University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
SHADOWS OF SHASTA.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 645EAF. Page 017. In-line image. Two snow-capped mountains stand in the background. In the foregrouns several pine trees stand.]

AS lone as God, and white as a winter moon,
Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary
from the heart of the great black forests of
Northern California.

You would hardly call Mount Shasta a part of the
Sierras; you would say rather that it is the great
white tower of some ancient and eternal wall, with
here and there the white walls overthrown.

It has no rival! There is not even a snow-crowned
subject in sight of its dominion. A shining pyramid
in mail of everlasting frosts and ice, the sailor sometimes,
in a day of singular clearness, catches glimpses
of it from the sea a hundred miles away to the west;
and it may be seen from the dome of the capital 340
miles distant. The immigrant coming from the east
beholds the snowy, solitary pillar from afar out on

the arid sage-brush plains, and lifts his hands in
silence as in answer to a sign.

Column upon column of storm-stained tamarack,
strong-tossing pines, and war-like looking firs have
rallied here. They stand with their backs against
this mountain, frowning down dark-browed, and confronting
the face of the Saxon. They defy the advance
of civilization into their ranks. What if these
dark and splendid columns, a hundred miles in depth,
should be the last to go down in America! What
if this should be the old guard gathered here, marshalled
around their emperor in plumes and armour,
that may die but not surrender.

Ascend this mountain, stand against the snow
above the upper belt of pines, and take a glance below.
Toward the sea nothing but the black and
unbroken forest. Mountains, it is true, dip and
divide and break the monotony as the waves break
up the sea; yet it is still the sea, still the unbroken
forest, black and magnificent. To the south the
landscape sinks and declines gradually, but still maintains
its column of dark-plumed grenadiers, till the
Sacramento Valley is reached, nearly a hundred miles
away. Silver rivers run here, the sweetest in the
world. They wind and wind among the rocks
and mossy roots, with California lilies, and the yew
with scarlet berries dipping in the water, and trout
idling in the eddies and cool places by the basketful.

On the east, the forest still keeps up unbroken
rank till the Pit River valley is reached; and even
there it surrounds the valley, and locks it up tight
in its black embrace. To the north, it is true, Shasta
valley makes quite a dimple in the sable sea, and
men plough there, and Mexicans drive mules or herd
their mustang ponies on the open plain. But the
valley is limited, surrounded by the forest confined
and imprisoned.

Look intently down among the black and rolling
hills, forty miles away to the west, and here and there
you will see a haze of cloud or smoke hung up above
the trees; or, driven by the wind that is coming from
the sea, it may drag and creep along as if tangled in
the tops.

These are mining camps. Men are there, down in
these dreadful canons, out of sight of the sun, swallowed
up, buried in the impenetrable gloom of the
forest, toiling for gold. Each one of these camps is
a world in itself. History, romance, tragedy, poetry
in every one of them. They are connected together,
and reach the outer world only by a narrow little
pack trail, stretching through the timber, stringing
round the mountains, barely wide enough to admit
of footmen and little Mexican mules with their
apparajos, to pass in single file. We will descend
into one of these camps by-and-by. I dwelt there a
year, many and many a year ago. I shall picture

that camp as it was, and describe events as they happened.
Giants were there, great men were there.

They were very strong, energetic and resolute, and
hence were neither gentle or sympathetic. They
were honourable, noble, brave and generous, and yet
they would have dragged a Trojan around the wall
by the heels and thought nothing of it. Coming
suddenly into the country with prejudices against
and apprehensions of the Indians, of whom they
knew nothing save through novels, they of course
were in no mood to study their nature. Besides,
they knew that they were in a way, trespassers if
not invaders, that the Government had never treated
for the land or offered any terms whatever to the
Indians, and like most men who feel that they
are somehow in the wrong, did not care to get
on terms with their antagonists. They would have
named the Indian a Trojan, and dragged him
around, not only by the heels but by the scalp, rather
than have taken time or trouble, as a rule, to get
in the right of the matter.

