Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 3

by Cincinnatus Heine Miller

CHAPTER III.

THE FINGER-BOARD OF FATE.

NOW stood face to face with the outposts of the great events of my life. Here were the tawny people with whom I was to mingle. There loomed Mount Shasta, with which my name, if remembered at all, will be remembered. I had not sought this. I did not dream even then that I should mix with these people, or linger longer here in the shadows of Shasta than I had lingered in camps before.

I visited many of the Indian villages, where I received nothing but kindness and hospitality. They had never before seen so young a white man. The Indian mothers were particularly kind. My tattered clothes were replaced by soft brown buckskins, which they almost forced me to accept. I was not only told that I was welcome, and that they were glad to see me, but I was made to feel that this was the case. Their men were manly, tall, graceful.

Their women were beautiful in their wild and natural, simple and savage beauty beyond anything I have since seen, and I have gone well-nigh the circuit of the earth since I first pitched camp at the base of Shasta.

I came to sympathize thoroughly with the Indians. Perhaps, if I had been in a pleasant home, had friends, or even had the strength of will and capacity to lay hold of the world, and enter the conflict successfully, I might have thought much as others thought, and done as others have done ; but I was a gipsy, and had no home. I did not fear or shun toil, but I de spised the treachery, falsehood, and villany, practised in the struggle for wealth, and kept as well out of it as I could.

All these old ideas of mine seem very singular now for one so young. Yet it appears to me I always had them ; may be, I was born with a nature that did not fit into the mould of other minds. At all events, I began to think very early for myself, and nearly always as incorrectly as possible. Even at the time mentioned I had some of the thoughts of a man ; and at the present time, perhaps, I have many of the thoughts of a child. My life on horseback and among herds from the time I was old enough to ride a horse, had made me even still more thoughtful and solitary than was my nature, so that on some things I thought a great deal, or rather observed, while on others- practical things I never bestowed a moment s time. I had never been a boy, that is, an orthodox, old

fashioned boy, for I never played in my life. Games ojf ball, marbles, and the like, are to me still mys terious as the rites in a Pagan temple. I then knew nothing at all of men. Cattle and horses I under stand thoroughly. But somehow I could not under stand or get on with my fellow man. He seemed to always want to cheat me to get my labour for nothing. I could appreciate and enter into the heart of an Indian. Perhaps it was because he was natural ; a child of nature ; nearer to God than the white man. I think what I most needed in order to understand, get on and not be misunderstood, was a long time at school, where my rough points could be ground down. The schoolmaster should have taken me between his thumb and finger and rubbed me about till I was as smooth and as round as the others. Then I should have been put out in the society of other smooth pebbles, and rubbed and ground against them till I got as smooth and pointless as they. You must not have points or anything about you singular or notice able if you would get on. You must be a pebble, a smooth, quiet pebble. Be a big pebble if you can, a small pebble if you must. But be a pebble just like the rest, cold, and hard, and sleek, and smooth, and you are all right. But I was as rough as the lava rocks I roamed over, as broken as the mountains I inhabited ; neither a man nor a boy.

How I am running on about myself, and yet how pleasant is this forbidden fruit ! The world says you must not talk of yourself. The world is a tyrant.

The world no sooner discovered that the most de lightful of all things was the pleasure of talking about one s self, even more delightful than talking about one s neighbour, than straightway the world, with the wits to back it, pronounced against the use of this luxury.

Who knows but it is a sort of desire for revenge against mankind for forbidding us to talk as much as we like about ourselves, that makes us so turn upon and talk about our neighbours.

Be that as it may, I know very well that if all men were permitted to talk about themselves as much as they liked, they would not talk so much about their neighbours. They would not have time. Even ages ago, whenever any man dared come out and talk freely, naturally and fully as he desired about himself, the wits nailed him to the wall with their shafts of irony, until the last man was driven from the green and leafy Eden of egotism, and no one has yet had courage to attempt to retake it.

Now I like this great big letter u I," standing out boldly alone like a soldier at his post. It is a sort of granite pillar, it seems to me, set up at each mile, even every quarter if you like, to face you, to be familiar, to talk to you as you proceed, without an interpreter or the intervention of a third party.

Modest Caesar ! The man who writes of a third person when he means the first is a falsehood. The man who says u we" when he means U I," is a coward, and afraid to go alone. He winces before the wits,

and takes shelter behind the back of another person. I would rather see a man stand up like Homer s heroes, or a North American Indian, and tell all his deeds of valour and the deeds of all his ancestors even back to the tenth generation, than this.

I despise this contemptible little wishy-washy editorial u we." The truth is, it is ten times more pompous than the bold naked soldier-like "I." Besides, it has the disadvantage of being a falsehood ; a slight, slight disadvantage in this age, it is true, but still a disadvantage.

