Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/467

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ATTITUDE OF THE SAVAGES.
455

and being instructed, and especially after Lalake was deposed and a remarkable young savage, named by the agent Allen David, promoted to the chieftainship, their ambition seemed to be to advance in civilization, which they were aware could be done only by conforming to treaty regulations and cultivating the friendship of the government. This conformity of the Klamaths, a source of pride, and perhaps of boasting with them, was obnoxious to Captain Jack, and a cause of his late feeling of hostility to-the Klamaths; the more so that the latter had acted with the whites against the hostile Snakes, and had helped to arrest the two Modocs guilty of carrying ammunition to the enemy, and afterward held in chains at Fort Klamath until the war ended. Such was the relative position of Jack and his band to Sconchin's band and the Klamaths in the summer of 1870.


I have elsewhere remarked that the constant scouting necessary during the Indian wars had revealed to the white men every feature of eastern and southern Oregon, hitherto but little known. Drew's reconnoissance from Fort Klamath to the Owyhee had led to the construction of the central military road from Eugene city to the eastern boundary of the state; and the adaptability of the country to stock-raising being understood, invited its settlement by that class of farmers, who began to establish themselves in the numerous small valWs lying between the frequent ridges, very soon after the confirmation of the Klamath and Modoc treaty; so that in 1870 there were many settlers living in secluded homes miles apart, scattered over the Klamath basin from the reservation south to the Tule and Clear lakes.

Since Jack had resolved to lay claim to that portion of the country about Tule lake—a claim favored by Meacham, of which fact Jack could not have been ignorant—the settlers in the vicinity of Lost river had felt some uneasiness, which was increased to alarm