University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.
BONE AND SINEW.

STILL we wrought, the Prince and I, patiently
and industriously. So did thousands
above us and below us; there was a clang of
picks and shovels, the smiting of steel on the granite,
a sound through the sable forests, an echoing up the far
hill-sides like the march of an army to battle, clashing
the sword and buckler.

Every man that wrought there, worked for an object.
There was a payment to be met at home; a
mortgage to be lifted. The ambition of one I knew
was to buy a little home for his parents; another had
orphan sisters to provide for; this had an invalid
mother. This had a bride, and that one the promise
of a bride. Every man there had a history, a plan,
a purpose.

Every man there who bent above the boulders,
and toiled on silently under the dark-plumed pines
and the shadows of the steep and stupendous mountains,
was a giant in body and soul.

Never since the days of Cortez has there been
gathered together such a hardy and brave body of
men as these first men of the Pacific. When it took
six months' voyaging round the Horn, and imminent
perils, with like dangers and delays, to cross the
isthmus or the continent, then the weak of heart
did not attempt it and the weak of body died on the
way. The result was a race of men worthy of the
land. The world's great men were thus drawn out,
separated and set apart to themselves out here on the
Pacific.

There was another segregation and sifting out
after the Pacific was reached. There lay the mines
open to all who would work; no capital but a pick
and pan required. The most manly and independent
life on earth. At night you had your pay in your
hand, your reward weighed out in virgin gold. If
you made five, ten, fifty, or a thousand dollars that
day, you made it from the fall of no man; no decline
of stocks or turn in trade which carried some man to
the bottom brought you to the top; no speculation,
no office, no favour, only your own two hands and
your strong, true heart, without favour from any
man. You had contributed that much to the commerce
of the world. If there is any good in gold, you
had done that much good to the world, besides the
good to yourself. What men took this line of life!
But some preferred to trade, build towns, hang about

them, and practise their wits on their fellow-men.

You see at once that the miners were the cream
of the milk in this second separation.

The summer wore on, and Paquita remained with
us, an industrious, lovely little girl. She was the
pet of the camp. She dressed with taste, and was
modest, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful. It was
noticeable that men who lived in that vicinity dressed
much more neatly than in any other part of the
camp, and even men who had to pass that way to
reach The Forks kept their shaggy beards in shape,
and their shirt bosoms buttoned up when they passed.
Such is the influence of even the presence of woman.

Klamat was wild as ever. The miners would
suppose him spending his nights with us, and we
would suppose him still with them, and thus he had
it all his own way, wandered off with his club and
knife into the hills, down to the river, and slept
Heaven knows where.

At last one Sunday the Prince taught him the use
of the rifle. This was to him perhaps the greatest
event of his life. He danced with delight, made all
sorts of signs about the game he would kill, and how
much he would do for the Prince. He was faithful
to his word. He began to repay something of his
trouble. He brought game to the Prince and to us
in abundance, but refused to let any one else have so
much as a quail.

Once the Prince gave a shoulder of venison to some
neighbour boys below us. Klamat went down when
the men were at work, took the axe, broke open the
door, and took and threw the meat over the bank
into the claim. This made him natural enemies, and
it took great caution on the part of the Prince to save
his life.

He never talked, never smiled; a sour, bitter-looking
face was his, and he had no friends in the camp
outside our own cabin. He stood his club in the
corner now, and used the rifle instead. In a few days
he had polished the barrel and all the brass ornaments
till they shone like silver and gold.

Once a travelling missionary, as he called himself,
gave him a tract. He took it to Paquita, who held it
up and pretended to him that she could read it all as
readily as the white men. This was one of her little
deceits. Poor children. No one had time to teach
them to read, or to set them much of an example.
How they wondered at the endless toil of the men.

The Doctor in the meantime ranged around the
hill sides, wrote some, gathered some plants, and
seemed altogether the most listless, wretched, miserable
man you could conceive. He made his home
in our cabin now, and rarely went to town; for
when he did, so sure one of the hangers-on about
the saloons was sure to insult him. Sometimes,
however, he would be obliged to go, such as when

some accident or severe illness would compel the
miners to send for him, and he never refused to
attend. On one of these occasions, Spades, half
drunk and wholly vicious, caught the Doctor by the
throat as he met him in the trail near town, and
shook him much as he had been shaken by Sandy
some months before.

Spades boasted he had made his old teeth rattle
like rocks in a rocker. The Doctor said nothing, but
got off as best he could and came home. He did
not even mention the matter to any one.

Shortly after this Spades was found dead. He was
found just as the Judge had been found, close to his
cabin door, with the mortal stabs in the breast,
only he did not have the lock of hair in his hands
from the Doctor's head.

There was talk of a mob. This thing of killing
people in the night, even though they were the most
worthless men of the camp, and even though they
were killed in a way that suggested something like
fair play, and revenge rather than robbery, was not
to be indulged in, even at Humbug, with impunity.
Some of the idlers got together at the Howlin'
Wilderness to pass resolutions, and take some steps
in the matter, as Spades lay stretched out under
the old blue soldier coat on a pine slab that had
many dark stains across and along its rugged surface,
but they fell into an exciting game of poker, at ten

dollars a corner, and the matter for the time was left
to rest. No Antony came to hold up the dead Cæsar's
mantle, and poor Spades was buried much as he had
buried the Judge a short time before.

