Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII.
MY NEW REPUBLIC.
ERE for the first time a plan which y had been forming in my mind ever since I first found myself among these people began to take definite shape. It was a bold and ambitious enterprise, and was no less a project than the establishment of a sort of Indian Republic " a wheel within a wheel," with the grand old cone Mount Shasta for the head or centre.
To the south, reaching from far up on Mount Shasta to far down in the Sacramento valley, lay the lands of the Shastas, with almost every variety of country and climate ; to the south-east the Pit River Indians, with a land rich with pastures and plains teeming with game ; to the north-east lay the Modocs, with lakes and pasture-lands enough to make a State. My plan was to unite these three tribes in a confederacy under the name of the United Tribes, and by making a claim and showing a bold front to
the Government, secure by treaty all the lands near the mountain, even if we had to surrender all the other lands in doing so.
It might have been called a kind of Indian re servation, but it was to be a reservation in its fullest and most original sense, such as those first allotted to the Indians. Definite lines were to be drawn, and these lines were to be kept sacred. No white man was to come there without permission. The Indians were to remain on the land of their fathers. They were to receive no pay, no perquisites or assistance whatever from the Government. They were simply to be let alone in their possessions, with their rites, customs, religion, and all, unmolested. They were to adopt civilization by degrees and as they saw fit, and such parts of it as they chose to adopt. They were to send a representative to the State and the national capitals if they chose, and so on through a long catalogue of details that would have left them in possession of that liberty which is as dear to the Indian as to any being on earth.
Filled with plans for my little Republic I now went among the Modocs, whom I had always half feared since they had killed and plundered the old trader, and boldly laid the case before them. They were very enthusiastic, and some of the old council- men named me chief ; yet I never had any authority to speak of till too late to use it to advantage.
I drew maps and wrote out my plans, and sent them to the commanding officer of the Pacific Coast, the
MY NEW REPUBLIC.
Governor of the State, and the President of the Republic. Full of enthusiasm and impossible theories were the letters I sent, and no doubt full of bad spelling and worse grammar ; but they were honest, sincere, and well meant, and deserved something better than the contemptuous silence they received.
I thought of this thing day after day, and it came upon me at last like a great sunrise, full and complete. The Indians entered into it with all their hearts. Their great desire was to have a dividing line a mark that would say, Thus far will we come and no farther. They did not seem to care about details or particulars where the line would be drawn, only that it should be drawn, and leave them secure in bounds which they could call their own. They would submit to almost anything for this.
Remove they would not ; but they were tired of a perpetual state of half- war, half-peace, that brought only a steady loss of life and of land, without any lookout ahead for the better, and would enter into almost any terms that promised to let them and theirs permanently and securely alone. I may say here in a kind of parenthesis that the only way an Indian can get a hearing is to go to war, and thus call the attention of the Government to the fact of his existence.
How magnificent and splendid seemed my plan ! Imagination had no limit. Here would be a national
o
park, a place, one place in all the world, where men lived in a state of nature, and when all the ot her
tribes had passed away or melted into the civiliza tion and life of the white man, here would be a people untouched, unchanged, to instruct and interest the traveller, the moralist, all men. When the world is done gathering gold, I said, it will come to these forests to look at nature, and be thankful for the wisdom and foresight of the age that preserved this vestige of an all but extinct race. There was a grandeur in the thought, a sort of sublimity, that I shall never feel again. A fervid nature, a vivid imagination, and, above all, the matchless and magnificent scenery, the strangely silent people, the half-pathetic stillness of the forests, all conspired to lift me up into an atmosphere where the soul laughs at doubt and never dreams of failure. A ship wrecked race, I said, shall here take rest. To the east and west, to the north and south, the busy com mercial world may swell and throb and beat and battle like a sea; but on this island, around this mountain, with their backs to this bulwark, they shall look untroubled on it all. Here they shall live as their fathers lived before the newer pyramids cast their little shadows, or camels kneeled in the dried-up seas.
I went to Yreka, the nearest convenient post-office, nearly one hundred miles away, and waited for my answers in vain. I wrote again, but with the same result.
