Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
BONE AND SINEW.
TILL we wrought, the Prince and I, patiently and industriously. So did thousands above us and below us ; there was a clang of picks and shovels, the smiting of steel on the granite, a sound through the sable forests, an echoing up the far hill-sides like the march of an army to battle, clashing the sword and buckler.
Every man that wrought there worked for an ob ject. There was a payment to be met at home ; a mortgage to be lifted. The ambition of one I knew was to buy a little home for his parents ; another had orphan sisters to provide for; this had an invalid mother. This had a bride, and that one the promise of a bride. Every man there had a history, a plan, a purpose.
Every man there who bent above the boulders, and toiled on silently under the dark-plumed pines and the shadows of the steep and stupendous moun tains, was a giant in body and soul.
Never since the days of Cortez has there been gathered together such a hardy and brave body of men as these first men of the Pacific. When it took six months voyaging round the Horn, and imminent perils, with like dangers and delays, to cross the isthmus or the continent, then the weak of heart did not attempt it and the weak of body died on the way. The result was a race of men worthy of the land. The world s great men were thus drawn out, separated and set apart to themselves out here on the Pacific. There was another segregation and sifting out after the Pacific was reached. There lay the mines open to all who would work ; no capital but a pick and pan required. The most manly and inde pendent life on earth. At night you had your pay in your hand, your reward weighed out in virgin gold. If you made five, ten, fifty, or a thousand dollars that day, you made it from the fall of no man ; no decline of stocks or turn in trade which carried some man to the bottom brought you to the top ; no specu lation, no office, no favour, only your own two hands and your strong, true heart, without favour from any man. You had contributed that much to the com merce of the world. If there is any good in gold, you had done that much good to the world, besides the good to yourself. What men took this line of life ! But some preferred to trade, build towns, hang about them, and practise their wits on their fellow-men.
You see at once that the miners were the cream of the milk in this second separation.
The summer wore on, and Paquita remained with
us, an industrious, lovely little girl. She was the
pet of the camp. She dressed with taste, and was
modest, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful. It was
noticeable that men who lived in that vicinity dressed
much more neatly than in any other part of the
camp, and even men who had to pass that way to
reach The Forks kept their shaggy beards in shape,
and their shirt bosoms buttoned up when they passed.
Such is the influence of even the presence of woman.
Klamat was wild as ever. The miners would suppose him spending his nights with us, and we would suppose him still with them, and thus he had it all his own way, wandered off with his club and knife into the hills, down to the river, and slept Heaven knows where.
At last one Sunday the Prince taught him the use of the rifle. This was to him perhaps the greatest event of his life. He danced with delight, made all sorts of signs about the game he would kill, and how much he would do for the Prince. He was faithful to his word. He began to repay something of his trouble. He brought game to the Prince and to us in abundance, but refused to let any one else have so much as a quail.
Once the Prince gave a shoulder of venison to some neighbour boys below us. Klamat went down when the men were at work, took the axe, broke open the door, and took and threw the meat over the bank into the claim. This made him natural enemies, and
it took great caution on the part of the Prince to
save his life.
He never talked, never smiled ; a sour, bitter-looking face was his, and he had no friends in the camp out side our own cabin. He stood his club in the corner now, and used the rifle instead. In a few days he had polished the barrel and all the brass ornaments till they shone like silver and gold.
Once a travelling missionary, as he called himself, gave him a tract. He took it to Paquita, who held it up and pretended to him that she could read it all as readily as the white men. This was one of her little deceits. Poor children ! No one had time to teach them to read, or to set them much of an example. How they wondered at the endless toil of the men.
The Doctor in the meantime ranged around the hill sides, wrote some, gathered some plants, and seemed altogether the most listless, wretched, miserable man you could conceive. He made his home in our cabin now, and rarely went to town ; for when he did, so sure one of the hangers-on about the saloons was sure to insult him. Sometimes, however, he would be obliged to go, such as when some accident or severe illness would compel the miners to send for him, and he never refused to attend. On one of these occasions, Spades, half drunk and wholly vicious, caught the Doctor by the throat as he met him in the trail near town, and shook him much as he had been shaken by Sandy some months before.
Spades boasted he had made his old teeth rattle
like rocks in a rocker. The Doctor said nothing,
but got off as best he could and came home. He
did not even mention the matter to any one.
Shortly after this Spades was found dead. He was found just as the Judge had been found, close to his cabin door, with the three mortal stabs in the breast, only he did not have the lock of hair in his hands from the Doctor s head.
There was talk of a mob. This thing of killing people in the night, even though they were the most worthless men of the camp, and even though they were killed in a way that suggested something like fair play, and revenge rather than robbery, was not to be indulged in, even at Humbug, with impunity. Some of the idlers got together at the Howlin Wilderness to pass resolutions, and take some steps in the matter, as Spades lay stretched out under the old blue soldier coat on a pine slab that had many dark stains across and along its rugged surface, but they fell into an exciting game of poker, at ten dollars a corner, and the matter for the time was left to rest. No Antony came to hold up the dead Caesar s mantle, and poor Spades was buried much as he had buried the Judge a short time before.
