Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 9

by Cincinnatus Heine Miller

CHAPTER IX.

A WORD FOR THE RED MEN.

OT a dog in camp. All had been eaten, I suppose, long before. Child ren die first in their famines ; then the old men, then the young men. The endurance of an Indian woman is a marvel.

In the village, some of the white men claimed to have found something that had been stolen. I have not the least idea there was any truth in it. I wish there was; then there might be some shadow of excuse for all the murders that made up this cruel tragedy, all of which is, I believe, literally true; truer than nine-tenths of the history and official reports written, wherein these people are mentioned; and I stand ready to give names, dates, and detail to all whom it may concern.

Let me not here be misunderstood. An Indian is no better than a white man. If he sins let him suffer. But I do protest against this custom of making up a case this custom of deciding the case

against him in favour of the white man, for ever, on the evidence of the white man only ; even though that custom be, in the language of the law, so old " that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary."

The white man and the red man are much alike, with one great difference, which you must and will set down to the advantage of the latter.

The Indian has no desire for fortune ; he has no wish in his wild state to accumulate wealth ; and it is in his wild state that he must be judged, for it is in that condition that he is said to sin. If u money is the root of all evil," as Solomon hath it, then the Indian has not that evil, or that root of evil, or any desire for it.

It is the white man s monopoly. If an Indian loves you, trusts you, or believes in you at all, he will serve you, guide you through the country, follow you to battle, fight for you, he and all his sons and kindred, and never think of the pay or profit. He would despise it if offered, beyond some presents, some tokens of remembrance, decorations, or simplest articles of use.

Again, I do vehemently protest against taking the testimony of border Indians or any Indians with whom the white man comes in constant contact, and to whom he has taught the use of money and the art of lying.

And most particularly I do protest against taking these Indians turn-skins and renegades who affiliate, mix, and strike hands with the whites, as representative Indians. Better take our own

" camp followers " as respectable and representative soldiers.

When you reflect that for centuries the Indians in almost every lodge on the continent, at almost every council, have talked of the whites and their aggres sions, and of these things chiefly, and always with that bitterness which characterizes people who look at and see only one side of a case, then you may come to understand, a little, their eternal hatred of their hereditary enemy how deeply seated this is, how it has become a part of their nature, and, above all, how low, fallen, and how unlike a true Indian one must be who leaves his retreating tribe and lingers in a drunken and debauched fellowship with the whites, losing all his virtues and taking on all the vices of his enemy.

A pot-house politician should represent us at the court of St. James s, if such an Indian is to be taken as a representative of his race.

The true Indian retires before the white man s face to the forest and to the mountain tops. It is very true he leaves a surf, a sort of kelp and drift-wood, and trash, the scum, the idlers, and the cowards and prostitutes of his tribe, as the sea leaves weeds and drift and kelp.

Judge not the sea by this, I protest. This is not the sea, but the refuse and dregs of the sea. The misfortune of it is, however, that this is about all that those who have written and pronounced upon the character of the Indian have ever seen.

And, again, why hold the whole race, f rom Cariboo

to Cape Saint Lucas, responsible for a single sin? Of course, we may deplore the death of the white man on the border. But for every white man that falls the ghosts of a hundred Indians follow. A white man is killed (half the time by a brother white man) and the account of it fills the land. Telegraph and printing-press reiterate, day after day, the whole details, and who shall say that they grow less as they spread to every household? The artist is called in. His ingenuity is taxed and tortured to put the horrible affair before the world in naming illustrations, and a general cry goes up against the Indians, no matter where.

All right enough, no doubt ; but who tells the tale when the Indian falls, or who tells his side of the story? A hundred Indians are killed in cold blood by the settlers, and the affair is never heard of out side the county where it occurs.

If we wish for justice let us, at least, try to be just. If we do wrong it seems to me to take half the sin away to be brave enough to admit it. At all events, it shows that if we have a great sin we have also one virtue Valour !

Killed by the Indians! Yes, many good men have been killed by the Indians with cause and with out cause. Many good men have also died of fevers. I think a man is about as likely to die a natural death in New York, New Orleans, or any other city, if he remains there, as he is to be killed by the Indians, should he travel or remain amongst them.

