University of Virginia Library

33. CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE LAST OF THE CHILDREN OF SHASTA.

I LEANED from the black stone wall that
sheltered the lodges from the south, and
watched the white McCloud riding like a stream
of light through the forest under me, and thought of
many things.

Yonder lay my beautiful Now-aw-wa valley; that
was wholly mine, that I should never possess, to
which I should never dare assert my right, and there,
not far away, were the ashes of the great Chief of
the Shastas. Strangely enough he had fought his
last fight there, not far from the spot where he had
stood and given me possession of the cherished part
of his old inheritance.

How still, how silent were all things! Not a campfire
shining through all the solemn forest. It was a
tomb, dark and typical;—the cyprus and the cedar
trees drooped their sable plumes above the dead of
a departed race.

Why had I returned here? The reasons were

many and all-sufficient. Among others I had heard
that another had come upon the scene. A rumour
had reached me that a little brown girl was flitting
through these forests; wild, frightened at the sight
of man, timid, sensitive, and strangely beautiful.
Who was she? Was she the last of the family of
Mountain Joe? Was she one of the Doctor's children,
half prophetess, half spirit, gliding through
the pines, shunning the face of the Saxon, or was
she even something more? Well, here is a little
secret which shall remain hers. She is a dreamer,
and delights in mystery. Who she was or who she is
I have hardly a right to say. Her name is Calli Shasta.

What was I to do? Leave her to perish there in
the gathering storm that was to fall upon the
Modocs and their few allies, or tear her away from
her mother and the mountains?

But where was the little maiden now, as I looked
from the battlement on the world below? They told
me she was with my Modocs away to the east among
the lakes. I waited, enquired, delayed many days,
but neither she nor her mother would appear. Her
mother, poor broken-hearted Indian woman, once a
princess, was afraid I would carry away her little
girl. At last I bade farewell, and turned down the
winding hill. I heard a cry and looked up.

There on the wall she stood, waving a red scarf.

Was it the same? Surely it was the same I

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE INDIAN MOTHER.

[Description: 645EAF. Illustration page. A woman is standing on an ivy-covered cliff, over looking a valley with two figures in the distance. A small child is holding on to her leg, and wind blows her shawl upwards. There are mountains in the distance.]

had thrown her years and years before, when I left
the land a fugitive.

There was a little girl beside her, too, not so
brown as she, waving one pretty hand as she held to
the woman's robe with the other. I stopped and
raised my hat, and called a kind farewell, and undertook
to say some pretty things, but just that moment
my mule, as mules always will, opened his mouth
and brayed and brayed as if he would die. I jerked
and kicked him into silence, and then began again;
and again the mule began, this time joined by
Limber Jim's. Limber Jim swore in wretched
English, but it was no use—the scarlet banner from
the wall was to them the signal of war, and they
refused to be silenced until we mounted and descended
to the glorious pines, where I had rode and
roved the sweetest years of my life.

Yet still the two hands were lifted from the wall,
and the red scarf waved till the tops of the pines
came down, and we could see no more.

Then I lifted my hat and said, “Adieu! I reckon
I shall never see you any more. Never, unless it
may come to pass that the world turns utterly
against me. And then, what if I were to return
and find not a single living savage?”

I think I was as a man whose senses were in
another world. Once I stopped, dismounted, leaned
on my little mule, looking earnestly back to the rocky

point as if about to return; as if almost determined
to return at once and there to remain. There was a
battle in my heart. At length awakened, I mounted
my mule mechanically and went on.

The Doctor still lived. I would see him once
more before I left the land for ever. It was a hard
and a long day's journey, and was nearly sundown
when we reached the little path planted with cherry
trees, and overhung in places with vines of grape,
leading from the river up the hill to his house. I
heard the shouts of children in the hills, and saw
the old man sitting in his cabin porch that overlooks
the river. He had some books and papers near him.
His face and demeanour were majesty itself.

He arose as he saw us through the trees and
vines, and shaded his brow with his hand as he
peered down the path. Men in the mountains do
not forget faces. Mountaineers never forget each
other, though they may separate for twenty years.
In a city you may meet a thousand new faces a
year; there a new face is a rare thing.

