The Author is pleased to present here a tale of Indian craft,
delightfully told him by Mrs. Elvira Martineau (Benj. S.) Johnson, who,
in 1876, accompanied her husband to Moen Copie, where he had been sent as
a missionary. July 4 the women had just prepared a holiday feast when
Indians were seen approaching. The men were summoned from the fields
below the cliff. Leading the Indians was a Navajo, Peicon, who,
addressing Brown as a brother chieftain, thrust forward his young son,
dramatically stating that the lad had killed three cows owned at the
settlement of Sunset and offering him for any punishment the whites might
see fit to inflict, even though it be death. Brown mildly suggested that
the Sunset people should be seen, but that he was sure that all they
would ask would be the value of the animals. During the protracted
argument a party of accompanying Utes came into the discussion,
threatening individuals with their bows and arrows. The Navajos were fed
and then was developed the truth. It was that the men of Sunset had
killed three Indian cattle and the wily chief had been trying to get
Brown to fix a drastic penalty upon his own people. Brown went with the
Navajos to Sunset, there to learn that the half-starved colonists had
killed three range animals, assumed to have been ownerless. The matter
then was adjusted with little trouble and to the full satisfaction of the
redskins.
In September, 1878, Erastus Snow visited Moen Copie, where the
inhabitants comprised nine families, with especial mention of Andrew S.
Gibbons, of the party of John W. Young and of Tuba. There had been a
prosperous season in a farming way.
This visit is notable from the fact that on the 17th, Snow and others
proceeded about two miles west of north and at Musha Springs located a
townsite, afterward named Tuba City. Tuba City was visited in 1900 by
Andrew Jenson, who found twenty families resident, with one family at the
old Moen Copie mission and three families at Moen Abi, seven miles to the
southwest.