Hickey, the intended victim, was one of the worst men in the band. The year following this occurrence, in a fit of anger induced by intoxication, at a store in Placerville, he made a desperate assault upon a peaceable, inoffensive individual who was known by the name of “Snapping Andy.” Hurriedly snatching a pickhandle from a barrel, Andy, by two or three well-directed blows, brought his career of crime and infamy to a bloody close.
For some reason, probably to place him beyond the reach of the friends of the murdered robber, Brockie was assigned to a new position. Ostensibly to establish a ferry at the mouth of White Bird Creek, a few miles from town, but really for the purpose of furnishing a convenient rendezvous for his companions, he took up his abode there. It was on the line of travel between Florence and a gold discovery reputed to have been made on a tributary of the Boise River.
About the middle of September, Arthur Chapman, son of the surveyor-general of Oregon, while waiting for ferriage, was brutally assaulted by Brockie, who rushed towards him with pistol and knife, swearing that he would “shoot him as full of holes as a sieve, and then cut him into sausage meat.” With an axe which he seized upon the instant, Chapman clove his skull to the chin. Brockie fell dead in his tracks, another witness to the fulfilment of that terrible denunciation, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Chapman was acquitted.
It will not be deemed out of place to record here the desperate fortune of one Matt Bledsoe, who became notorious as an independent freebooter, and killed several persons in the valley of the Upper Sacramento and Upper Willamette. His bloody character preceded his arrival at Florence in the Fall of 1861. He acknowledged no allegiance to any band, and avowed as a ruling principle that he would “as soon kill a man as eat his breakfast.” While engaged in a game of cards with a miner at a ranche on White Bird Creek in October, 1861, he provoked an altercation, but the miner being armed, he did not, as was usual with him, follow it up by an attack. The next morning, while the miner was going to the creek, Bledsoe shot and killed him. Mounting his horse he rode rapidly to Walla Walla, surrendered to the authorities, asked for a trial, and on his own statement that he “had killed a man in self-defence,” was acquitted.