I say that the greatest, and the grandest body of
men that have ever been gathered together since the
seige of Troy, was once here on the Pacific. I grant
that they were rough enough sometimes. I admit
that they took a peculiar delight in periodical six-shooter
war dances, these wild-bearded, hairy-breasted
men, and that they did a great deal of promiscuous

killing among each other, but then they did it in
such a manly sort of way!

There is another race in these forests. I lived
with them nearly five years. A great sin it was
thought then, indeed. You do not see the smoke of
their wigwams through the trees. They do not
smite the mountain rocks for gold, nor fell the pines,
nor roil up the waters and ruin them for the fishermen.
All this magnificent forest is their estate.
The Great Spirit made this mountain first of all, and
gave it to them, they say, and they have possessed it
ever since. They preserve the forest, keep out the
fires, for it is the park for their deer.

I shall endeavour to make this sketch of my life
with the Indians—a subject about which so much has
been written and so little is known—true in every
particular. In so far as I succeed in doing that I
think the work will be novel and original. No man
with a strict regard for truth should attempt to write
his autobiography with a view to publication during
his life; the temptations are too great.

A man standing on the gallows, without hope of
descending and mixing again with his fellow men,
might trust himself to utter “the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth,” as the law hath it;
and a Crusoe on his island, without sail in sight or
hope of sail, might be equally sincere, but I know of
few other conditions in which I could follow a man

through his account of himself with perfect confidence.

This narrative, however, while the thread of it is
necessarily spun around a few years of my early life,
is not particularly of myself, but of a race of people
that has lived centuries of history and never yet had a
historian; that has suffered nearly four hundred years
of wrong, and never yet had an advocate.

I must write of myself, because I was among these
people of whom I write, though often in the background,
giving place to the inner and actual lives of
a silent and mysterious people, a race of prophets;
poets without the gift of expression—a race that has
been often, almost always, mistreated, and never
understood—a race that is moving noiselessly from
the face of the earth; dreamers that sometimes waken
from their mysteriousness and simplicity, and then,
blood, brutality, and all the ferocity that marks a man
of maddened passions, women without mercy and
without reason, brand them with the appropriate
name of savages.

But beyond this, I have a word to say for the
Indian. I saw him as he was, not as he is. In
one little spot of our land, I saw him as he was
centuries ago in every part of it perhaps, a Druid and
a dreamer—the mildest and the tamest of beings.
I saw him as no man can see him now. I saw him
as no man ever saw him who had the desire and
patience to observe, the sympathy to understand, and

the intelligence to communicate his observation to
those who would really like to understand him.
He is truly “the gentle savage;” the worst and the
best of men, the tamest and the fiercest of beings.
The world cannot understand the combination of these
two qualities. For want of truer comparison let us
liken him to a jealous woman—a whole souled uncultured
woman, strong in her passions and her love.
A sort of Parisian woman, now made desperate by a
long siege and an endless war.

A singular combination of circumstances laid his
life bare to me. I was a child and he was a child.
He permitted me to enter his heart.

As I write these opening lines here to-day in the
Old World, a war of extermination is declared against
the Modoc Indians in the New. I know these people.
I know every foot of their once vast possessions,
stretching away to the north and east of Mount Shasta.
I know their rights and their wrongs. I have known
them for nearly twenty years.

Peace commissioners have been killed by the
Modocs, and the civilized world condemns the
act. I am not prepared to defend it. This narrative
is not for its defence, or for the defence of
the Indian or any one; but I could, by a ten-line
paragraph, throw a bombshell into the camp of the
civilized world at this moment, and change the whole
drift of public opinion. But it would be too late to

be of any particular use to this one doomed tribe.

Years and years ago, when Captain Jack was but
a boy, the Modocs were at war with the whites, who
were then scouring the country in search of gold.
A company took the field under the command of a
brave and reckless ruffian named Ben Wright.

The Indians were not so well armed and equipped
as their enemies. The necessities of the case, to say
nothing of their nature, compelled them to fight from
behind the cover of the rocks and trees. They were
hard to reach, and generally came out best in the
few little battles that were fought.

