University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
A WORD FOR THE RED MEN.

NOT a dog in camp. All had been eaten, I
suppose, long before. Children die first in
their famines; then the old men, then the
young men. The endurance of an Indian woman is
a marvel.

In the village, some of the white men claimed to
have found something that had been stolen. I have
not the least idea there was any truth in it. I
wish there was; then there might be some shadow of
excuse for all the murders that made up this cruel
tragedy, all of which is, I believe, literally true;
truer than nine-tenths of the history and official
reports written, wherein these people are mentioned;
and I stand ready to give names, dates, and detail to
all whom it may concern.

Let me not here be misunderstood. An Indian is
no better than a white man. If he sins let him
suffer. But I do protest against this custom of
making up a case—this custom of deciding the case

against him in favour of the white man, for ever, on
the evidence of the white man only; even though that
custom be, in the language of the law, so old “that
the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”

The white man and the red man are much alike,
with one great difference, which you must and will
set down to the advantage of the latter.

The Indian has no desire for fortune; he has no
wish in his wild state to accumulate wealth; and it
is in his wild state that he must be judged, for it is
in that condition that he is said to sin. If “money is
the root of all evil,” as Solomon hath it, then the
Indian has not that evil, or that root of evil, or any
desire for it.

It is the white man's monopoly. If an Indian
loves you, trusts you, or believes in you at all, he
will serve you, guide you through the country,
follow you to battle, fight for you, he and all his
sons and kindred, and never think of the pay or
profit. He would despise it if offered, beyond some
presents, some tokens of remembrance, decorations, or
simplest articles of use.

Again, I do vehemently protest against taking the
testimony of border Indians or any Indians with
whom the white man comes in constant contact, and
to whom he has taught the use of money and the art
of lying.

And most particularly I do protest against taking

these Indians—turn-skins and renegades—who
affiliate, mix, and strike hands with the whites, as
representative Indians. Better take our own
“camp followers” as respectable and representative
soldiers.

When you reflect that for centuries the Indians in
almost every lodge on the continent, at almost every
council, have talked of the whites and their aggressions,
and of these things chiefly, and always with that
bitterness which characterizes people who look at and
see only one side of a case, then you may come to
understand, a little, their eternal hatred of their
hereditary enemy—how deeply seated this is, how it
has become a part of their nature, and, above all,
how low, fallen, and how unlike a true Indian one
must be who leaves his retreating tribe and lingers in
a drunken and debauched fellowship with the whites,
losing all his virtues and taking on all the vices of
his enemy.

A pot-house politician should represent us at the
court of St. James's, if such an Indian is to be taken
as a representative of his race.

The true Indian retires before the white man's face
to the forest and to the mountain tops. It is very
true he leaves a surf, a sort of kelp and drift-wood,
and trash, the scum, the idlers, and the cowards and
prostitutes of his tribe, as the sea leaves weeds and
drift and kelp.

Judge not the sea by this, I implore you. This is
not the sea, but the refuse and dregs of the sea. The
misfortune of it is, however, that this is about all
that those who have written and pronounced upon
the character of the Indian have ever seen.

And, again, why hold the whole race, from Cariboo
to Cape Saint Lucas, responsible for a single sin?
Of course we may deplore the death of the white man
on the border. But for every white man that falls
the ghosts of a hundred Indians follow. A white man
is killed (half the time by a brother white man) and
the account of it fills the land. Telegraph and
printing-press reiterate, day after day, the whole
details, and who shall say that they grow less as they
spread to every household? The artist is called in.
His ingenuity is taxed and tortured to put the
horrible affair before the world in flaming illustrations,
and a general cry goes up against the Indians,
no matter where.

All right enough, no doubt; but who tells the tale
when the Indian falls, or who tells his side of the
story? A hundred Indians are killed in cold blood
by the settlers, and the affair is never heard of outside
the county where it occurs.

If we wish for justice let us, at least, try to be just.
If we do wrong it seems to me to take half the sin
away to be brave enough to admit it. At all events,
it shows that if we have one great sin we have also
one virtue—Valour.

Killed by the Indians! Yes, many good men have
been killed by the Indians with cause and without
cause. Many good men have also died of fevers. I
think a man is about as likely to die a natural death
in New York, New Orleans, or any other city, if he
remains there, as he is to be killed by the Indians,
should he travel or remain amongst them.