He came down the steps in moccasins and a rich
dress of skins and fur. His thin hair fell in long
silver tresses on his shoulders. He was stouter than
before, and seemed quite strong. He took my hands,
led me up to a seat, sat down by my side, and we
two together looked up the river and up to the
north.

The same old golden glory rested like a mantle on
the shoulders and about the brows of Shasta; the
same sunset splendour as of old; the purple tint, the
streaming bars, the banner of red and blue and gold
was stretching away from the summit across the sky.

He had learned the Indians' custom of silent
salutation, which means so much; but I knew his
thoughts. He was saying in his heart so loud that I
heard him: “You and I are changed, the world has
changed, men and women have grown old and ugly,
and a new generation now controls and possesses the
world below. Here there is no change.”

I looked often at my old companion there, as he
looked away across the scarlet and yellow woods in
the dying sunlight or lifted his face to the mountain.
The old, old face, but nobler now, a sort of strength
in its very weakness, an earnestness very finely
marked, a sincerity not stamped in broad furrows or
laid in brick and mortar, but set in threads of silver
and of gold.

He had settled here in a stormy time. For the
good he could do he came down here on the line
between the white man and the red, where the worst
of both men are always found, and you have nothing
to expect from either but suspicion, treachery, and
abuse, and here gathered a few Indians about him,
and took up his abode.

He had planted trees, tilled the soil a little, grew

some stock, and now had a pleasant home, and horses
and cattle in herds up and down the river.

As the sun went down, the children,—brown,
beautiful, and healthy children, strong and supple,—
came in from the hills with the herds, and dismounted,
while some Indians came up from the river
and led their ponies down to water.

A little girl came up the steps; the eldest, a shy
child of not more than a dozen years, yet almost a
woman, for this Californian sun is passionate, and
matures us early. A great black pet bear was by
her side, and she seemed to shrink as she saw me, a
stranger, there, and half hid behind his shaggy coat.
She took an apple from the ground that had fallen in
the path, and then the huge bear reared himself on
his hind legs before her as she turned, showing the
white of his breast to us, and opened his red mouth,
and held his head coaxingly to one side to receive
the apple. The bear was as tall as the little woman.

The next morning, when I persisted that I could
not remain, fresh horses were saddled for us, and an
Indian given to return the tired mules to the station.

“Why did you not tell me,” said I, as we walked
down the path to the canoe, “that you bore nothing
of the blood of those men?”

The old nervousness swept across his face, but he
was composed and pleasant.

“Would men have believed me? And if they had

believed me, was I not as able to bear the blame as
the poor, desperate and outraged little Indian? As
a true Indian, he could not have done otherwise than
he did. If ever men deserved death those did. Yet,
had it even been believed that they fell by an
Indian's hand, not only those two children, but
every Indian that set his foot in camp had been
butchered.”

I could not answer. I could only think how this
man must have suffered to save those two waifs of
the forest, how he had thought it all out in the old
mining camp, balanced the chances, counted the cost,
and deliberately at last decided to become an outcast
from the civilized world.

He stood with his moccasins down to the river's
rim, and took my hand, as the Indian seated himself
in the canoe and lifted his paddle.

“Come back,” he said, “to the mountains. The
world is fooling you. It will laugh and be amused
to-day, as you dance before it in your youth, and
sing wild songs, but to-morrow it will tire of the
forest fragrance and the breath of the California lily;
your green leaves will wither in the hot atmosphere
of fashion, and in a year or two you will be more
wretched than you can think; you will be neither
mountaineer nor man of the world, but vibrate hopelessly
between, and be at home in neither capacity.
Come, be brave! It is no merit to leave the world

when it has left you, and requires no courage; but
now—”

“Say no more,” I cried, “I will come! Yonder,
across the hills, where the morning sun is resting on
the broad plateau, there among the oaks and pines,
I will pitch a tent, and there take up my everlasting
rest.”

A pressure of the hand for the promise; the canoe
swung free, the Indian's paddle made eddies in the
bright blue water, the horses blew the bubbles from
their nostrils, and their long manes floated in the
sweeping tide.

