In the spring of 1861, Missouri farmer Floyd Farrar and his wife, Wilmoth (Banta) Farrar, headed West with their infant children, Martha Octavia and John Henry.
Alerted that fall that Indians were menacing the Farrar wagon train on the Applegate Trail, Capt. Lindsay Applegate rushed with 42 armed volunteers to Bloody Point, the scene of an 1850 massacre of 80 emigrants near Tule Lake, Calif.
A volunteer, Wallace Baldwin, recounted, “We should not have been surprised to find the immigrants [sic] massacred and the Indians in readiness to attack our party. But such was not the case. We came upon the immigrants safe, but greatly alarmed by … the Indians who [said they] were endeavoring to approach the train … to tell the new arrivals of our whereabouts … and in this antagonistic position we found them.”
The outnumbered Indians left, and the volunteers shared their provisions with the exhausted and hungry emigrants.
“If I (ever) saw a grateful party of men and women, it was that band of immigrants,” Baldwin said.
Many decades later, Martha Octavia (Farrar) DeLap would tell her grandchildren that her father greeted the volunteers by asking, “Have you got any tobaccy?”
Sources: DeLap, Martha Octavia (Farrar) as told to her grandchildren, including the author of this episode; Wynne, Floyd L. Great Moments in Klamath History. Bend, Ore.: Maverick Publications, 2005. 4."Wallace Baldwin." Find a Grave Memorial. 28 June 2008. Web. 25 July 2014.
