Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/89

Rh was in fact one of our next-door neighbors. Some one in the settlement had named him Jacob, or Jake for short. He was a typical Kalapooya. The men of the Kalapooya tribes were not working men; they were sportsmen, or idlers, while the squaws were industrious and did all the work. Aside from game furnished by the men, which they killed as much for sport as anything else, the squaws had to provide all the food. They had to get the wood; sometimes carrying great bundles of sticks on their backs quite a distance. In moving from place to place they carried all the goods, provisions, wares and "plunder" of every kind. It was not unusual to see a squaw with a pack on her back heavy enough for a pony, with a child riding on top of it, and trudging along behind a man mounted on a pony, who was carrying nothing but his bow and arrows, or an old "pil-pil musket"—a kind of short musket with a red stock which the Hudson Bay Company traded to the Indians for furs. The squaw was a slave; her husband was her master.

The only battle we were in, where our cannon was taken onto the field, was an engagement with a skunk. Our dogs were very courageous and watchful, for they would not permit an Indian to approach the house even in the daytime to within less than thirty or forty yards. Many times I have heard an Indian calling for protection against the dogs and would find him standing on the fence holding to a stake for support, or on top of a hog-house on a bench of the hill, about forty yards from our dwelling. The dogs would fight a bear on panther, and two of them would kill a prairie wolf; but they would shun a skunk, though if under orders, they would make short work of one notwithstanding the disagreeable job.

One evening after supper we were sitting about the fire, some engaged in a game of fox and geese, when one of the dogs came and stood in the door and after wagging his tail and looking over his shoulder a time or two, uttered a couple of short yelps, which was to say, "There is a nasty thing in the yard you should be looking after, I don't want anything to do with it myself." When he saw we understood him, he turned and stood on the porch looking into the yard. The moon was shining and as soon as we looked out we saw a skunk, nosing around in the yard. Our cannon was already loaded with a maximum charge of powder, a wad, a buckshot, a wad, another