In this emergency Captain Wright proposed to meet
the chiefs in council, for the purpose of making a
lasting and permanent treaty. The Indians consented,
and the leaders came in. “Go back,” said Wright,
“and bring in all your people; we will have council,
and celebrate our peace with a feast.”

The Indians came in in great numbers, laid
down their arms, and then at a sign Wright and his
men fell upon them, and murdered them without
mercy. Captain Wright boasted on his return that
he had made a permanent treaty with at least a thousand
Indians.

Captain Jack was but a boy then, but he was a
true Indian. He was not a chief then. I believe he
was not even of the blood which entitles him to that
place by inheritance, but he was a bold, shrewd

Indian, and won the confidence of the tribe. He
united himself to a band of the Modocs, worked his
way to their head, and bided his time for revenge.
For nearly half a lifetime he and his warriors waited
their chance, and when it came they were not unequal
to the occasion.

They have murdered, perhaps, one white man to
one hundred Indians that were butchered in the
same way, and not so very far from the same spot.
I deplore the conduct of the Modocs. It will contribute
to the misfortune of nearly every Indian in
America, however well some of the rulers of the land
may feel towards the race.

With these facts before you, considering our
superiority in understanding right and wrong, and
all that, you may not be so much surprised at the
faithful following in this case of the example we set
the Modoc Indians, which resulted in the massacre,
and the universal condemnation of Captain Jack and
his clan.

To return to my reason for publishing this sketch
at this time. You will see that treating chiefly of
the Indians, as it does, it may render them a service,
that by-and-by would be of but little use, by instructing
good men who have to deal with this peculiar
people.

I know full well how many men there are on the
border who are ready to rise up and contradict

everything that looks like clemency or an apology
for the Indian, and have therefore given only a brief
account of the Ben Wright treachery and tragedy,
and only such an account as I believe the fiercest
enemy of the Indians living in that region admits to
be true, or at least, such an account as Ben Wright
gave and was accustomed to boast of.

The Indian account of the affair, however, which I
have heard a hundred times around their camp fires,
and over which they seemed to never tire of brooding
and mourning, is quite another story. It is dark
and dreadful. The day is even yet with them, a sort
of St. Bartholomew's Eve, and their mournful narration
of all the bloody and brutal events would fill a
volume.

They waited for revenge, a very bad thing for
Indians to do, I find; though a Christian king can
wait a lifetime, and a Christian nation half a century.
They saw their tribe wasting away every year;
every year the hordes of white settlers were eating
into the heart of their hunting grounds, still they lay
in their lava beds or moved like shadows through the
stormy forests and silently waited, and then when
the whites came into their camp to talk for peace, as
they had gone into the camp of the whites, they
showed themselves but too apt scholars in the bloody
lesson of long ago.

The scene of this narrative lies immediately about

the base of Mount Shasta. The Klamat river with its
tributaries flows from its snows on the north, and the
quiet Sacramento from the south. The Shasta
Indians, now but the remnant of a tribe at one time
the most powerful on the Pacific, live at the south
base of the mountain, while the Modocs and Pit
River Indians live at the east and north-east, with the
Klamats still to the north. The other sides and base
of the mountain is disputed territory, since the driving
out of its original owners, between settlers and
hunters, and the roving bands of Indians.

It was late in the fall. I do not know the day
or even remember the month; but I do know that I
was alone, a frail, sensitive, girl-looking boy, almost
destitute, trying to make my way to the mines of
California, and that before I had ridden my little
spotted Cayuse pony half way up the ten-mile trail
that then crossed the Siskiyou mountains, I met
little patches of snow; and that a keen, cold wind
came pitching down between the trees into my face
from the California side of the summit.

At one place I saw where a moccasin track was in
the snow, and leading across the trail; a very large
track I thought it was then, but now I know that
it was made by many feet stepping in the same impression.

My dress was scant enough for winter, and it was
chill and dismal. A fantastic dress, too, for one looking

to the rugged life of a miner; a sort of cross
between an Indian chief and a Mexican vaquero, with
a preference for colour carried to extremes.

As I approached the summit the snow grew deeper,
and the dark firs, weighted with snow, reached their
sable and supplie limbs across my path as if to catch
me by the yellow hair, that fell, like a school-girl's,
on my shoulders. Some of the little firs were covered
with snow, and were converted into pyramids
and snowy pillars.

