to California, where Sister Thurston won't be so wore out by aggravating reports that she was here or there.
I suppose so young a child would have forgotten her parents by this time!
I said.Well, yes, it's four years ago now. She's forgotten them, if she's living, but most likely she got peevish and sickly at that age with the change from white ways. Then they'd get tired of her.
The pause was as significnt as if he had said plainly, They'd kill her.
4
Notes…
George W. and Sarah Lucinda Snow Thurston's child Rosetta, was kidnapped in the spring of 1868 on their farm near Mendon in northern Utah. She was never found, and her family eventually left Utah and never returned. (Erastus Snow, Larson, page 603-604.)
In the Journal of Elizabeth Kane, she also speaks of the Olive Oatman family massacre and capture of the two sisters.
- Indian Depredations in Utah, Peter Gottfredson, 1919, page 279.
- Correspondence, to Brother Huges, written in the early 1940's. From Artice Bird in 1979.
- A Gentile Account of Life in Utah's Dixie, 1872-1873, Elizabeth Kane's St. George Journal, 1995, page 7-9.