Take one case in point. I happen to know an old
man who has lived more than forty years on the
frontier and among the Indians. More than twenty
years ago he took his little family of children and
made the six months' journey through the heart of
the Indian countries across the great plains, almost
alone and entirely unarmed. I happen to know that
this old man, owing to his singularly quiet nature
and Quaker-like love of peace, never fired a gun or
pistol in his life for any purpose whatever. I happen
to know that he made many journeys through the
Indian countries; lived and still lives on the border,
always unarmed and utterly helpless in the use of
arms, and yet never received so much as an uncivil
word from an Indian. I am not mistaken in this, for
the old man referred to, is my father.

Twenty years' observation ought to enable one to
speak with intelligence on this subject; and I am free
to say that grandmothers never hold up before
naughty children a bigger or more delusive bug-a-boo
than this universal fear of Indians.

The village was soon consumed; and as the smoke
went up, black and sullen, from its embers, we turned
away towards our cabin. Most of the men had
already gone. A sort of chill had fallen over all, and
they scarcely spoke to each other now. They were
more than sober.

The blood, the burning camp, the cold and cruel
butchery, the perfect submission, the savage silence
in which the wretches died, the naked, bony forms
in the snow, had gone to the hearts of the men, and
they were glad to get away when all was over.

There was not an adventure, not an achievement,
not a hazard or escape of any one to allude to. The
only heroic act was that of the little skeleton savage
with his club. I think they almost wished they had
butchered and scalped this boy as they had threatened.
To think that the only achievement of the whole
affair worth mentioning was that of an Indian, and
an Indian boy at that! They did not mention it.

The men were nearly all gone now, stringing up
along the snowy trail by twos and threes, toward The
Forks. A few still lingered about the smouldering
wigwams, or stood looking down into the river, grinding
its blocks of ice in its mighty, rocky jaws.

The boy had not moved. I believe he had not
lifted his eyes. The sharp wind, pitching up and
down and across, cut him no doubt, on the one hand,
while the burning wigwams scorched him on the
other; but he did not move.

The Prince had stood there all this time like a
king, turning sometimes to watch this man or that,
but never going aside, never giving way an inch for
any one. They went around him, they avoided him,
or deferred to him in every way possible. From the
very moment he came down from the bluff to the
bank of the river, and they saw him in their midst,
they felt the presence of a master and a man.

I had always said to myself, this man is of royal
blood. This man was born to lead and control. To
me he had always stood, like Saul, a head and shoulders
above his fellows. I had always believed him a
king of men, and now I knew it.

He took the little girl by the hand, folded her robe
about her gently as if she had been a Christian
born, looked to her moccasins, and then cast about to
see who should take and provide for the boy. The
last man was going—gone!

There was a look of pain and trouble in the face of
the Prince. There was not a crust of bread in the
cabin: a poor place to which to take the two starved
children, to be sure.

The cast of care blew on with the wind; and with
the same old look of confidence and self-possession he
went up to the Indian boy, took him by the thin
little arm, and bade him arise and follow.

The boy started. He did not understand, and then
he understood perfectly. He stood up taller than

before. His face looked fierce and bitter, and his
hands lifted as if he would strike. The Prince smiled,
stooped and picked up his club, and put it in his
hand. This conquered him. He stood it against the
stone on which he had sat, took up a robe that lay
under his feet, fastened his moccasin strings, and we
moved away together and in silence.

The little girl would look up now and then, and
endeavour to be pleasant and do cunning things; but
this boy with his club tucked under his robe did not
look up, nor down, nor around him.

There were some dead that lay in the way; he did
not notice them. He walked across them as if they
had been clay. What could he have been thinking
of?

I know very well what I do; how unpopular and
unprofitable it is to speak a word for this weak and
unfriended people. A popular verdict seems of late
to have been given against them. Fate, too, seems
to have the matter in hand, for in the last decade
they have lost more ground than in the fifty preceding
years. Cannon are mounted on their strong-holds,
even on the summits of the Rocky Mountains. Bayonets
bristle in their forests of the north, and sabres
flash along the plains of the Apache. There is no
one to speak for them now, not one. If there was I
should be silent.

