University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
MY NEW REPUBLIC.

HERE for the first time a plan which had
been forming in my mind ever since I first
found myself among these people began to
take definite shape. It was a bold and ambitious
enterprise, and was no less a project than the establishment
of a sort of Indian Republic—“a wheel
within a wheel,” with the grand old cone Mount
Shasta for the head or centre.

To the south, reaching from far up on Mount
Shasta to far down in the Sacramento valley, lay the
lands of the Shastas, with almost every variety of
country and climate; to the south-east the Pit River
Indians, with a land rich with pastures and plains
teeming with game; to the north-east lay the Modocs,
with lakes and pasture-lands enough to make a
State. My plan was to unite these three tribes in
a confederacy under the name of the United Tribes,
and by making a claim and showing a bold front to
the Government, secure by treaty all the lands near

the mountain, even if we had to surrender all the
other lands in doing so.

It might have been called a kind of Indian reservation,
but it was to be a reservation in its fullest
and most original sense, such as those first allotted to
the Indians. Definite lines were to be drawn, and
these lines were to be kept sacred. No white man
was to come there without permission. The Indians
were to remain on the land of their fathers. They
were to receive no pay, no perquisites or assistance
whatever from the Government. They were simply
to be let alone in their possessions, with their rites,
customs, religion, and all, unmolested. They were
to adopt civilization by degrees and as they saw fit,
and such parts of it as they chose to adopt. They
were to send a representative to the State and the
national capitals if they chose, and so on through
a long catalogue of details that would have left them
in possession of that liberty which is as dear to the
Indian as to any being on earth.

Filled with plans for my little Republic I now
went among the Modocs, whom I had always half
feared since they had killed and plundered the old
trader, and boldly laid the case before them, They
were very enthusiastic, and some of the old councilmen
named me chief; yet I never had any authority
to speak of till too late to use it to advantage.

I drew maps and wrote out my plans, and sent them

to the commanding officer of the Pacific Coast, the
Governor of the State, and the President of the
Republic. Full of enthusiasm and splendid plans
were the letters I sent, and no doubt full of bad
spelling and worse grammar; but they were honest,
sincere, and well meant, and deserved something
better than the contemptuous silence they received.

I thought of this thing day after day, and it came
upon me at last like a great sunrise, full and
complete. The Indians entered into it with all their
hearts. Their great desire was to have a dividing
line—a mark that would say, Thus far will we come
and no farther. They did not seem to care about
details or particulars where the line would be drawn,
only that it should be drawn, and leave them secure
in bounds which they could call their own. They
would submit to almost anything for this.

Remove they would not; but they were tired of a
perpetual state of half-war, half-peace, that brought
only a steady loss of life and of land, without any
lookout ahead for the better, and would enter into
almost any terms that promised to let them and theirs
permanently and securely alone. I may say here
in a kind of parenthesis that the only way an Indian
can get a hearing is to go to war, and thus call the
attention of the Government to the fact of his
existence.

How magnificent and splendid seemed my plan!

Imagination had no limit. Here would be a national
park, a place, one place in all the world, where men
lived in a state of nature, and when all the other
tribes had passed away or melted into the civilization
and life of the white man, here would be a
people untouched, unchanged, to instruct and interest
the traveller, the moralist, all men.

When the world is done gathering gold, I said, men
will come to these forests to look at nature, and be
thankful for the wisdom and foresight of the age that
preserved this vestige of an all but extinct race.
There was a grandeur in the thought, a sort of
sublimity, that I shall never feel again. A fervid
nature, a vivid imagination, and, above all, the
matchless and magnificent scenery, the strangely silent
people, the half-pathetic stillness of the forests, all
conspired to lift me up into an atmosphere where the
soul laughs at doubt and never dreams of failure. A
ship-wrecked race, I said, shall here take rest. To
the east and west, to the north and south, the busy
commercial world may swell and throb and beat and
battle like a sea; but on this island, around this
mountain, with their backs to this bulwark, they
shall look untroubled on it all. Here they shall
live as their fathers lived before the newer pyramids
cast their little shadows, or camels kneeled in the
dried-up seas.

I went to Yreka, the nearest convenient post-office,

nearly one hundred miles away, and waited for my
answers in vain. I wrote again, but with the same
result.

