Buried twice: “Gold Fever” leads to tragedy for a Laramie couple
Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s death at the Battle of Little Bighorn was in July 1876. That event may seem to be unrelated to the story of a Laramie baker named Charles Metz who died three months earlier. But there is a somber trail linking the two.
Laramie was an eight-year-old railroad town of newcomers in January of 1876 with many residents who were born in Europe. Among those early settlers was a group from northern Germany that included Mr. and Mrs. Charles Metz who came to Laramie around 1872.
IOOF Fraternity
A Laramie restaurant operator named William Fischer was also in that group of Germans, identified by the Laramie Sentinel newspaper as a brother-in-law of the Metzes. The Laramie tobacco shop of John Fischer was next door to William Fischer’s restaurant. Charles Metz and John Fischer were reported in 1874 as officers of a local Independent Order of Odd Fellows organization.
In the late 19th century, the IOOF became one of the largest non-sectarian fraternal organizations in America. It was especially popular with German immigrants like Metz and the Fischers. It becomes significant later in this story that a central pledge of IOOF members is to see to the proper burial of members. For newcomers in a strange land, that was a comforting principle.
Charles Metz had a grocery store and bakery on 1st St. near the intersection with what is now Ivinson Ave. Adjacent to his shop were the businesses of William and John Fischer.
Metz placed clever ads in the Laramie Daily Independent, such as one on June 19, 1874, urging readers to bring their meat and vegetables to his ovens “to save your wife from roasting over a hot stove.” But two years later, on February 21, 1876, he announced in the Laramie Daily Sun that his bakery shop was for sale or rent.
Gold Fever
Apparently, Metz was influenced by frequent newspaper stories on the success of gold prospectors in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. There were cautionary reports of attacks by Native Americans, especially those of the Oceti Sakowin tribe. By 1876 the U.S. Army had stopped forcibly removing prospectors from the Hills, as the 1868 Treaty at Fort Laramie mandated, and had turned its attention to subduing Indigenous people.
Many would-be prospectors were heading to the Hills, affected by the “Gold Fever” then rampant all over the west. Thus, the Metzes would have eager customers and were probably not intending to prospect. Instead, it is surmised that they planned to establish a bakery in the new boom town of Custer.
“Custer” was named for Lt. Col. Custer, who had explored the Hills in 1874 with over 1,000 soldiers in his command. Newly established in 1876, it became a boom town of hundreds or perhaps thousands.
A bakery in Custer could have been highly profitable as the miners only had plentiful wild game to eat. The Metzes would be trespassing on native land, but so were thousands of prospectors.
Gold in the Black Hills was known at least a decade or two before Lt. Col. Custer’s expedition. U.S. Government reports during the 1860s made it clear that seeking gold in Black Hills streams could yield gold dust or nuggets through relatively easy “placer” mining. But the military expeditions, including Custer’s, did not play up this discovery, lest poorly paid soldiers desert to begin prospecting themselves.
The Civil War and hostilities with Natives halted further Black Hills mining explorations in the 1860s, as did the discovery of gold in other western territories. The Army tried hard to honor the 1868 treaty by forcibly discouraging miners, enjoying some success through 1875. But enough gold dust and nuggets from the Black Hills got through that by early 1876 there were hordes of prospectors in the Black Hills.
As several historians point out, at that time the American Army could not let its public support plummet due to an armed engagement with white men. Its priority was to constrain and fight, if necessary, Natives incensed at the incursion of miners. Thus, in 1876, trespassers had only hostile tribesmen to fear; the Army had stopped expelling miners from the Black Hills.
Metz Massacre
In early spring 1876, the Metzes traveled the wagon road from Cheyenne to Fort Laramie and Custer. It is not clear which direction they were going when they were attacked on April 16, 1876. There were no survivors of their little group of four that included Mr. and Mrs. Metz, their driver named “Mr. Simpson,” and another woman.
Their bodies, shattered wagon, and possessions were strewn about in a six-mile section of the road near the Wyoming border, called Red Canyon. This portion of the route was known to be treacherous for the ridges that concealed ambushers. The road had such a bad reputation that it was abandoned a year later for a route avoiding Red Canyon.
Another traveler, W.J. Felton, survived a Red Canyon attack in which his four companions died. His wagon was ambushed the same day, either before or after the Metz attack. He claimed to have seen at least five Natives on the attack.
Felton told his story to a freighter named C.R. LeRoy who passed it on to newspapers. LeRoy had been in a party of 60 men and many wagons that safely made it through Red Canyon before the attacks on the Felton and Metz wagons. LeRoy’s report was published widely within weeks. In it, he mentions the Metz party tragedy.
Felton and LeRoy met at a stage station at one end of Red Canyon where Felton was recovering from his gunshot wounds. Since both attacks occurred in almost the same place on the same day, both have become conflated as the “Metz Massacre,” as reported in both the Laramie and Cheyenne newspapers by early May 1876.
Conflicting Accounts
Newspaper reporters at the time and professional writers who came later have speculated on what happened. The number of contradictions about the Metz Massacre point out the perils of relying on secondary sources.