Take one case in point. I happen to know an old man who has lived more than forty years on the frontier arid among the Indians. More than twenty years ago he took his little family of children and made the six months journey across the great plains, almost alone and entirely unarmed. I happen to know that this old man, owing to his singularly quiet nature and Quaker-like love of peace, never fired a gun or pistol in his life for any purpose whatever. I happen to know that he made many journeys through the Indian countries; lived and still lives on the border, always unarmed and utterly helpless in the use of arms, and yet never received so much as an uncivil word from an Indian. I am not mistaken in this, for the old man referred to is my father.

Twenty years observation ought to enable one to speak with intelligence on this subject ; arid I am free to say that grandmothers never hold up before naughty children a bigger or more delusive bug-a- boo than this universal fear of Indians.

The village was soon consumed ; and as the smoke went up, black and sullen, from its embers, we turned away towards our cabin. Most of the men had already gone. A sort of chill had fallen over all, and they scarcely spoke to each other now. They were more than sober.

The blood, the burning camp, the cold and cruel butchery, the perfect submission, the savage silence in which the wretches died, the naked, bony forms

in the snow, had gone to the hearts of the men, and they were glad to get away when all was over.

There was not an adventure, not an achievement, not a hazard or escape of any one to allude to. The only heroic act was that of the little skeleton savage with his club. I think they almost wished they had butchered and scalped this boy as they had threatened. To think that the only achievement of the wliole affair worth mentioning was that of an Indian, and an Indian boy at that ! They did not mention it.

The men were nearly all gone now, stringing up along the snowy trail by twos and threes, toward The Forks. A few still lingered about the smouldering wigwams, or stood looking down into the river, grinding its blocks of ice in its mighty, rocky jaws.

The boy had not moved. I believe he had not lifted his eyes. The sharp wind, pitching up and down and across, cut him no doubt, on the one hand, while the burning wigwams scorched him on the other ; but he did not move.

The Prince had stood there all this time like a king, turning sometimes to watch this man or that, but never going aside, never giving way an inch for any one. They went around him, they avoided him, or deferred to him in every way possible. From the very moment he came down from the bluff to the bank of the river, and they saw him in their midst, they felt the presence of a master and a man.

I had always said to myself, this man is of royal blood. This man was born to lead and control. To

me he had always stood, like Saul, a head and shoulders above his fellows. I had always believed him a king of men, and now I knew it.

He took the little girl by the hand, folded her robe about her gently as if she had been a Christian born, looked to her moccasins, and then cast about to see who should take and provide for the boy. The last man was going gone !

There was a look of pain and trouble in the face of the Prince. There was not a crust of bread in the cabin : a poor place to which to take the two starved children, to be sure.

The cast of care blew on with the wind ; and with the same old look of confidence and self-possession he went up to the Indian boy, took him by the thin little arm, and bade him arise and follow.

The boy started. He did not understand, and yet he understood perfectly. He stood up taller than before. His face looked fierce and bitter, and his hands lifted as if he would strike. The Prince smiled, stooped and picked up his club, and put it in his hand. This conquered him. He stood it against the stone on which he had sat, took up a robe that lay under his feet, fastened his moccasin strings, and we moved away together and in silence.

The little girl would look up now and then, and endeavour to be pleasant and do cunning things; but this boy with his club tucked under his robe did not look up, nor down, nor around him.

There were some dead that lay in the way; ha did

not notice them. He walked across them as if they had been clay. What could he have been think ing of?

I know very well what I do ; how unpopular and unprofitable it is to speak a word for this weak and unfriended people. A popular verdict seems of late to have been given against them. Fate, too, seems to have the matter in hand, for in the last decade they have lost more ground than in the fifty pre ceding years. Cannon are mounted on their strong holds, even on the summits of the Rocky Mountains. Bayonets bristle in their forests of the north, and sabres flash along the plains of the Apache. There is no one to speak for them now, not one. If there was I should be silent.

