Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/124



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 $&lt;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.