I saw that I must learn something more of the
white man, mix with him, observe his manners and
disposition more closely than I had done. I said to
myself, I have been a dreamer. I am now awake,
and I have a purpose.

That purpose became my hobby. I rode that
hobby to the bitter end. Old men have hobbies
sometimes as well as boys. The Civil War was born
of hobbies. When a hobby becomes a success it is
then baptised and given another name.

I engaged in many pursuits through the summer,
always leaving a place or calling so soon as it afforded
me no further instruction. On Deadwood, a mining
stream with a large and prosperous camp, I found
some old acquaintances of The Forks, and finding also
a library, a debating society, and a temperance
lodge, I joined all these, took part, and on every fit
and unfit occasion began to urge my hobby. Yet I
never admitted that I had cast my fortune with the
Indians or even had been among them. This would
have been disgrace and defeat at once. I engaged
as a common laborer, shovelling dirt and running
a wheelbarrow with broad-backed Irishmen and
tough Missourians, in order to get acquainted with
the men who clustered about the library. The

books—300 in number—were kept at the cabins of
the men who employed me. Of course I could not
stand the work long, but I accomplished my object.
I got acquainted with the most intelligent men of
the camp, and so enlarged my life.

I remained a month. I read Byron and Plutarch's
Lives over and over again. They were the only
books I cared at all to read, and they were the very
books that I in that state of mind should not have
read. I pictured myself the hero of all I read.
Instead of being awakened, I was only dreaming a
greater dream.

I returned to Soda Springs ranch, and Mountain
Joe went with me to the Indian camp, but I never
took him into my confidence. Not but he was a
brave, true man, but that he was unfortunately
sometimes given to getting drunk, and besides that,
he was the last man to sympathize with the Indian
or any plan that looked to his improvement. I laid
in my supplies, and proposed to spend my winter
with the Indians. I loved Mountain Joe fondly; and
in spite of his prophecies that he would see me no
more, returned to the camp on the Upper McCloud.
As feed for stock was scarce on the ranch, I with
my Indians took the horses on the McCloud to winter.
My camp was about seventy-five miles from the
Pit River settlements, and about thirty miles from
Soda Springs. These were the nearest white habitations.
I was partly between the two.

About mid-winter the chief led his men up towards
the higher spurs of the mountain for a great
hunt. After some days on the head-waters of the
McCloud, at some hot springs in the heart of a deep
forest and dense undergrowth, we came upon an
immense herd of elk. The snow was from five to
ten feet deep. We had snow shoes, and as the elk
were helpless, after driving them from the thin
snow and trails about the springs into the deep
snow, the Indians shot them down as they wallowed
along, by hundreds.

Camp was now removed to this place, with the
exception of a few who preferred to remain below,
and feasting and dancing became the order of the
winter.

Soon Klamat and a few other young and spirited
Indians said they were going to visit some other
camp that lay a day or two to the east, and disappeared.

In about a month they returned. After the usual
Indian silence, they told a tale which literally froze
my blood. It made me ill.

The Indians had got into difficulty with the white
men of Pit River valley about their women, and
killed all but two of the settlers. These two they
said had escaped to the woods, and were trying to
get back through the snow to Yreka. The number
of the settlers I do not remember, but they did not
exceed twenty, and perhaps not more than ten.

There were no women or children in the valley at
the time of the massacre; only the men in charge of
great herds of stock.

This meant a great deal to me. I began to reflect
on what it would lead to. The affair, no matter who
was to blame, would be called another dreadful
massacre by the bloodthirsty savages; of this I was
certain. Possibly it was a massacre, but the Indian
account of it shows them to have been as perfectly
justified as ever one human being can be for taking
the life of another.

I have been from that day to this charged with
having led the Indians in this massacre. I deny
nothing; I simply tell what I know and all I know of
this matter as briefly as possible, and let it pass.

The massacre, as it is called, occurred in the first
month of the year 1867. The whites were besieged
by the Indians in a strong wooden house, a perfect
fortress. The Indians asked them to surrender,
offering to conduct them safely to the settlements.
They felt secure, and laughed at the proposition. A
long fight followed, in which many Indians fell. At
last the Indians carried great heaps of hay to the
walls, fired them, and the whites perished.