PEACE OR WAR—ONE HUNDRED LIVES VOTED AWAY BY MODOC INDIANS.
Leaving our soldier friends to dream of glory to be won in the coming battle, let us pick our way from their camp to the head-quarters of Captain Jack.
Our starting-point now is from a little grove of mountain mahogany trees on a high plateau, a few miles south of the California and Oregon boundary line, and within a short distance of the extreme southern end of lower Klamath lake. The trees are dwarfed, stunted, and bent before the stormy winds that have swept over them so continually.
As we leave this military camp, a long, high, sharp ridge extends northward and southward, falling away at either end to hills of lesser height. Climbing to the top, and looking eastward, we see Tule lake, named on the maps of this country Rhett lake. It is a beautiful sheet of water, of thirty miles from north to south, and fifteen from west to east. We see also, with a field-glass, across the lake, the lone cabins where the strong hands of Boddy, Brotherton, and others have laid the foundation of future homes. They stand like spirit sentinels on the plain.
Look again at the trail leading out of the sage-brush plains; follow with your glass down to where a high stone bluff crowds against the lake, and forces
the wagon trail into the edge of the water, until it disappears in the high tule grass.
In September, 1852, a long train of wagons, drawn by worn-out oxen, driven by hardy, venturesome pioneers, came down that trail.
They never came out again, save the two or three persons, as related in a former chapter.
That place is Bloody Point.
Turn your glass northward, and see the trail emerge from the tule grass; follow it until it turns suddenly westward and reaches the natural bridge on Lost river. Turn your glass up the river one mile, and you see the favorite home of Captain Jack, where we found him in 1869, and where Major Jackson found him on the morning of “November 30th, 1872;” and, had you been looking at that spot at 4 P.M. of the 23d day of April, 1873, you would have descried a four-horse ambulance, with a mounted escort of six men on either side, and standing in the front end of that ambulance a woman, with a field-glass, eagerly scanning the surface of the lake. That woman shows anxiety in her blue eye and earnest face while she changes the direction of the glass, expecting each moment to catch sight of a boat crossing the lake. She is cool, calm, and self-possessed, although no other lady is nearer than twenty-four miles.