Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/24

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Indians to do, I find; though a Christian king can wait a lifetime, and a Christian nation wait a century. They saw their tribe wasting away every year ; every year the hordes of white settlers were eating into the heart of their hunting grounds, still they lay in their lava beds or moved like shadows through the stormy forests and silently waited, and then when the whites came into their camp to talk for peace, as they had gone into the camp of the whites, they showed themselves but too apt scholars in the bloody lesson of long ago.

The scene of this narrative lies immediately about the base of Mount Shasta. The Klamat river with its tributaries flows from its snows on the north, and the quiet Sacramento from the south. The Shasta Indians, now but the remnant of a tribe at one time the most powerful on the Pacific, live at the south base of the mountain, while the Modocs and Pit River Indians live at the east and north-east, with the Klamats still to the north. The other sides and base of the mountain is disputed territory, since the driving out of its original owners, between settlers and hunters, and the roving bands of Indians.

It was late in the fall. I do not know the day or even remember the month ; but I do know that I was alone, a frail, sensitive, girl-looking boy, almost destitute, trying to make my way to the mines of California, and that before I had ridden my little spotted Cayuse pony half way up the ten-mile trail that then crossed the Siskiyou mountains, I met