I edited a little paper once for a brief period. I was owner, editor, and proprietor. This was dis tinctly stated at the head of the first column of the paper. It would have been clear to all, even had I desired to take shelter under the editorial u we," that its use was a naked and notorious falsehood. I was young then. I knew nothing of civilization. My education had been greatly neglected, and I could not lie. I stood up the great big pronoun on the paper as thick as pickets around a garden fence. The publication died soon after, it is true, but this proves nothing against the use of the great and popular pronoun.

Winter now was approaching ; and while I should have been welcome with the Indians to the end, I preferred to consider my stay with them in the light of a visit, and decided to go on to Yreka (a mining camp then grown to the dignity of a city), and try my fortune in the mines.

It was unsafe to venture out alone, if not impossible to find the way ; but the two young men who had .assisted as vaqueros in the valley set out with me and led the way till we touched the trail leading from Red Bluffs to Yreka on the eastern spurs of Mount Shasta. Here they took a tender farewell, turned back, and I never saw them again. They were murdered before I returned to their village.

The facts of the cruel assassinations are briefly these. The following summer the young men went down into Pit River Valley, then filling up rapidly with white settlers, and there took to themselves wives from the Pit River tribe, with whom the Shastas were on the best of terms.

These young fellows had a fondness for the whites, and were very frequently about the settlements. They finally made a camp near some men who were making hay, and put in their time and supported themselves by hunting and fishing, at the same time keeping up friendly relations with the whites by liberal donations of game.

One day one of these Indians, with his young wife, went out among the hay makers, and while he was standing there, watching the men at work, two men came up from a neighbouring part of the prairie and shot him down in cold blood, saying only that they knew him and that he was u a damned bad Injin."

This is, or was at that time, considered quite suffi cient excuse for taking an Indian s life on the Pacific.

D

They hid the body under a haycock, and carried his young and terrified wife to their camp.

That evening the other Indian, returning from the hills, came to look after his companion. The two men told him they would show him where he was ; and the young man, still unsuspicious, walked out with them; but when near the hayfield one of the two, who had fallen behind, shot him in the back. .

The Indian was good mettle, however, and for the first time discerning the treachery, sprang forward upon the other now a little in advance and brought him to the ground. But the poor boy had been mortally shot, and died almost instantly after.

The plain cold truth of the matter is these men had seen the two young Indian women, wanted them, and got them after this manner, as did others in similar ways, and no one said nay.

This account I had from the lips of one of the very two men alluded to. His name is Fowler. He told it by way of a boast, repeatedly, and to numbers of men, while we were engaged in the Pit river war. This Fowler is now married to a white woman, and lives in Shasta county, California.

Of such deeds grew the Pit river valley mas sacre hereinafter narrated.

I rode down and around the northern end of the deep wood, and down into Shasta valley.

If I was unfit to take my part in the battle of life when I left home, I was now certainly less so. My wandering had only made me the more a dre amer.

My stay with the Indians had only intensified my dislike for shopkeepers, and the commercial world in general, and I was as helpless as an Indian.

I was so shy, that I only spoke to men when com pelled to, and then with the greatest difficulty and embarrassment. I remember, lonely as I was in my ride to Yreka, that I always took some by-trail, if possible, if about to meet people, in order to avoid them, and at night would camp alone by the way side, and sleep in my blanket on the ground, rather than call at an inn, and come face to face with strangers.

I left the Indians without any intention of return ing, whatever. I had determined to enter the gold mines, dig gold for myself, make a fortune, and return to civilization, or to such civilization as I had known.

Stronger men than I have had that same plan. Perhaps one out of twenty has succeeded.

I must here make a long digression from the Indian trail. In spite of my resolution to boldly enter the camp or city and bear my part there, as I neared the town my heart failed me, and I made on to Cotton- wood, a mining camp twenty miles distant, on the Klamat, and a much smaller town.

After two or three days of unsuccessful attempts to find some opening, I determined to again marshal courage and move upon Yreka. I accordingly, on a clear frosty morning, mounted my pony, and set out alone for tha t place.

I rode down to the banks of the beautiful, arrowy Klamat misspelled Klamath with a thousand peaceful Indians in sight.

A deep, swift stream it was then, beautiful and blue as the skies; but not so now. The miners have filled its bed with tailings from the sluice and torn; they have dumped, and dyked, and mined in this beautiful river-bed till it flows sullen and turbid enough. Its Indian name signifies the " giver " or "generous," from the wealth of salmon it gave the red men till the white man came to its banks.

The salmon will not ascend the muddy water from the sea. They come no more, and the red men are gone.

As I rode down to the narrow river, I saw a tall, strong, and elegant-looking gentleman in top boots and red sash, standing on the banks calling to the ferryman on the opposite side.