I saw that I must learn something more of the white man, mix with him, observe his ma nners and
disposition more closely than I had done. I said to myself, I have been a dreamer. I am now awake, and I have a purpose.
That purpose became my hobby. I rode that hobby to the bitter end. Old men have hobbies sometimes as well as boys. The Civil War was born of hobbies. When a hobby becomes a success it is then baptized and given another name. I engaged in many pursuits through the summer, always leaving a place or calling so soon as it afforded me no further instruction. On Dead wood, a mining stream with a large and prosperous camp, I found some old ac quaintances of The Forks, and finding also a library, a debating society, and a temperance lodge, I joined all these, took part, and on every fit and unfit occasion began to urge my hobby. Yet I never admitted that I had cast my fortune with the Indians or even had been among them. This would have been disgrace and defeat at once. I engaged as a common labourer, shovelling dirt and running a wheelbarrow with broad-backed Irishmen and tough Missourians, in order to get acquainted with the men who clustered about the library. The books 300 in number were kept at the cabins of the men who employed me. Of course I could not stand the work long, but I accomplished my object. I got acquainted with the most intelligent men of the camp, and so enlarged my life.
I remained a month. I read Byron and Plutarch s Lives over and over again. They were the only
books I cared at all to read, and they were the very
books that I in that state of mind should not have
read. I pictured myself the hero of all I read.
Instead of being awakened, I was only dreaming a
greater dream.
I returned to Soda Springs ranch, and Mountain Joe went with me to the Indian camp, but I never took him into my confidence. Not but he was a brave, true man, but that he was unfortunately sometimes given to getting drunk, and besides that, he was the last man to sympathize with the Indian or any plan that looked to his improvement. I laid in my supplies, and proposed to spend my winter with the Indians. I loved Mountain Joe fondly ; and in spite of his prophecies that he would see me no more, returned to the camp on the Upper McCloud. As feed for stock was scarce on the ranch, I with my Indians took the horses on the McCloud to winter. My camp was about seventy-five miles from the Pit River settlements, and about thirty miles from Soda Springs. These were the nearest white habita tions. I was partly between the two.
About mid- winter the chief led his men up to wards the higher spurs of the mountain for a great hunt. After some days on the head-waters of the McCloud, at some hot springs in the heart of a deep forest and dense undergrowth, we came upon an immense herd of elk. The snow was from five to ten feet deep. We had snow shoes, and as the elk were helpless, after driving them from the thin
snow and trails about the springs into the deep snow, the Indians shot them down as they wallowed along, by hundreds.
Camp was now removed to this place, with the exception of a few who preferred to remain below, and feasting and dancing became the order of the winter.
Soon Klamat and a few other young and spirited Indians said they were going to visit some other camp that lay a day or two to the east, and dis appeared.
In about a month they returned. After the usual Indian silence, they told a tale which literally froze my blood. It made me ill.
The Indians had got into difficulty with the white men of Pit River valley about their women, and killed all but two of the settlers. These two they said had escaped to the woods, and were trying to get back through the snow to Yreka. The number of the settlers I do not remember, but they did not exceed twenty, and perhaps not more than ten.
There were no women or children in the valley at the time of the massacre ; only the men in charge of great herds of stock.
This meant a great deal to me. I began to reflect on what it would lead to. The affair, no matter who was to blame, would be called another dreadful massacre by the bloodthirsty savages ; of this I was certain. Possibly it was a massacre, but the Indian account of it shows them to have been a s perfectly
justified as ever one human being can be for taking the life of another.
I have been from that day to this charged with having led the Indians in this massacre. I deny no thing; I simply tell what I know and all I know of this matter as briefly as possible, and let it pass.
The massacre, as it is called, occurred in the first month of the year 1867. The whites were besieged by the Indians in a strong wooden house, a perfect fortress. The Indians asked them to surrender, offering to conduct them safely to the settlements. They felt secure, and laughed at the proposition. A long fight followed, in which many Indians fell. At last the Indians carried great heaps of hay to the walls, fired it, and the whites perished.