Game and fish have their seasons to come and go, as regular as the flowers. Now the game go to the hills, now to the valleys, to winter, to have their loves, to bring forth their young. You break in upon their habits by pushing settlements here and there. With the fish you do the same by building dams and driving steam-boats, and you break the whole machinery of their lives and stop their in crease. Then the Indians must $<Jfeye, or push over on to the hunting and fishing grounds of another tribe. This makes war. The result is they fight fight like dogs ! almost like Christians ! Here is the whole trouble with this doomed race, in a nut-shell.

Let us, sometimes, look down into this thing honestly, try and find the truth, and understand.

THE RED MEN. Ill

Even the ocean has a bottom.

These rude red men love their lands and their homes. The homes for which their fathers fought for a thousand generations, where their fathers lie buried with their deeds of daring written all over the land, every mountain pass a page of history ; every mountain peak a monument to some departed hero; every mountain stream a story and a tradi tion. They love and cherish these as no other people can, for their lands, their leafy homes, are all they have to love.

I know very well they have never received so much as a red blanket for all the matchless and magnificent Willamette valley; and, I may add, that the whites never took that in war, and so cannot claim it as a conquest. No white man s blood ever stained that great and fertile valley at the hands of an Indian.

True, there are Reservations over on the sea, forty and fifty miles away from the valley ; but the interior Indian had as soon descend silently to his grave as go there to live. Hundreds have so chosen and acted on the c^^e. The sea-coast Indians are u fish-eatexo. stink! " say the valley Indians,

u while we of the interior eat venison and acorns."

Their feuds and wars were fierce, and reached farther back than their traditions. Fancy these val ley Indians being induced to go over there on their enemies lands to make a home. Their own sense of justice revolted at it. Besides, they knew they would

be murdered, one by one, in spite of the promises and half-extended protection of the Government.

Let Germans, to-day, enter, helpless and unarmed, even into civilized Paris, and sit down there without ample protection, and see how it would be ! Compel certain celebrated leaders of the North to go down unarmed and pitch their tents under the palm-trees of the Ku-Klux, and mark what would follow !

The Indian agent of this Reservation by the sea, who had Indians gathered in from a thousand miles of territory, could not understand why Indians would fighi among themselves. u Ah! but they are a vile set," he said : u they fight among themselves like dogs. They are a low set. They will soon kill each other off." And so they did.

The miserable heathens were as bad as the Christians of the North and South. They fought amongst each other. The ungrateful wretches ! To fight amongst themselves after all the Government had done for them ! Why did they not keep quiet, and die of small-pox and cholera in the little pens built for them, all at the expense of the Government?

If the Government invites settlers to a place, and sells or gives away land that does not yet belong to the Government, and a difficulty arises between the immigrant and the Indian, and the whites get the worst of it, why, send in a thousand young lieute nants, thirsting for glory, and they will soon bring them to terms, at a cost to the Government only a few hundred times more than it would take to set the

Indians up comfortably for life. But if the Indians get the worst of any little misunderstanding that may arise, why why, they get the worst of it, and what is the use to interfere !

I was present once when the superintendent sent a delegation of half-civilized Indians into the moun tains to the chief of the Shastas, old Worrotetot, called Black-beard by the whites, for he was bearded like a prophet, to ask him to surrender and go on to the Reservation.

u Where is the Superintendent, the man of blankets?"

u Down in the valley, at the base of the Shasta mountain."

" Well, that is all right, I suppose. Let him stay there, if he likes, and I will stay here."

u But we must take him an answer. Will you go or not?"

" What can I do if I go?"

u You shall have a house, a farm, and horses."

" Where?"

u Down at the Reservation, by the sea."

" Ba,h! give me a piece of land down by the sea? Where did he get it to give ? Tell me that. The white men took it from the Indians, and now want to give it to me. I won t have it. It is not theirs to give. They drove the Indians off, and stole their land and camping places. I could have done that myself. No. You go and tell your great father, the blanket-maker, I do not want that land. I have

i

got land of my own high up here, and nearer to the Great Spirit than his. I do not want his blankets: I have a deer-skin ; and my squaws and my children all have skins, and we build great wood fires when it snows. No, I will not go away from this mountain. But you may tell him if he will take this mountain along, I will go down by the sea and live on the Reservation."

