CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE TWO GIBBETS.
A gloomy picture fills the eye from the height of the bluff whence we took our first view of the Lava Beds, Jan. 16th, 1873. The whited tents are there no more. The little mounds at the foot rest heavy on the breasts of the fallen. No curling smoke rises from savage altar, or soldier camp. The howl of cayote and cougar succeed the silver bugle, calling to the banquet of blood. Wild birds, instead of ascending ghosts, fill the air above, and their screams follow the weird wild songs of the medicine-men. The caverns answer back to bird and beast—no more to savage war-whoop, or bursting shell. The cannon are cooled by a winter’s frost, while a winter’s storms have given one coating to the scars left on the lava rocks by the iron hail. The dark spots, painted by mad hands, dipped in the blood of heroes, grow dim. A rude, unfinished gibbet stands out on the deserted promontory of the peninsula, a reproachful proof of a soldier’s unwarranted haste, a token of a nation’s prudence; while another rude scaffold, which justice left half-satisfied, also remains at Fort Klamath, defiant and threatening, and upbraiding her ministers for unfair dispensation in sparing the more guilty, while writing her protest on the blood-stained hands of the felons who provoked her wrath, as she follows them to the land of banishment.
The lone cabins, made desolate by the casualties of war, are again inviting the weary traveller to rest. The ranchmen of the Modoc country follow the cattle trails without fear. The surviving wounded are trying to forget their scars, or hobbling on crutch or cork. Tall grasses meet, fern and flowers bloom over the graves of loved ones, bedewed with the tears of the widows and orphans of a nation’s mistake in refusing to recognize a savage’s power for revenge, until recorded by scars on the maimed hands and mutilated face of his biographer, and proclaimed by the marble shaft whose shadows fall over the breast of the lamented Canby, near Indiana’s capital, and by the tomb of the no less lamented Dr. Thomas, which keeps silent vigils with those of Baker and Broderick, on the hallowed heights of Lone mountain, San Francisco.
The broken chains of the royal chief hang noiseless on the walls of his prison cell. His bones, despised, dishonored, burnished, sepulchred in the crystal catacomb of a medical museum, represent his ruined race in the capital of a conquering nation; and the survivors of his blood-stained band, broken-hearted, mourn his ignominious death, shouting their anguish to listless winds in a land of exile. He lives in memory as the recognized leader in the most diabolical butchery that darkened the pages of the world’s history for the year eighteen hundred and seventy-three.
The Congress of the United States devotes itself to the payment of the cost of the war; while the results stand out ghastly monuments, calling in thunder-tones on a triumphant nation to stop, in its
mad career; to think; upbraiding it for the inhuman clamor of power for the blood of heroic weakness, until it thwarted President Grant’s policy of doing right, because it was right; at the same time applauding him for his courage in proposing, and his success in consummating, a settlement on peaceful terms with a powerful civilized nation, with whom we had cause of estrangement.
If it was bravery that courted the accusation of cowardice, while it grandly defied impeachment by proposing to settle a financial difference, involving questions of national honor, in the case with England, on amicable terms; it was infinitely more patriotic, more humane, more just, and more godlike, boldly to declare that a weak and helpless people should be treated as men,—should be tendered the olive-branch, while the cannon were resting from their first repulse.
The civilized world joins in honoring him in the former case; cowardly America burns in effigy his Minister of the Interior for failure in the latter; while on neither magistrate nor minister should fall the blame. On whom, then, should it fall? Where it belongs,—on the American people as a nation. If you doubt it, read the history written by our own race, and you will blush to find from Cape Cod bay to the mouth of the Oregon, the record of battle-grounds where the red man has resisted the encroachments of a civilization that refused him recognition on equal terms before the law. You will find that these battle-grounds have been linked together by trails of blood, marked out by the graves of innocent victims of both races, who have fallen in vindication of rights that
have been by both denied, or have been slain in revenge by each. You will find scarce ten miles square that does not offer testimony to the fact that it has been one continuous war of races, until the aborigines have been exterminated at the sacrifice of an equal number of the aggressive race.