THE ACORN.
Many years ago several families were out camping in the Fall, in the last part of October or November gathering acorns for food. (When the families get all fixed up in their acorn camps all go forth to pick the acorns each day as they drop from the tree, using the large baskets to put them in and carry to camp, in the evening when all have gathered at the camp house and the evening meal is over, all the family men, women and children take their places and commence taking the hulls off so as to get the meat or kernel out. This is done by the teeth and it is wonderful how expert we become at it, and it is seldom a kernel is mashed or bruised. These kernels are nearly always in halves, sometimes in three pieces and once in a great while there will be four pieces, and to find one that is divided into four pieces just as it grew in the shell is not a common occurrence. There is on the inside of the outer shell a very thin skin that covers the kernel or meat of the acorn.) There was a young Indian girl out with her basket picking acorns, and as she went along with her basket picking up acorns she would as often as she could, place some in her mouth and crack the hull and take the kernel out and put it in the basket with the ones that were not hulled. As she was going along she happened to open one where the kernel was in four parts which at once became very amusing to her, so she set her basket down and on taking a look at it she took the outer hull off and made a neat little cradle out of it, then she took the inner skin part and made a nice set of baby clothes, after she did this she took the whole of the kernel and covered with the clothes and placed it in the cradle that she had made of the hull. After all was finished she looked at it and then put it in the hollow of an oak tree and went on picking her acorns until time to go back to the camp house. When it came time for them all to return to their homes she had forgotten what she had done. One day while she was preparing some acorn flour she heard a noise behind her, some one saying mother, mother, and on looking behind her she beheld a little boy and as soon as she saw him she knew that he was formed from the acorn that she had fixed and left in the hollow oak tree. She raised the Sa-quan or pestle in her hand and tried to catch the boy but he ran from her and she followed after him and the race kept up until the boy got to the edge of the ocean, where there was a man in a boat, so the boy jumped into the boat, the man pushed the boat off and together they started out to sea, and had got well out when the girl arrived at the sea-shore, she hurled the stone pestle at them and it fell into the sea and the top of it stuck up and is there to this day.
Any Indian will tell his white brother this story as a true part to their religion, as calmly and seriously as if it was the truth and perhaps some of the lower class really believe it, yet it is only a fairy tale.
This is the rock that sits out in the ocean some eight or ten miles from the land, at the present time from Orick or the mouth of Redwood Creek. This rock the white man calls Redding Rock, the Klamath Indians call it Sa-quan-ow. The true facts concerning this rock are told in a preceding chapter.