I am now in my new home where I have rested
and written this history of my life among the Indians
of Mount Shasta. I have seen enough of cities and
civilization—too much. I can endure storms, floods,
earthquakes, but not this rush and crush and crowding
of men, this sort of moral cannibalism, where
souls eat souls, where men kill each other to get
their places. I have returned to my mountains. I
have room here. No man wants my place, there is
no rivalry, no jealousy; no monster will eat me up
while I sleep, no man will stab me in the back when
I stoop to drink from the spring.

And yet how many noble and generous men have
I met away out in the sea of human life, far from my
snowy island in the clouds! Possibly, after all, I

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE DOCTOR'S HOME

[Description: 645EAF. Illustration page. An Indian and a white man are in a boat rowing towards a cabin. On the shore, there is a figure standing. There are mountains in the background.]

am here, not that I love society less, but the solitude
more.

The heart takes root like a tree when it is young
and strong, and fresh and growing. It shoots tendrils
like a vine. You cannot tear it from its place
at will. You may be very strong; you may even
uproot and transplant, but it will never flourish in
the new place or be satisfied.

We have a cabin here among the oaks and the
pines, on a bench of the mountain, looking down on
the Sacramento valley, a day's ride distant.

A stream, white as cotton, is foaming among the
mossy rocks in a canon below the house, with balm
and maldrono on its banks, and I have some horses
on the plain below. I have cattle on the manzanita
hills above me, towards the snow, where the grass is
fresh the season through. You can hear the old
white bull, the leader of the herd, lift up his voice
in the morning, and challenge the whole world below
to battle, but no David comes to meet him. When
we want a fresh horse here, we mount one of those
staked out yonder by lariat and hackamore, ride
down to the band in the plain, take, with the lasso,
the strongest and fastest of them all, saddle him,
mount, and turn the other loose to run till strong and
fresh again.

I have a field too, down yonder, where we lead the
water through the corn, and the rich, rank growth of

many kinds of vines. We have planted an orchard,
and grape vines are climbing up the banks, and
across the boulders that time has tumbled down from
the manzanita hills. We will remain here by our
vine and our fig tree till we can take shelter under
their boughs.

We will yet eat fruit from the trees we have
planted.

We? Why, yes! That means little “Calli Shasta,”
the little shy, brown girl that tried to hide, and
refused to see me when I first returned to the
mountains. She is with me now, and wears a red
sash, and a scarf gracefully folded about her shoulders
under her rich flow of hair. I call her Shasta because
she was born here, under the shadows of Mount
Shasta, many stormy years ago. How she can ride,
shoot, hunt, and track the deer, and take the salmon!
Beautiful? I think so. And then she is so fresh, innocent
and affectionate. Last night I was telling her
about the people in the world below, how crowded
they were in cities, and how they had to struggle.

“Poor things!” she said, “poor things! how I
pity them all that they have to stay down there.
Why cannot they come up here from their troubles
and be happy with us?”

She is learning to read, and believes everything
she has yet found in the school books—George
Washington with his hatchet and all. The sweet,

sweet child! I am waiting to see what she will say
when she comes to the story of Jonah and the
whale.

The Prince is here too. There is a tinge of gray in
his hair and a touch of sadness in his face. He is
back from his wanderings. Up from the world, up
to this sort of half-way house to the better land.

To-day, when the sun was low, we sat down in the
shadow of the pines on a mossy trunk, a little way out
from the door. The sun threw lances against the
shining mail of Shasta, and they glanced aside and
fell, quivering, at our feet, on the quills and dropping
acorns. A dreamy sound of waters came up through
the tops of the alder and madrono trees below us.

The world, no doubt, went on in its strong, old
way, afar off, but we did not hear it. The sailing
of ships, the conventions of men, the praise of men,
and the abuse of men; the gathering together of the
air in silks, and laces, and diamonds under the
lights; the success or defeat of this measure or of that
man; profit and loss; the rise and fall of stocks:
what were they all to us?

Peace! After many a year of battle with the
world, we had retreated, thankful for a place of
retreat, and found rest—peace. Now and then an
acorn dropped; now and then an early leaf fell
down; and once I heard the whistle of an antlered
deer getting his herd together to lead them down the

mountain; but that was all that broke the perfect
stillness.