We reached the cabin, and built a roaring fire.

u Stand your war-club there in the corner, Klamat," said the Prince to the boy, u and come to the fire. This is your home now." The boy did as he was bid, not as a slave, but proud and unbending as a chief in council.

The little girl had washed her hands and face, thrown back her long luxuriant hair, and stood drying herself by the fire, quite at home.

Two more mouths to feed, and where was the bread to come from !

Soon the Prince went out and left us there. He returned in a little while with a loaf of bread.

Where on earth did he get it? I never knew. Maybe he stole it.

He divided it with a knife carefully into three pieces, gave first to the Indian boy, then to the Indian girl, and then to me. Then he stood there a moment, looked a little abashed, but finally said something about wood and went out.

We ate our bread as the axe smote and echoed against the pi ne-log outside.

A certain strong magnet attracts from out the grains of gold all the ironstone and black sand to itself. It seemed there was something in the nature of this man that attracted all the helpless, and weak, and friendless to his side. He had not sought these little savages. That would have been folly, if not an abso lute wrong to them. There was, perhaps, not another man in camp as little capable of caring for them as he. He had rather tried to avoid them, particularly the boy; but when they fell into his hands, when fate seemed to put them there, he took them proudly, boldly, and trusted to fortune, as all brave men will trust it, and without question.

To see those Indians eat daintily, only a little bit at a time, then put it under the robe, stealthily, and look about ; then a memory, and the head would bend and the eyes go down ; then the little piece of bread would be withdrawn, eyed wistfully, a morsel broken off, and then the piece again returned beneath the robe, to be again withdrawn as they found it im possible to resist the hunger that consumed them.

But Indians are strangely preservative, and these had just endured a bitter school. They had learned the importance of hoarding a bit for to-morrow, and even the next morning had quite a piece of bread still. How could they suppose that any one would provide, or attempt to provide, for them the next day ?

The Prince came in at last from the dusk, and we all went out and helped to bring the wood from the snow.

I am bound to say that I suddenly grew vastly in my own estimation that evening. Up to this time I had been the youngest person in all the camp, the most helpless, the least of all. Here was a change. Here were persons more helpless than myself; some one now that I could advise, direct, dictate to and patronize.

There must be a point in each man s life when he becomes a man turns from the ways of a boy.

I dare say any man can date his manhood from some event, from some little circumstance that seemed to invest him with a sort of majesty, and dignify him, in his own estimation, at least, with manhood. A man must first be his own disciple. If he does not first believe himself a man, he may be very sure the world, not one man or woman of the world, will believe it.

We sat late by the fire that night. The little girl leaned against the wall by the fire-side and slept, but the boy seemed only to brighten and awake as* the night went on. He looked into the fire. What did he see? What were his thoughts? What faces were there? Fire, and smoke, and blood the dead!

Down before the fire in their fur-robes we laid the little Indians to sleep, and sought our blankets in the bunks against the wall.

Through the night one arose and then the other, and stirred the fire silently and lay down. Indians never let their fires go out in their lodges in time of peace. It is thought a bad omen, an d then it is

inconvenient, and certainly not the thing to do in the winter.

The Prince was up early the next morning. He could not sleep. Why? Starve yourself a week and you will understand. I did not think or ask myself then why he could not sleep. I know now.

He went to town at day-break. Then when we had rolled a back log into the spacious fire-place, and built a fire under my direction, a new style of architecture to the Indians, with a fore-stick on the stone and irons, and a heap of kindling wood in the centre, I induced Klamat to wash his face, and helped him to wash the blood from his hair in a pan of tepid water.

The little girl without any direction made her toilet, poor child, in a simple, natural way, with a careful regard for the effect of falls of dark hair on her brown shoulders and about her face ; and then we all sat down and looked at the fire and at each other in silence.

Soon the Prince returned, and wonderful to tell? he had on his shoulder a sack of flour. All flour in the mines is put in fifty-pound sacks, so as to be easily packed and unpacked, in the transportation over the mountains on the backs of mules, and is branded " Fifty Pounds, Self-rising, Warranted Superfine."

