Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/192

176 graves. Weimer remarked afterward to Case, he would hate to be in those Oregonians' shoes at judgment day, but Mr. Case replied: "Why, we didn't kill your Indian women; you killed them with kindness yourselves. The tribe killed thirty-two of our men, and every Oregonian here had a brother or friend among the murdered number. There was no trouble with the Indians that year or the next.

The last of June I started with five or six newly arrived Oregonians for Big Bar, on the Middle Fork of the American River, about fifty miles from Coloma.

Captain Whiting, with seventy-two persons, who were in prison for debt, arrived at Big Bar the same day that our party did. In order to get these persons out of prison, he had to pay their creditors an average of $2.50 apiece, and he had hired them for two years for eighteen and three fourths cents per day and board. At the end of two years he had to give bonds to the government to return them to Mexico if they wanted to go. (This is an illustration of the method employed by the Californians and Mexicans in lieu or as a further application of the Indian labor principle. These prisoners were practically bought by Captain Whiting, and had been imprisoned not for any crime, but simply for debt; and it was evident that any great extension of this plan of working the mines would have excluded free American labor entirely, and soon have made California a slave state, with a slavery like that of some of the South American countries, peonage, and even worse than the domestic slavery of the Southern States.)

We arrived at the Bar two hours before Captain Whiting's party and told the people at Big Bar, who numbered about five hundred, that a Spanish crowd was com-