A chipmunk dusted across the burrs, mounted the
further end of the mossy trunk, lifted on his hind
legs, and looked all around; then, finding no hand
against him, let himself down, ran past my elbow on
to the ground again, and gathered in his paws, then
into his mouth, an acorn at our feet.

Peace! Peace! Who, my little brown neighbour
in the striped jacket, who would have allowed you to
take that, even that acorn, in peace, down in the busy,
battling world? But we are above it. The storms
of the social sea may blow, the surf may break
against the rocky base of this retreat, may even
sweep a little way into the sable fringe of firs, but
it shall never reach us here.

I looked at the Prince as the sun went down. I
had so longed to know the secret of his life. Yet I
had never doubted that he was all he looked and
seemed: a genuine, splendid Prince.

Strange, nay, more than strange, that men should
live together in the mountains, year after year, and
not even know each other's names, not even the place
of their birth. Yet such is the case here, and all up
and down the Sierras. A sort of tacit agreement it
seems to have been from the first, that they should
not ask of the past, that they began a new life here.
The plains and the great seas they had crossed were

[ILLUSTRATION]

CALLI SHASTA

[Description: 645EAF. Illustration page. A young Indian woman is riding sidesaddle on a horse. A dog is chasing after the girl and horse. In the background is a cabin.]

as gulfs of oblivion. Was it an agreement that we
should all begin life even here, and equal? or was it
because these men were above any low curiosity, because
they had something to do beside prying into
the past lives of their neighbours? I should say that
this fine peculiarity grew largely out of the latter.

But here it seemed the Prince and I had at last
pitched our tent for good, together. I had told him
of my ten years' battle just past, and he had recounted
his. He had crossed and recrossed the
Cordilleras and the Andes, sailed up and down the
Amazon, fought in Nicaragua, and at last raised an old
Spanish galleon from Fonseca filled with doubloons
and Mexican dollars that had gone down in the sea
half a century before.

But his name? Was he really a Prince, and if he
was really a Prince why follow the mountains so far?
Why seek for gold, and why at last return to Shasta,
instead of to his people and his possessions? My faith
was surely shaken. So many years of practical life
had taken something of the hero-worship out of my
nature. There was no longer the haze of sovereignty
about the head of this man, and yet I believe I loved
him as truly as ever.

Little Shasta came dashing up with the hounds at
her horse's heels. A chill breath came pitching down
from the mountain tops, keen and crisp, and we arose
to enter the cabin.

I put my hand on his arm, reached up and
touched the long, black curls that lay on his
shoulder, for I am now as tall as he.

“Nevertheless,” said I, “you are really a Prince,
are you not?”

“A Prince!” said he with surprise. “Why, what
in the world put that into your head?” and he put
my hand playfully aside and looked in my face.
He patted the ground in the old, old way, smiled
so gently, so graciously and kind, that I almost
regretted I had spoken. “A Prince! indeed!”

“Then pray, once for all, tell me who you are,
and what is your real Christian proper name.”

He laughed a little, tossed his black hair back
from his face, stooped, picked up an acorn and tossed
it lightly after a chipmunk that ran along the mossy
trunk, and said:—

“Why, a man, of course, like yourself. An
American, born of poor parents, so that I had to
make the best of it; drifted into Mexico after awhile,
and have been drifting ever since; aimless, idle, till
I met you and undertook to pull you through the
winter. As for my name, it is Thompson, James
Thompson.” Here he stooped, picked another acorn
from the ground, and cast it at the hounds that stood
listening to the whistle of the deer.

“Ah, Prince! Prince! You should at least have
had a romantic and prince-like name,” I said to

myself, as I filled a pipe with killikinick and reclined
on the panther skins in the cabin when we
had entered.

“But see,” I said with paternal air, to Calli, as I
blew the smoke towards the thatch, and she came
bounding in, filling the house like sunshine, with
cheerfulness and content; “see what silence, coupled
with gentlemanly bearing, may do in the world.
Even plain Mr. Thompson may be named a Prince.”

He is indeed a Prince, none the less a Prince
than before. Here we shall dwell together. Here
we shall be and abide in the dark days of winter
and the strong full days of the summer. Here we
have pitched our tents, and here we shall rest and
remain unto the end.