The Prince s face was beaming with delight. He took the sack from his shoulder gently, set it on the empty flour-bench in the corner, as carefully and tenderly as if it had been a babe as if it had been his own f irstborn.

The u Doctor" came with him. Not on a profes sional visit, however, but as a friend, and to see the Indians.

Now this Doctor was a character, a special part of The Forks. Not a lovely part or an excellent part in the estimation of either saloon-men or miners, but he filled a place there that had been left blank had he gone away, and that was not altogether because he was the only doctor in the place, but because he was a man of marked individuality.

A man who did not care three straws for the good or ill-will of man, and, as a consequence, as is always the fortune of such men when they first appear in a place, was not popular. He was a foreigner of some kind ; maybe a German. I know he was neither an American nor an Irishman. He was too silent and reserved to have been either of these.

He was a small, light-haired man, a sort of an invalid, and a man who had no associates whatever. He was always alone, and never spoke to you if he could help it.

How the Prince made this man s acquaintance I do not know. Most likely he had gone to him that morning deliberately, told him the situation of things, asked for help, and had it for the asking. For my part, I had rather have seen almost anyone else enter the cabin. I did not like him from the first time that I ever saw him.

u Come here, Paquita," said the Doctor, as he sat down on the three-legged stool by the fire , and held

out his hand to the Indian girl. She drew her robe modestly about her bosom and went up to the man, timid but pleasantly.

I knew no more of this Doctor, or his name, than of the other men around me.

He came into the camp as a doctor, and had pill bags and a book or two, and was called The Doctor.

Had another doctor come, he would have been called Doctor Brown, or Smith, or Jones, provided that neither of these names, or the name given him by the camp, was the name given him by his parents. I know a doctor who wore the first beaver hat into a camp, and was called Doctor Tile. He could not get rid of that name. If he had died in that camp, Doctor Tile would have been the name written on the pine board at his head.

I can hardly account for this habit of nick-naming men in the mines. Maybe it was done in the interest of those who really desired and felt the need of a change of name. No doubt it was a convenient thing for many ; but for this wholesale re-naming of men, I see no sufficient reason. Possibly it was because these men, in civilization, had become tired of Col. William Higginson, The Hon. George H. Fer guson, Major Alfred Percival Brown, and so on to the end and exhaustion of handles and titles of men, and determined out here to have it their own way, to set up a sort of democracy in the matter of names.

" I will bake some bread, Doctor, for my babies ;"

and the Prince threw off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, and went to work. He opened the mouth of his burden on the bunk, thrust in his hand, drew out the yellow flour in the gold pan, poured in cold water from the bucket, and soon had a luscious cake baking before the fire in the frying-pan.

Bread for my babies ! Poor brave devil ! When had he tasted bread?

Little Klamat retreated to his club, and stood with his back to the corner, with his head down, but at the same time watching the Doctor from under his hair, as a cat watches a mouse ; only he was not the cat in this case, by a great deal.

The Doctor talked but little, and then only in an enigmatical sort of a way with the Prince. He did not notice me, and that contributed to my instinc tive dislike. Soon he took leave, and we four ate bread together.

A wind came up the Klamat from the sea, soft and warm enough to drip the icicles from the cabin eaves, and make the drooping trees along the river bank raise their heads from the snow as if with hope.

The Doctor came frequently and spent the even ing as the weeks went by. The butchers mules came braying down the trail ere long, and we needed bread and meat no more.

The thunder boomed away to the west one night as if it had been the trump of resurrection ; a rain set in, and the next morning, Humbug Creek, a s if it

had heard a Gabriel blow, had risen and was rushing toward the Klamat and calling to the sea.

Some birds were out, squirrels had left the rocks and were running up and down the pines, and places where the snow had melted off and left brown burrs and quills, and little shells. The back-bone of the winter storm was broken.

To return once more to the Doctor : I can hardly say why I disliked him at first, or at all. One thing is certain, however, he was bald on the top or rather on the back of his head ; and from childhood, I have always had a prejudice against men who first be come bald on the back instead of the front of the head.

It looks to me as if they had been running away, trying to escape from somewhere or something, when old Time caught them by the back of the hair as they fled, and scalped them on the spot.