Up to this moment, it seemed to me I had never yet seen a perfect man. This one now before me seemed to leave nothing to be desired in all that goes to make the comely and complete gentleman. Young I should say he was hardly twenty-five and yet thoroughly thoughtful and in earnest. There was command in his quiet face and a dignity in his presence, yet a gentleness, too, that won me there, and made it seem possible to approach as near his heart as it is well for one man to approach that of another.

This, thought I, as I stood waiting for th e boat, is

no common person. He is surely a prince in dis guise; may be he is the son of a president or a banker, wild and free, up here in the mountains for pleasure. Then I saw from the dark and classic face that he was neither an American, German, nor Irish man, and vaguely I associated him with Italian princes dethroned, or even a king of France in exile. He was surely splendid, superb, standing there in the morning sun, in his gay attire, by the swift and shining river, smiling, tapping the sand in an absent- minded sort of way with his boot. A prince ! truly nothing less than a prince ! The man turned and smiled good-naturedly, as I dismounted, tapped the sand with his top-boot, gently whistled the old air of " 49," but did not speak.

This man was attired something after the Mexican style of dress, with a wealth of black hair on his shoulders, a cloak on his arm, and a pistol in his belt.

The boatman came and took us in his narrow little flat, and set his oars for the other side. A sort of Yankee sailor was this boatman, of a very low sort too; blown up from the sea as sea-gulls are sometimes found blown out even in the heart of the plains: a suspicious-looking, sallow, solemn- faced, bald-headed man in gum-boots, duck-breeches, blue shirt with the front all open, showing his hairy bosom, and with a lariat tied about his waist in the form of a sash.

The tall, fine -looking man stepped ashore with a

quiet laugh as the boat touched the sand, and said, " Chalk that." These were the first words I had ever heard him utter.

The solemn-faced ferryman tied his boat in a second, and, stepping boldly up under the nose of the tall man, said fiercely :

"Look here, what do you play me for? Do you think I m a Chinaman? You high-toned, fine-haired gamblers don t play me not much, you don t!"

"Don t want to play you, my friend."

" Then pay me. Why don t you pay me, and be off?"

u Haven t got the tin. Can t come to the centre ! Haven t got the dust. Can t liquidate. That s the reason why."

And here the good-natured tall gentleman again tapped the sand with his boot, and looked down at the river and at the bullying ferryman under his nose.

" Then leave your coat ; leave your your pistol, till you come again."

The tall man shifted his cloak from his right arm to his left. The ferryman fell back toward his boat. Sailors know the signs of a storm.

" Look here," began the tall man, mildly, " I crossed here yesterday, did I not ? I gave you a whole cart-wheel, did I not ? a clean twenty dollar, and told you to keep the change and use it in cross ing poor devils that were out of tin. You don t know me now with no mule and no catenas filled

with tin. Forgot what I told you, I should think. Now, you count out my change, or by the holy spoons, I ll pitch you in there, neck and crop, among the salmon."

And here the tall man reached for the man in blue who in turn turned red and white and black, and when he had retreated to the water s edge and saw the tall man still advancing and reaching for him, thrust his hand into his capacious pocket and counted down the coin in a very methodical and business-like way, into the hand of the other.

Then the tall man laughed good-naturedly, bade the boatman good-bye, came up and coolly tied his <;oat on behind my saddle, and we set forward up the trail.

The tall man hummed an air as he followed in the trail behind my pony, the boatman swore a little as he untied his boat, and the arrowy, silver river shot away towards the sea between its rocky walls, with its thousands of listless, dreamy Indians on its banks.

I take it to be a good sign if a strong, good- natured man who has a fair opportunity, does not talk to you much, at first. In fact, as a rule, you should be cautious of over-talkative strangers. Such persons have either not sense enough to keep quiet; not brains enough to ballast their tongues, as it were, or are low and vicious people who feel their littleness and feel that they must talk themselves into some consequence.

After we had gone on in silence for some time r on turning a point in the trail we saw a man approach ing from the other direction. A strong, fine-looking man was this also, mounted on a sleek, well-fed mule with his long ears set sharply forward ; a sure sign that he was on good terms with his rider. The mule brayed lustily, and then pointed his two ears keenly at us as if they were opera-glasses, and we a sort of travelling theatre.

The man was richly dressed, for the mountains ; sported a moustache, top-boots, fur vest, cloth coat,, a broad palm hat, and had diamonds in the bosom of his shirt. A costly cloak on his shoulders, yellow buckskin gauntlets, a rich, red sash around his waist, where swung a pair of Colt s new patent, and a great gold chain made up by linking speci mens of native gold together, made up this man s attire. His great hat sheltered him like a palm.