Some one consulted Sandy on the subject, about
the time of the funeral, as he stood at the bar of the
Howlin' Wilderness for his gin and peppermint.
Sandy was something of a mouth-piece for the miners,
not that he was a recognized leader; miners, as a
rule, decline to be led, but rather that he knew what
they thought on most subjects, and preferred to act
with them and express their thoughts, rather than
incline to the idlers about The Forks. He drank his
gin in silence, set down his glass, and said in an
oracular sort of way, as if to himself, when passing
out of the door:

“Well, let 'em rip; it's dog eat dog, anyhow!”

But it was evident that this matter would not blow
over as easily as did the death of the Judge. True,
there was no magistrate in camp yet, but there was a
live Sheriff in the city.

The Doctor went on as usual, avoiding men a little
more than before, but other than this I could see no
change in the man or his manner of life.

He and the Prince had many strange theories.
Men in the mines think out some great things, as
they dig for gold all day, with no sound save the
ripple of the mountain stream and the sharp quick

call of the quail in the chapparal, to disturb them,
through all the days of summer. They come upon
new thoughts as upon nuggets of gold.

Sometimes they talked in bitter terms about the
treatment of the Indians. They had humane and I
think just and possible theories on this subject, which
I remember very well, and may sometime submit to
the Government, if I can only get a hearing within
the next ten years. It will hardly be worth while
after that time, although, after the Indians are all
dead, no doubt we will have some very humane and
Christian plans advanced by which they may be made
a prosperous and contented people.

I am constantly asked: “Does not the Government
interfere? Does not the Government take charge of
these Indians after having taken their lands, and
lakes, and rivers?” Nonsense! The Government!
The Indian Bureau, Indian Agent, or whatever you
choose to call that part of the North American Republic
deputed to distribute red blankets and glass
beads to the North-American Indian, had not yet put
in an appearance on the Klamat. I doubt if he has
reached that particular portion of the interior to this
day.

When he does arrive he will find now only falling
lodges with grass growing rank about the doorways;
he will find mounds all up and down the river that
were made by a continual round of encampments

reaching back to a time when the Chaldeans named
the stars; he will find perhaps an old woman or two,
or a bent old warrior, sitting in rags and wretchedness,
lamenting, looking back with dimmed eyes to
another age, and that is all.

Twenty years ago the Indians of the Forks of the
Willamette, rode by my father's cabin in bands,
single file, a mile or two in length. They rode
spotted horses, had gay clothes and garments of many
colours. The squaws chanted songs of a monotonous
kind, not without some melody, as they rode by
astride, with papooses swinging on boards from the
saddle-bow, and were very happy.

They saw the country settling up day by day, but
never raised a hand against the whites.

The whites were insolent, it is true, for had not
Government given them the land, and had they not
journeyed a long way to possess it?

Then the country was fenced up and their ponies
could not get pasture; the lands were ploughed and
the squaws could not get roots and acorns. But worst
of all, the whites killed and frightened off the game,
and the Indians began to starve and die. Once or
twice they undertook to beg, about the Forks of the
Willamette, but the settlers set dogs on them, and
they went back to their lodges and died off in a few
years by thousands. The world wondered why the
Indians died. “They are passing away,” said the

substantial idiot who edited the “Star of the West.”
“They are a doomed race,” said the minister. I think
they were.

Less than six months ago I visited this spot. How
many Indians do you suppose I found there of the
permanent old settlers? Two! Captain Jim and
his squaw. All along the silver river, where it
makes its flashing course against the sun, the banks
are black and mellow, and the grass grows tall and
strong from the bones and ashes of the “doomed
race.”

Captain Jim declines to surrender to the Reservation.
They caught him once, him and his squaw,
but he got away after a year or two, and not only
brought back his own squaw, but one of a neighbouring
tribe, and has ever since been dodging about
through the hills overlooking the great valley where
his fathers were once the lords and masters, with
only the Great Spirit to say yea or nay to them.

Captain Jim is a harmless fellow, and a good hunter.
Sometimes in harvest he goes down in the fields and
binds wheat, and gets pay like a white man. His
squaws gather berries and sell them to the whites.
Sometimes they take a great fancy to children, and
give them all the berries they have, and will take
nothing for them. Captain Jim says that is not good
management. One day some one asked him why he
had two squaws. He studied awhile, and said he

had two squaws so that they could bury him when
he died.

He wears a stiff-brimmed beaver hat with feathers
in it; clothes like a white man, even to the white
shirt; smokes and chews tobacco, swears, and sometimes
gets drunk. In fact, he is so nearly civilized,
that no great efforts are now made to return him to
the Reservation.

Some day soon the two wives of Captain Jim will
be permitted to lay the last of the Willamette Indians
to sleep on the banks of that sunny river.

What would I do? It would be long to tell. But
I would blow the Indian Bureau to the moon. I
would put good men, and plenty of them, to look into
the Indians' interest. I would set apart, out of their
original possessions, good tracts of land for each tribe.
I would pay these men so well, if possible, that they
would not steal from the Indians, if I could not get
honest men otherwise. I would make their office
perpetual, and I would make it one of honor and of
trust.

But what do we do instead? We change the man
in charge every few years, before he has even got a
glimpse at the inner life of an Indian. We send out
some red-mouthed politician, who gets the place
because he happens to have a great influence with the
Irish vote of New York, or the German vote of Pennsylvania.
We wait, nine cases out of ten, till the

matter adjusts itself between the whites and the reds.
If the Indians are peaceful, as in the case of the Willamette,
why interfere? If they go to war they must
be made peaceful. This is the way it has gone and
still goes on, to the eternal disgrace of the country.
If a trouble comes of this clashing together of the
whites and the reds, we hear but one side of the
story. The Indian daily papers are not read.