Game and fish have their seasons to come and go,

as regular as the flowers. Now the game go to the
hills, now to the valleys, to winter, now to the mountains,
to bring forth their young. You break in upon
their habits by pushing settlements here and there.
With the fish you do the same by building dams and
driving steam-boats, and you break the whole machinery
of their lives and stop their increase. Then the
Indians must starve, or push over on to the hunting
and fishing grounds of another tribe. This makes
war. The result is they fight—fight like dogs! almost
like Christians! Here is the whole trouble with this
doomed race, in a nut-shell.

Let us, sometimes, look down into this thing honestly,
try and find the truth, and understand.

Even the ocean has a bottom.

These rude red men love their lands and their
homes. The homes for which their fathers fought
for a thousand generations, where their fathers lie
buried with their deeds of daring written all over
the land, every mountain pass a page of history;
every mountain peak a monument to some departed
hero; every mountain stream a story and a tradition.
They love and cherish these as no other people can,
for their lands, their leafy homes, are all they have
to love.

I know very well that they have never received so
much as a red blanket for all the matchless and
magnificent Willamette valley; and, I may add, that

the whites never took that in war, and so cannot
claim it as a conquest. No white man's blood ever
stained that great and fertile valley at the hands of
an Indian.

True, there are Reservations over on the sea, forty
and fifty miles away from the valley; but the interior
Indian had as soon descend silently to his grave as
go there to live. Hundreds have so chosen and acted
on the choice. The sea-coast Indians are “fish-eaters.”
“They stink!” say the valley Indians, “while we of
the interior eat venison and acorns.”

Their feuds and wars were fierce, and reached farther
back than their traditions. Fancy these valley
Indians being induced to go over there on their enemies'
lands to make a home. Their own sense of
justice revolted at it. Besides, they knew they would
be murdered, one by one, in spite of the promises
and half-extended protection of the Government.

Let Germans, to-day, enter, helpless and unarmed,
even into civilized Paris, and sit down there without
ample protection, and see how it would be. Compel
certain celebrated leaders of the North to go down
unarmed and pitch their tents under the palm-trees
of the Ku-Klux, and mark what would follow.

The Indian agent of this Reservation by the sea,
who had Indians gathered in from a thousand miles
of territory, could not understand why Indians would
fight among themselves. “Ah! but they are a vile

set,” he said: “they fight among themselves like dogs.
They are a low set. They will soon kill each other
off.” And so they did.

The miserable heathens were as bad as the Christians
of the North and South. They fought amongst
each other. The ungrateful wretches! To fight
amongst themselves after all the Government had
done for them! Why did they not keep quiet, and
die of small-pox and cholera in the little pens built
for them, all at the expense of the Government?

If the Government invites settlers to a place, and
sells or gives away land that does not yet belong to
the Government, and a difficulty arises between the
immigrant and the Indian, and the whites get the
worst of it, why, send in a thousand young lieutenants,
thirsting for glory, and they will soon bring
them to terms, at a cost to the Government only a
few hundred times more than it would take to set the
Indians up comfortably for life. But if the Indians
get the worst of any little misunderstanding that
may arise, why—why, they get the worst of it, and
what is the use to interfere!

I was present once when the superintendent sent
a delegation of half-civilized Indians into the mountains
to the chief of the Shastas, old Worrotetot, called
Black-beard by the whites, for he was bearded like a
prophet, to ask him to surrender and go on to the
Reservation.

“Where is the Superintendent, the man of blankets?”

“Down in the valley, at the base of the Shasta
mountain.”

“Well, that is all right, I suppose. Let him stay
there, if he like, and I will stay here.”

“But we must take him an answer. Will you go
or not?”

“What can I do if I go?”

“You shall have a house, a farm, and horses.”

“Where?”

“Down at the Reservation, by the sea.”

“Bah! give me a piece of land down by the sea?
Where did he get it to give? Tell me that. The
white men took it from the Indians, and now want to
give it to me. I won't have it. It is not theirs to
give. They drove the Indians off, and stole their
land and camping places. I could have done that
myself. No. You go and tell your great father,
the blanket-maker, I do not want that land. I have
got land of my own high up here, and nearer to the
Great Spirit than his. I do not want his blankets:
I have a deer-skin; and my squaws and my children
all have skins, and we build great wood fires when it
snows. No, I will not go away from this mountain.
But you may tell him if he will take this mountain
along, I will go down by the sea and live on the
Reservation.”

We reached the cabin, and built a roaring fire.

