Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/458

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446
SOME INDIAN EPISODES.

effort would be useless. The enemies of her race were at her door; they were savages, maddened by years of wrong and the shedding of much innocent blood. Their wives and daughters had been outraged and slain by the white men; for a brief moment they might enjoy revenge.

Barring the door, and refusing admittance to any, refusing even to parley, she proceeded quietly to arrange her beautiful hair, and dress herself with neatness and decorum, as if for an important occasion; then drawing to her the child, and fdding it to her heart in the last embrace this side of eternity, she seated herself in the middle of the room, took the child in her lap, pillowed its head upon her breast, and thus, while singing to it a lullaby, she met her doom. She heeded not the approaching flames; she heard not the savage yells; nor was she conscious of the glittering eyes that peered at her through the crevices of her cabin. Already in spirit she was far away from that horrible scene, safe with her child beyond the skies.


The leading events of the insurrectionary movement of the Modocs I have presented in my general history, but the subject is worthy of more extended treatment than I was able then to give it. I have, therefore, reserved sufficient space for fuller detail in this volume.

To the early incomers the Modocs were a wild, unknown people, and scarcely ever seen. Indeed, Modoc is a Shasta word, signifying stranger, or hostile, and so was taken up and applied to these savages by white men hearing the Shastas speak of them.

When Superintendent Huntington made the treaty of 1864 with the Klamaths and Modocs, that portion of the latter tribe which lived on the border of California, and acknowledged Keintpoos,—individually known in the settlements as Captain Jack—for their chief, he had no great difficulty in gaining the consent