Some one consulted Sandy on the subject, about the time of the funeral, as he stood at the bar of the Howlin Wilderness for his gin and peppermint. Sandy was something of a mouth-piece for the miners, not that he was a recognized leader; miners, as a
rule, decline to be led, but rather that he knew what
they thought on most subjects, and preferred to act
with them and express their thoughts, rather than
incline to the idlers about The Forks. He drank his
gin in silence, set down his glass, and said in an
oracular sort of way, as if to himself, when passing
out of the door :
" Well, let em rip; it s dog eat dog, anyhow!" But it was evident that this matter would not blow over as easily as did the death of the Judge. True, there was no magistrate in camp yet, but there was a live Sheriff in the city.
The Doctor went on as usual, avoiding men a little more than before, but other than this I could see no change in the man or his manner of life.
He and the Prince had many strange theories. Men in the mines think out some great things, as they dig for gold all day, with no sound save the ripple of the mountain stream and the sharp quick call of the quail in the chapparal, to disturb them, through all the days of summer. They come upon new thoughts as upon nuggets of gold.
Sometimes they talked in bitter terms about the treatment of the Indians. They had humane and I think just and possible theories on this subject, which I remember very well, and may sometime sub mit to the Government, if I can only get a hearing within the next ten years. It will hardly be worth while after that time, although, after the Indians are all dead, no doubt we will have some very humane
and Christian plans advanced by which they may be
made a prosperous and contented people.
I am constantly asked : " Does not the Govern ment interfere? Does not the Government take charge of these Indians after having taken their lands, and lakes, and rivers?" Nonsense! The Government ! The Indian Bureau, Indian Agent, or whatever you choose to call that part of the North American Republic deputed to distribute red blankets and glass beads to the North- American Indian, had not yet put in an appearance on the Klamat. I doubt if he has reached that portion of the interior to this day.
When he does arrive he will find now only falling lodges with grass growing rank about the doorways ; he will find mounds all up and down the river that were made by a continual round of encampments reaching back to a time when the Chaldeans named the stars ; he will find perhaps an old woman or two, or a bent old warrior, sitting in rags and wretched ness, lamenting, looking back with dimmed eyes to another age, and that is all.
Twenty years ago the Indians of the Forks of the Willamette, rode by my father s cabin in bands, single file, a mile or two in length. They rode spotted horses, had gay clothes and garments of many colours. The squaws chanted songs of a monotonous kind, not without some melody, as they rode by astride,^with papooses swinging on boards from the saddle-bow, and were very happy.
They saw the country settling up day by day, but
never raised a hand against the whites.
The whites were insolent, it is true, for had not Government given them the land, and had they not journeyed a long way to possess it?
Then the country was fenced up and their ponies could not get pasture ; the lands were ploughed and the squaws could not get roots and acorns. But worst of all, the whites killed and frightened off the game, and the Indians began to starve and die. Once or twice they undertook to beg, about the Forks of the Willamette, but the settlers set dogs on them, and they went back to their lodges and died off in a few years by thousands. The world wondered why the Indians died. " They are passing away," said the substantial idiot who edited the " Star of the West." " They are a doomed race," said the minister. I think they were.
Less than six months ago I visited this spot. How many Indians do you suppose I found there of the permanent old settlers ? Two ! Captain Jim and his squaw. All along the silver river, where it makes its flashing course against the sun, the banks are black and mellow, and the grass grows tall and strong from the bones and ashes of the u doomed race."
Captain Jim declines to surrender to the Reserva tion. They caught him once, him and his squaw, but he got away after a year or two, and not only brought back his own squaw, but one of a neigh-
bouring tribe, and has ever since been dodging about through the hills overlooking the great valley where his fathers were once the lords and masters, with only the Great Spirit to say yea or nay to them.
Captain Jim is a harmless fellow, and a good hunter. Sometimes in harvest he goes down in the fields and binds wheat, and gets pay like a white man. His squaws gather berries and sell them to the whites. Sometimes they take a great fancy to children, and give them all the berries they have, and will take nothing for them. Captain Jim says that is not good management. One day some one asked him why he had two squaws. He studied awhile, and said he had two squaws so that they could bury him when he died. He wears a stiff- brimmed beaver hat with feathers in it ; clothes like a white man, even to the white shirt; smokes and chews tobacco, swears, and sometimes gets drunk. In fact, he is so nearly civilized, that no great efforts are now made to return him to the Eeservation. Some day soon the two wives of Captain Jim will be per mitted to lay the last of the Willamette Indians to sleep on the banks of that sunny river.
What would I do? It would be long to tell. But I would blow the Indian Bureau to the moon. I would put good men, and plenty of them, to look into the Indians interest. I would set apart good tracts of land for each tribe. I would pay these men so well that they would not steal from the I ndians,
if I could not get honest men otherwise. I would make their office perpetual, and I would make it one of honour and of trust.
But what do we do instead? We change the man in charge every few years, before he has even got a glimpse at the inner life of an Indian. We send out some red-mouthed politician, who gets the place because he happens to have a great influence with the Irish vote of New York, or the German vote of Pennsylvania. We wait, nine cases out of ten, till the matter adjusts itself between the whites and the reds. If the Indians are peaceful, as in the case of the Willamette, why interfere? If they go to war they must be made peaceful. This is the way it has gone and still goes on, to the eternal disgrace of the country. If a trouble comes of this clashing together of the whites and the reds, we hear but one side of the story. The Indian daily papers are not read.