“Stand your war-club there in the corner, Klamat,”
said the Prince to the boy, “and come to the fire.
This is your home now.” The boy did as he was bid,
not as a slave, but proud and unbending as a chief in
council.

The little girl had washed her hands and face,
thrown back her long luxuriant hair, and stood drying
herself by the fire, quite at home.

Two more mouths to feed, and where was the bread
to come from?

Soon the Prince went out and left us there. He
returned in a little while with a loaf of bread.

Where on earth did he get it? I never knew.
Maybe he stole it.

He divided it with a knife carefully into three
pieces, gave first to the Indian boy, then to the Indian
girl, and then to me. Then he stood there a moment,
looked a little embarrassed, but finally said something
about wood and went out.

We ate our bread as the axe smote and echoed
against the pine-log outside.

A certain strong magnet attracts from out the
grains of gold, all the ironstone and black sand to itself.
It seemed there was something in the nature of this
man that attracted all the helpless, and weak, and
friendless to his side. He had not sought these little
savages. That would have been folly, if not an absolute

wrong to them. There was, perhaps, not another
man in camp as little capable of caring for them as
he. He had rather tried to avoid them, particularly
the boy; but when they fell into his hands, when fate
seemed to put them there, he took them proudly,
boldly, and trusted to fortune, as all brave men will
trust it, and without question.

To see those Indians eat—daintily, only a little
bit at a time, then put it under the robe, stealthily,
and look about; then a memory, and the head would
bend and the eyes go down; then the little piece of
bread would be withdrawn, eyed wistfully, a morsel
broken off, and then the piece again returned beneath
the robe, to be again withdrawn as they found it impossible
to resist the hunger that consumed them.

But Indians are strangely preservative, and these
had just endured a bitter school. They had learned
the importance of hoarding a bit for to-morrow, and
even the next morning had quite a piece of bread still.
How could they suppose that any one would provide,
or attempt to provide, for them the next day?

The Prince came in at last from the dusk, and we
all went out and helped to bring the wood from the
snow.

I am bound to say that I suddenly grew vastly in
my own estimation that evening. Up to this time I
had been the youngest person in all the camp, the
most helpless, the least of all. Here was a change.

Here were persons more helpless than myself; some
one now that I could advise, direct, dictate to and
patronize.

There must be a point in each man's life when he
becomes a man—turns from the ways of a boy.

I dare say any man can date his manhood from
some event, from some little circumstance that seemed
to invest him with a sort of majesty, and dignify him,
in his own estimation, at least, with manhood. A
man must first be his own disciple. If he does not
first believe himself a man, he may be very sure the
world, not one man or woman of the world, will
believe it.

We sat late by the fire that night. The little girl
leaned against the wall by the fire-side and slept, but
the boy seemed only to brighten and awake as the
night went on. He looked into the fire. What did
he see? What were his thoughts? What faces were
there? Fire, and smoke, and blood—the dead!

Down before the fire in their fur-robes we laid the
little Indians to sleep, and sought our blankets in the
bunks against the wall.

Through the night one arose and then the other,
and stirred the fire silently and lay down. Indians
never let their fires go out in their lodges in time of
peace. It is thought a bad omen, and then it is
inconvenient, and certainly not the thing to do in the
winter.

The Prince was up early the next morning. He
could not sleep. Why? Starve yourself a week and
you will understand. I did not think or ask myself
then why he could not sleep. I know now.

He went to town at day-break. Then when we
had rolled a back log into the spacious fire-place, and
built a fire under my direction, a new style of architecture
to the Indians, with a fore-stick on the stone
and irons, and a heap of kindling wood in the centre,
I induced Klamat to wash his face, and helped him to
wash the blood from his hair in a pan of tepid water.

The little girl without any direction made her
toilet, poor child, in a simple, natural way, with a
careful regard for the effect of falls of dark hair on
her brown shoulders and about her face; and then
we all sat down and looked at the fire and at each
other in silence.

Soon the Prince returned, and wonderful to tell,
he had on his shoulder a sack of flour. All flour in
the mines is put in fifty-pound sacks, so as to be easily
packed and unpacked, in the transportation over the
mountains on the backs of mules, and is branded
“Fifty Pounds, Self-rising, Warranted Superfine.”