I crossed the summit in safety, with a dreamy sort
of delight, a half-articulated “Thank God!” and
began to descend. Here the snow disappeared on the
south side of the mountain, and a generous flood of
sunshine took its place.

After a while I turned a sharp-cut point in the
trail, with dense woods hanging on either shoulder,
and an open world before me. I lifted my eyes and
looked away to the south.

Mount Shasta was before me. For the first time I
now looked upon the mountain in whose shadows so
many tragedies were to be enacted; the most comely
and perfect snow peak in America. Nearly a hundred
miles away, it seemed in the pure, clear atmosphere
of the mountains to be almost at hand. Above the
woods, above the clouds, almost above the snow, it
looked like the first approach of land to another
world. Away across a grey sea of clouds that arose

[ILLUSTRATION]

CROSSING THE SUMMIT

[Description: 645EAF. Illustration page. A man on a horse is passing between two rock outcroppings. Wind blows the horse's mane and his shawl. In the background are mountains.]

from the Klamat and Shasta rivers, the mountain
stood, a solitary island; white and flashing like a
pyramid of silver! solemn, majestic and sublime!
Lonely and cold and white. A cloud or two about
his brow, sometimes resting there, then wreathed and
coiled about, then blown like banners streaming in
the wind.

I had lifted my hands to Mount Hood, uncovered
my head, bowed down and felt unutterable things,
loved, admired, adored, with all the strength of an
impulsive and passionate young heart. But he who
loves and worships naturally and freely, as all strong,
true souls must and will do, loves that which is most
magnificent and most lovable in his scope of vision.
Hood is a magnificent idol; is sufficient, if you do not
see Shasta.

A grander or a lovelier object makes shipwreck of
a former love. This is sadly so.

Jealousy is born of an instinctive knowledge of
this truth....

Hood is rugged, kingly, majestic, immortal! But
he is only the head and front of a well-raised family.
He is not alone in his splendour. Your admiration
is divided and weakened. Beyond the Columbia
St. Helen's flashes in the sun in summer or is folded
in clouds from the sea in winter. On either hand
Jefferson and Washington divide the attention; then
farther away, fair as a stud of fallen stars, the white

Three Sisters are grouped together about the fountain
springs of the Willamette river;—all in a line—
all in one range of mountains; as it were, mighty
milestones along the way of clouds!—marble pillars
pointing the road to God.

Mount Shasta has all the sublimity, all the
strength, majesty, and magnificence of Hood; yet is
so alone, unsupported, and solitary, that you go
down before him utterly, with an undivided adoration—a
sympathy for his loneliness and a devotion
for his valour—an admiration that shall pass unchallenged.

I dismounted and stood in the declining sun, hat in
hand, and looked long and earnestly across the sea of
clouds. Now and then long strings of swans went
by to Klamat lakes. I could hear them calling to
each other. Far and faint and unearthly their echoes
seemed, and were as sounds that had lost their way,
and came to me for protection.

I looked and listened long but uttered not a sound;
strangely mute for a boy; but exclamation at such a
time is a sacrilege.

At last I threw a kiss across the sea of clouds, as
the red banners and belts of gold streamed from the
summit in the setting-sun, and turned, took up my
lariat, mounted, and proceeded down the mountain.

Should ever your fortune lead you to cross the
Chinese wall that divides the people of Oregon from

the people of California, stop at the Mountain House
and ask for the old mountain trail. Take the direction
and stop at the top of what is called the first
summit of the Siskiyou mountains, for there you will
see to the left hand by the trail a pile of rocks high
as your head, put there to mark where a party fell a
few days after I passed the place.

Dismount and contribute a stone to the monument
from the loose rocks that lie up and down the
trail. It is a pretty Indian custom that the whites
sometimes adopt and cherish. I never fail to observe
it here, for this spot means a great deal to
me.

I uncover my head, take up a stone and lay it on
the pile, then turn my face to Mount Shasta and kiss
my hand, for the want of some better expression.