I have seen enough, too much to be in love with
life as I find it where men are gathered together. As
for civilization, it has been my fate or my fortune to
see it in every stage and grade, from the bottom to
the top. And I am bound to say that I have found
it much like my great snow peaks of the Sierras.
The higher up you go the colder it becomes.

Yet a good and true man will not withhold himself
utterly from society, no matter how much he may
dislike it. He will go among the people there much
as a missionary goes among the heathen, for the good
he can do in their midst.

How it amuses me to see my friends, the men I have

met in civilization, denying and attempting to dispute
the story that I am the man who lived with the
Indians and led them in war. Ah, my friends, you do
not know me at all.

There is much, no doubt, in my life to regret, but
there is nothing at all to conceal.

And let it be understood once for all that the
things I have to regret are not of my life with the
Indians or my attempt to ameliorate their condition.
I only regret that I failed.

Nay, I snap my fingers at the world and say, I am
proud of that period of my life. It is the one white
spot in my character, the only effort of my life to
look back to with exultation, the only thing I have
ever done or endeavoured to do that entitles me to
rank among the men of a great country.

And what has been my reward?..... No
matter, I appeal to time. It may be that a Phillips
will rise up yet to speak for these people, or a John
Brown to fire a gun, and then I will be remembered.

Ah, thus I wrote, felt and believed in the few
days that I sat again in the shadows of Shasta, where
I wrote all but the opening and concluding lines of
this narrative. But I had mixed too much with the
restless and bustling life below me. I had bound
myself in ties not to be broken at pleasure.

Besides, it was now so lonely. The grass grew

tall and entangled in the trails. It was rank and
green from the dust and ashes of the dead. It
flourished with all that rich and intense verdure that
marks the grasses growing above your friends. Here
it was like living in one great graveyard.

We went down to the busy world below, the
Prince and I, and ships have borne us into other and
different lands; wanderers again upon the earth;
drifting with the world, borne up and down, and on,
like the shifting levels of the sea.

The origin of the late Modoc war, which was really
of less importance than the earlier ones, and in which
the last brave remnant of the tribe perished, may be
briefly chronicled.

Among the Indians, as well as Christian nations,
there is often more than one man who aspires to or
claims to be at the head of the people. It is a
favourite practice of the Indian agents to take up
some coward or imbecile who may be easily managed,
and make him the head of a tribe, and so treat with
him, and hold the whole tribe to answer for his contracts.
In this way vast tracts of land and the
rights of a tribe are often surrendered for a mere
song. If anyone dissents, then the army is called to
enforce the treaty.

The old treaty with the Modocs was not much
unlike this. Every foot of their great possessions
had been ceded away by one who had not authority
to cede, or influence to control the Indians.

They were mostly taken from their old possessions
to a reservation to the north, and on the lands of the
Klamat Indians, their old and most bitter enemies.
It was a bleak and barren land, and the Indians were
well-nigh starved to death.

Captain Jack, who was now the real and recognized
chief among the Indians, still held on to the home of
his fathers, an honest and upright Indian, and gathered
about him the best and bravest of his tribe.
Here they remained, raising horses and cattle, hunting,
fishing, and generally following their old pursuits,
till the white settlers began to want the little land
they occupied.

Then the authorities came to Captain Jack, and
told him he must go to the Reservation, abandon his
lands, and live with his enemies. The Indians refused
to go.

“Then you must die.”

“Very well,” answered Captain Jack; “it is die
if we go, and die if we stay. We will die where our
fathers died.”

At night—that time which the Indians surrender
to the wild beasts, and when they give themselves up
in trust to the Great Spirit—the troops poured in
upon them. They met their enemies like Spartans.

After long holding their ground, then came the
Peace Commissioners to talk of peace. The Indians,
remembering the tragedy of twenty years before,

desperate and burning for revenge, believing that the
only alternative was to kill or be killed, killed the
Commissioners, as their own Peace Commissioners
had been killed. They were surrounded, there was
not even a possibility of escape, no hope, nothing but
death, yet they did this deed right in the face of the
desperate consequences which they knew must follow.