The Prince's face was beaming with delight. He
took the sack from his shoulder gently, set it on the
empty flour-bench in the corner, as carefully and
tenderly as if it had been a babe—as if it had been
his own firstborn.

The “Doctor” came with him. Not on a professional
visit, however, but as a friend, and to see the
Indians.

Now this Doctor was a character, a special part of
The Forks. Not a lovely part or an excellent part in
the estimation of either saloon-men or miners, but he
filled a place there that had been left blank had he
gone away, and that was not altogether because he
was the only doctor in the place, but because he was
a man of marked individuality.

A man who did not care three straws for the good
or ill-will of man, and, as a consequence, as is always
the fortune of such men when they first appear in a
place, was not popular. He was a foreigner of some
kind; maybe a German. I know he was neither an
American nor an Irishman. He was too silent and
reserved to have been either of these.

He was a small, light-haired man, a sort of an
invalid, and a man who had no associates whatever.
He was always alone, and never spoke to you if he
could help it.

How the Prince made this man's acquaintance I
do not know. Most likely he had gone to him that
morning deliberately, told him the situation of things,
asked for help, and had it for the asking. For my
part, I had rather have seen almost anyone else enter
the cabin. I did not like him from the first time that
I ever saw him.

“Come here, Paquita,” said the Doctor, as he sat
down on the three-legged stool by the fire, and held
out his hand to the Indian girl. She drew her robe
modestly about her bosom and went up to the man,
timid but pleasantly.

I knew no more of this Doctor, or his name, than
of the other men around me.

He came into the camp as a doctor, and had pill
bags and a book or two, and was called The Doctor.

Had another doctor come, he would have been
called Doctor Brown, or Smith, or Jones, provided
that neither of these names, or the name given him
by the camp, was the name given him by his parents.
I know a doctor who wore the first beaver hat into
a camp, and was called Doctor Tile. He could not
get rid of that name. If he had died in that camp,
Doctor Tile would have been the name written on
the pine board at his head.

I can hardly account for this habit of nick-naming
men in the mines. Maybe it was done in the interest
of those who really desired and felt the need of a
change of name. No doubt it was a convenient thing
for many; but for this wholesale re-naming of men,
I see no sufficient reason. Possibly it was because
these men, in civilization, had become tired of Col.
William Higginson, The Hon. George H. Ferguson,
Major Alfred Percival Brown, and so on to the end
and exhaustion of handles and titles of men, and

determined out here to have it their own way, to set
up a sort of democracy in the matter of names.

“I will bake some bread, Doctor, for my babies;”
and the Prince threw off his coat and rolled up his
sleeves, and went to work. He opened the mouth
of his burden on the bunk, thrust in his hand, drew
out the yellow flour in the gold pan, poured in cold
water from the bucket, and soon had a luscious cake
baking before the fire in the frying-pan.

Bread for my babies! Poor brave devil! When
had he tasted bread?

Little Klamat retreated to his club, and stood with
his back to the corner, with his head down, but at
the same time watching the Doctor from under his
hair, as a cat watches a mouse; only he was not the
cat in this case, by a great deal.

The Doctor talked but little, and then only in an
enigmatical sort of a way with the Prince. He did
not notice me, and that contributed to my instinctive
dislike. Soon he took leave, and we four ate bread
together.

A wind came up the Klamat from the sea, soft
and warm enough to drip the icicles from the cabin
eaves, and make the drooping trees along the river
bank raise their heads from the snow as if with
hope.

The Doctor came frequently and spent the evening
as the weeks went by. The butchers' mules came

braying down the trail ere long, and we needed bread
and meat no more.

The thunder boomed away to the west one night
as if it had been the trump of resurrection; a rain set
in, and the next morning, Humbug Creek, as if it had
heard a Gabriel blow, had risen and was rushing
toward the Klamat and calling to the sea.

Some birds were out, squirrels had left the rocks
and were running up and down the pines, and places
where the snow had melted off and left brown burrs
and quills, and little shells. The back-bone of the
winter storm was broken.

To return once more to the Doctor: I can hardly
say why I disliked him at first, or at all. One thing
is certain, however, he was bald on the top or rather
on the back of his head; and from childhood, I have
always had a prejudice against men who first become
bald on the back instead of the front of the head.

It looks to me as if they had been running away,
trying to escape from somewhere or something, when
old Time caught them by the back of the hair as they
fled, and scalped them on the spot.