Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/409

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marks the grasses growing above your friends. Here it was like living in one great graveyard.

We went down to the busy world below, the Prince and I, and ships have borne us into other and different lands; wanderers again upon the earth; drifting with the world, borne up and down, and on, like the shifting levels of the sea.

The origin of the late Modoc war, which was really of less importance than the earlier ones, and in which the last brave remnant of the tribe perished, may be briefly chronicled.

Among the Indians, as well as Christian nations, there is often more than one man who aspires to or claims to be at the head of the people. It is a favourite practice of the Indian agents to take up some coward or imbecile who may be easily managed, and make him the head of a tribe, and so treat with him, and hold the whole tribe to answer for his con tracts. In this way vast tracts of land and the rights of a tribe are often surrendered for a mere song. If anyone dissents, then the army is called to enforce the treaty.

The old treaty with the Modocs was not much unlike this. Every foot of their great possessions had been ceded away by one who had not authority to cede, or influence to control the Indians.

They were mostly taken from their old possessions to a reservation to the north, and on the lands of the Klamat Indians, their old and most bitter enemies. It was a bleak and barren land, and the Indians well-nigh starved to death