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CHAPTER XXII.

MY NEW REPUBLIC.

ERE for the first time a plan which y had been forming in my mind ever since I first found myself among these people began to take definite shape. It was a bold and ambitious enterprise, and was no less a project than the establishment of a sort of Indian Republic " a wheel within a wheel," with the grand old cone Mount Shasta for the head or centre.

To the south, reaching from far up on Mount Shasta to far down in the Sacramento valley, lay the lands of the Shastas, with almost every variety of country and climate ; to the south-east the Pit River Indians, with a land rich with pastures and plains teeming with game ; to the north-east lay the Modocs, with lakes and pasture-lands enough to make a State. My plan was to unite these three tribes in a confederacy under the name of the United Tribes, and by making a claim and showing a bold