Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 33

by Cincinnatus Heine Miller

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE LAST OF THE CHILDREN OF SHASTA.

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 Calle 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 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 under took 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 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 ha& 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 dis mounted, 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, i 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 lie 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 o ut in the old mining camp, balanced the chances, counted the cost, and deliberately at last decided to be known as a murderer, and 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 sweepi ng 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 crowd ing 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 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 madrono on its banks, and I have some horses on the plain below. I have cattle on the ma nzanita 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 "Calle 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 t he 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, and happy too, 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 fair 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, find ing 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 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, be cause 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 re counted 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 the past! 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 Thomas, James Thomas." 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 Calle, as I blew the smoke towards the thatch, and she came bounding in, filling the house, like sunshine, with cheerfulness and content, to prepare the evening meal; u see what silence, coupled with gentlemanly bearing, may do in the world. Even plain Mr. Thomas 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 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 only 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 con tracts. 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 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, yet did this deed right in the face of the desperate con sequences 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 Judgment, as a sworn indictment against the rulers of my country for the destruction of these people.

Here lies a letter giving a long account of the last struggle of the Indians of Mount Shasta. Strange how this one little struggle of the Modoc Indians has got to the ears of the 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 Thermopylae.

And little Calle Shasta, the last of her race ?

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 sound ing 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 un schooled 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:

"She is now fifteen years old, and is living in San Francisco, supported from the poet's purse. She is described as strikingly beautiful. She has her mother's deep, dark eyes, and wealth of raven hair, and her father's clear Caucasian skin. Her neighbours call her the beautiful Spanish girl, for they know not her romantic history; but to her own immediate friends she is known as the poet's gifted child. It is but justice to this rough, half-savage man, to say that he is exceedingly fond of her, and does everything in his power to make her comfortable and happy."

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 one living now to speak her language.

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

CHISWICK PRESS : PRINTED BY WHITTINGHAM AND WILKINS,

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.