Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/455

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SULLIX THE SHASTA.
443

seldom retaliated. In the vicinity of the Oregon border, however, on both sides of the line, it was quite different. The inhabitants were a bolder, braver people, who would not tamely submit to every indignity.

During the year 1852 there were several new mining fields discovered in northern California and southern Oregon, and the natives thereabout being high-spirited and strong, and the miners overbearing, it is no wonder there were many outrages on both sides.

Conspicuous among the savages was a Shasta, called by the white men Scarface, and another named Bill, and Sullix the bad-tempered, who in cunning, treachery, and cruelty, were equal to any of the white men invading their domains—only the latter were the stronger. E. Steele, of Yreka, was a favorite of the Shastas, who named him Jo Lane's Brother. Among the Rogue river chiefs, some of whose people belonged to the Shasta nation, were Tolo and John, Sam and Jo; then at the foot of the Siskiyou mountains, was Tipsey, or the Hairy, second to none in war and diplomacy.

White men imposed upon the Shastas, and from time to time these chiefs had killed white men. Sometimes Steele played successfully the part of peacemaker; oftener there was fighting.

On one occasion, while a surveying party was at work in his vicinity, Scarface said to them, " You white men who are so good and so great, why do you come into our country and kill our men, ravish our women, and go around with a compass and chain crying ' stick, stuck,' set up a few stakes and call the land your own when you have not paid a cent for it?"

Cardwell, an old Indian-fighter of that vicinity, tells many stories of this aboriginal. "This same old Sullix sat upon one of the sills of my mill," he says, "while I was at work boring and mortising on it, watching the road alive with men coming into the valley after the discovery of the