University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
THE LAST OF THE LOST CABIN.

THESE Indians use but few words. A coward
and a liar is the same with them; they
have no distinct terms of expressing the two
sins. Sometimes a single eloquent gesture means a
whole sentence, and expresses it, too, better than
could a multitude of words.

I said to the old chief one day,

“Your language is very poor; it has so few
words.”

“We have enough. It does not take many words
to tell the truth,” he answered.

“Ah, but we have a hundred words to your one.”

“Well, you need them.”

There was a stateliness in his manner when he
said this, and a toss of the head, that meant a whole
chapter.

He seemed to say, “Yes, from the number of lies
you have told us, from the long treaties that meant
nothing that you have made with us; from the

multitude of promises that you have made and
broken, and made again, back as far as the traditions
of my people go, I should say that you needed even
a thousand words to our one.”

“Words, umph! Tell me how my dog looks out
of his eyes?”

The old Indian arose as he said this, and gathered
his blanket about his shoulders. The dog lay with
his nose on his two paws, and his eyes raised to his
master's.

“You have not words enough in all your books
to picture a single look from the eyes of my dog.”

He drew his blanket closer about him, turned away,
and the dog arose and followed him.

I had a pocket Bible with me once, in his camp.
I was young, enthusiastic, and anxious to do a little
missionary business on my own responsibility. I
showed it to the chief, and undertook to tell him
what it was.

“It is promise of God to man,” I said, “His
written promise to us, that if we do as He has commanded
us to do, we shall live and be happy for
ever when we die.”

He took it in his hand, upside down, and looked at
the outside and inside very attentively.

“Promises! Is it a treaty?”

“Well, it is a treaty, perhaps; at least, it is a
promise, and He wrote it.”

“Did it take all of this to say that? I do not
like long treaties. I do not like any treaties on paper.
They are so easy to break. The Indian does not
want his God to sign a paper. He is not afraid to
trust his God.”

“But the promises and the resurrection?” I urged.

He pointed to the new leaves on the tree, the
spears that were bursting through the ground,
handed me the book gruffly, and said no more.

The Prince was gone, perhaps to return no more. I
was again utterly alone with the Indians. I looked
down and out upon the world below as looking
upon a city from a tower, and was not unhappy.

I dwelt now altogether with the chief. His lodge
was my home; his family my companions. We rode
swift horses, sailed on the little mountain lakes with
grass and tule sails, or sat down under the trees in
summer, where the wind came through from the sea,
and drank in silently the glories and calm delights
of life together. Nothing wanted, nothing attempted.
We were content, silent, and satisfied. Was it not
enough?

Despise a love of nature, and even a love of woman,
that is ranted and talked about as if it were a pain in
the stomach. A dog may howl his passion, but the
most of beasts are more decent in this than the mass
of men.

“They will find the cabin, yet,” said the chief, “if

it is allowed to stand. Then they will search
till they find the mine, then a crowd of people will
come, like grasshoppers in the valley; my warriors
will be murdered, my forests cut down, my grass
will be burned, my game driven off, and my people
will starve. As their father to whom they look for
protection and support, I cannot allow it to stand.”

“It shall be as you say. Send some men with
me. What care I for the cabin, and what is a mine
of gold to me here?”

We went down, we burned the cabin to the ground.
We did not leave even a pine board, and after
the embers had cooled and a rain had settled the
ashes, we dug up the soil and scattered seeds of
reeds and grass on the spot. The stumps, chips,
logs, everything was burned that bore the mark of
the white man's axe.

A year or two afterwards I passed there, and all
was wild and overgrown with grass, the same as if
no man had ever sat down and rested there below the
boughs.

Some pines that stood too close to the burning
cabin had yellow branches at one side, and where
the bark had burned on that side they were gnarled
and seared, and stood there parched up and ugly, in
a circle, as if making faces at some invisible object in
their midst.

That is all there is really of the lost cabin, which

once created such a commotion in northern California.

Men came, less numerous of course, each season,
year after year, looking for the lost cabin, for it was
pleasant to come up from the hot plains of the
Sacramento, and up from the cities on the sea, and
camp here by the cool streams, and travel under the
great trees away from even a hint of the sun; but
they never found so much as a trace of the lost
cabin, and at last gave it up as a myth not unlike
Gold Lake, Gold Beach, and the Lost Dutchman of
the earliest days of the Pacific excitements.

I did not return to the mine because, in the first
place, I believed that it was only a treacherous
pocket that had nothing more to give but promises.
But beyond all that, I was trying to rise to the dignity
of some little virtue, after the Prince had shown so
much, and these Indians had set such good examples.
What should I do with the gold, even if I found a
mountain of it? My wants were few and simple.
Except to make journeys, I did not need a dollar.
I had all that I could use; what use, then, had I
for more?

I could only point it out to my countrymen, and
that meant toil and strife, privation and endurance
for them; for the Indians it meant annihilation.
With the constant sense before me that it was and is
exhausted, I have been enabled to let the leaves fall
there, and the moss to grow in the mine for many,

many years. Sometimes we have almost to lie to
ourselves to get strength to do a simple act of
justice; nay, to even not do a deliberate wrong.

What, after all, if my grand, old, noble pyramid of
the north, white as faith, sphinx-like looking out over
the desert plains of the east, the seas of the west,
the sable woods that environ it, should be built on a
solid base of gold!

When the Modoc has led his last warrior to battle
up yonder in his rocky fortress, fired his last shot, and
the grass is growing in the last war-path of those
people, then, and not till then, I may go up where the
solemn trees with their dead limbs stand around,
making faces at something in the centre, pitch a tent
there, and go down in the canon with men, and picks
and shovels, and bars of steel and iron.

At the same time, I am trying to bring myself up
to the conviction of the truth, that a great deal of
gold is rather to be avoided than sought after. Every
day I look around, and see how many thousands
there are who have gold and nothing else; I see the
sin there is in it and the getting of it. The ten
thousand temptations it brings a man, tied up in the
bags along with it, and let out when it is let out,
inseparable from it. I see that it is sinking my country,
morally, every day; and yet with this steady drift
of all things toward the one goal, this sailing of every
ship in life for the one Golden Gate, barren as it is,

forgetting the green isles of palm and the warm
winds there; I say, with all this, it is hard to stand up
tall and despise it.

Save money for the children? Bosh! Are you
afraid to put them down on the track of life, to take
a fair and even start with the rest? Do you want
to start them ahead of nine-tenths of those who have
to run the race of life? Do you think they have not
brains or backbone enough to make their way with
the rest? How many of all the millions can start
with a fortune?

No. Put them out on the track, well trained and
strong, and let them run the race fairly and squarely
with the humblest there, and then if they win they
win like men.

Must have money to appear well! Fiddlesticks!
To buy a new coat and furniture, so as
to receive your friends. My dear sir, friends never
yet came to see a man's new coat or his nice
house; never! If your friends want to see new
coats, they can go to the clothing stores and see a
thousand every day for nothing.

No, we do not hoard up money altogether for the
children, or for friends to look upon, but we heap it
up because we are selfish cowards! Because we have
not nerve enough to stand on our own merit, or having
so little merit and so much money, we prefer to
trust to the latter for a place in the eyes of the world.

And then there is a low, contemptible fear that we
will come to want, and so toil and toil and build a barricade
of gold about us, and die at last in fear,
pinched to death between twenty-dollar pieces, that
the starved and hungry soul has crept between, with
the last bit of young, strong manhood that we were
born with crushed utterly out of us.