If we may be permitted to exult in any deeds of
war, how can we but glory in the valour of these few
men, battling there in the shadows of Shasta for all
that is sacred to the Christian or the savage, holding
the forces of the United States at bay for half a
year, looking death firmly in the face and fighting
on without a word day by day, every day counting
a diminished number, shrinking to a diminished
circle; bleeding, starving, dying; knowing that annihilation
was only a question of time. Knowing the
awful cost and yet counting down the price bravely
and without a murmur. There is nothing nobler in
all the histories of the hemispheres. But they shall
not be forgotten. Passion will pass away, and even
their enemies of to-day will yet speak of them with
respect.

I know that men will answer that it is impossible
to deal peaceably with the Indians. I ask, who has
tried it? Penn tried it, and found them the most
peaceable, upright, and gentle of beings. The
Mormons, certainly not the most noble type of men

at first, tried it, and they were treated like brothers.
A destitute and half-desperate band of wanderers, they
sat down in the midst of the wildest and the worst of
Indians, and the red men gave them meat to eat,
lands to plough, and protection and food till they
could protect and feed themselves. These are the
only two examples of an honest and continued
attempt to deal peaceably and fairly with the Indians
that you can point to since the savage first lifted his
hands in welcome to Columbus.

When I die I shall take this book in my hand
and hold it up in the Day of Judgement, as a sworn
indictment against the rulers of my country for the
destruction of this people.

Here lies a letter giving a long account of the
last struggle of the Indians of Mount Shasta. Strange
how this one little war of the Modoc Indians
has got to the ears of world, while a thousand
not much unlike it have gone by in the last century
unwritten and unremembered; perhaps it is because
it came in a time of such universal peace.

Brave little handful of heroes! if ever I return to
Mount Shasta I will seek out the spot where the
last man fell; I will rear a monument of stones, and
name the place Thermopylæ.

And little Calli Shasta, the last of her tribe?

At school in San Francisco. Her great black
eyes, deep and sad and pathetic, that seem to lay

hold of you, that seem to look you through and
understand you, turn dreamily upon the strange,
strong sea of people about her, but she gazes unconcerned
upon it all. She is looking there, but she is
living elsewhere. She is sitting there in silence, yet
her heart, her soul, her spirit, is threading the dark
and fragrant wood. She is listening to the sounding
waterfall, watching the shining fish that dart
below the grassy border. Seeing all things here, she
understands nothing at all. What will become of
her? The world would say that she should become
a prodigy, that she should at once become civilized,
lay hold of the life around her, look up and climb
to eminence; crush out all her nature, forget her
childhood; compete with those educated from the
cradle up, and win distinction above all these. The
world is an ass!

“And whose child is she?” I hear you ask. Well
now, here is a little secret.

On her mother's side you must know that the last
and best blood of a once great tribe is in her veins.
And her father? Ah, that is the little secret.
We only know. We laugh at the many guesses and
speculations of the world, but we keep the little
maiden's secret.

If I fail in my uncertain ventures with an unschooled
pen, as I have failed in all other things,
then she is not mine; but if I win a name worth
having, then that name shall be hers.

Getting along in her new life?

Well, here is a paragraph clipped from an article
of many columns in a San Francisco journal:—

What a joke it would be on this modern Gorgon,—
this monster daily press of America that eats up
men and women, soul and body,—this monster that
must be fed night and morning on live men who
dare to come to the surface, if it should in this case
be utterly mistaken!

What if this busy, searching, man-devouring press,
which has compelled me to add to this narrative, or
live and die misunderstood, should discover after all
that this little lady is only the old Doctor's daughter
sent down to the city in my care to be educated?

What will become of her? The poor little waif,
when I look into her great wondering eyes, I fancy
she is a little rabbit, startled and frightened from
the forest into the clearing, where she knows not
whether to return or bound forward, and so sits still
and looks in wonderment around her. A little waif
is she, blown like some strange bird from out the
forest into a strange and uncertain land.

Will she succeed in the new scene? Poor child,
the chances are against her. Only fancy yourself
the last one of your race, compelled to seek out and
live with another and not an over-friendly people.
And then you would be always thinking in spite of
yourself; the heart would be full of memories; the
soul would not take root in the new soil.

How lost and how out of place she must
feel! Poor little lady, she will never hear the
voices of her childhood any more. There is no true
Indian of Shasta living now to speak her language.

Touch her gently, O Fate, for she is so alone! she
is the last of the children of Shasta.