Even Felton’s report relies on secondhand information regarding the Metzes. Some say the Metz attack wasn’t just by Natives, but included a murderous white outlaw named William F. “Persimmon Pete” Chambers who egged them on. One source even said no Natives were involved.
The identity of the woman with the Metzes might have been their “colored cook” named Rachel Briggs or she may have been the wife of a Custer merchant named Sally Mosby on a mission to buy supplies for her husband, as one source claims. Conflicting sources say the Metzes sold the Custer bakery at a profit and were on their way back to Laramie, or they were headed to Fort Laramie to buy more flour. Others thought they were on their way to Custer for the first time when attacked and had yet to set up a bakery.
One source said they carried $3,000 in cash.
The only thing all sources agree upon is that Metz was a baker, and that his wife, whose first name we do not know, was with him. One frontiersman, Edward Ordway, wrote about the Metz Massacre in a 1929 issue of Annals of Wyoming. He said that Chief American Horse killed the renegade young man responsible for the Metz Massacre. The Chief’s orders to abide by the treaty with whites had been disobeyed, wrote Ordway.
Ordway claimed that the Chief delivered the head of the offender to General Crook, (then probably at Fort Laramie), who took note of the result. If so, that detail is not repeated in any other sources consulted.
Buried Twice
There are several different versions of what happened initially to the Metz Massacre victims. According to several accounts, the bodies were not in the same place as the women had fled before being killed. It is likely that travelers along Red Canyon would have stopped to hastily bury them where they were found, following a well-known code of the west. Another account says a local rancher reburied them together. By May 8, word of the Metz Massacre and the hasty burials was published in the Laramie Sentinel newspaper.
The IOOF members of Laramie could not tolerate that one of their members and his wife were hastily laid to rest in a shallow grave in Red Canyon. On May 15, 1876, the Sentinel said: “The party who went out from this city to receive the bodies of Charles Metz and wife, killed by the Indians, returned last evening having successfully accomplished the object of their mission.”
That it took over a month for that to happen is not surprising, considering the six or more days it took a mule-drawn wagon to drive from Cheyenne to Red Canyon. The newspaper report said that the party was financed by “William Fischer, brother-in-law of the deceased,” and that the leader was “Mattis Dunnelbaum, brother of Mrs. Metz.” Dunnelbaum was probably part of the German migration to western America, though his name, if reported correctly, does not turn up in any Laramie directories of residents from 1875 or later.
Surprising information in the newspaper is that the bodies were placed in one coffin “and are lying in state at the old Holt store on the Odd Fellows corner, where they can be seen by the public at any time after 10 o’clock this morning.” Perhaps that was done, gruesome though it might have been, to prove to friends and relatives that the correct bodies had been retrieved.
Apparently, the bodies of the other two victims were not retrieved.
Mr. and Mrs. Metz were buried on May 16, 1876, in the Ingersoll burial ground east of Laramie which six years later became Greenhill Cemetery. They were among the earliest burials there, in a large tract bought by the IOOF from stable owner James M. Ingersoll. The Metz gravesite is unmarked but is in Cemetery records, close to where Ingersoll had buried his wife and two daughters about two years earlier.
Army retaliation
The Metz Massacre was among the first of several 1876 attacks attributed accurately or not to the Oceti Sakowin and which spurred the Army into action against the tribes. The “Battle of Little Bighorn” on July 25-26, 1876, known by Natives as “the Battle of Greasy Grass,” was the tragic result. It was a stunning calamity for both the U.S. Army and for the victorious tribes because that victory cast all Indigenous people as enemies to many outraged Americans of European heritage.
On July 17, 1877, the court-appointed administer of the Metz estate, John Fischer, announced in the Laramie Sentinel that the Metz personal property, bakery and residence in Laramie would be auctioned to the highest bidder on the Courthouse steps. Thus ends the unfortunately brief saga of the Metz couple of Laramie, whose deaths were among those Lt. Col. Custer hoped to avenge.
Editor’s note: Judy Knight is Collection Manager at the Laramie Plains Museum. Most of the Black Hills information in this story is from the book Gold in the Black Hills by Watson Parker, originally published in 1966 but with a 2003 edition by the South Dakota State Historical Press, Pierre. The Smithsonian Institution and many historians now replace “Sioux” with Oceti Sakowin, a practice followed here. The word Sioux derives from a spiteful French and Ojibwe word meaning snake or foreigner, thus the Oceti Sakowin tribe did not use it. In their language, “Lakota,” “Nakota” and “Dakota” mean something like “friend” and are three different language groups of the Oceti Sakowin. The term “Indian” was never accurate though used almost exclusively in 18th and 19th century accounts.
By Judy knight
Caption: 2023 view of Red Canyon, northeast of Edgemont, South Dakota, and the highway sign that marks where the Metz wagon was ambushed. It adds to the confusion about the Metz Massacre incident by posting the date wrong, it was April 16, 1876. And it mangles the word “massacred.”
Photo credit: by Darold Hehn