The Interpreter. That is one of those murdered in the wagon while prisoners by the settlers.

Captain Jack (continuing). This old Indian man told me that Nate Beswick told him that that day Meacham, General Canby, Dr. Thomas, and Dyer were going to murder us if we came to the council. All of my people heard this old man tell us so. And

then there was another squaw came from Fairchild’s, and told me that Meacham and the peace commissioners had a pile of wood ready built up, and were going to burn me on this pile of wood; that when they brought us into Dorris’s they were going to burn me there. All of the squaws about Fairchild’s and Dorris’s told me the same thing. After hearing all this news I was afraid to go, and that is the reason I did come in to make peace.

Add to all this the fact, that the popular cry was war, of which the Modocs were aware, as they were of all the incidents referred to in this chapter; and the further discouraging knowledge that no efforts had ever been made to punish offenders for crimes committed on their race; and a candid mind may be enlightened as to the cause of the failure of the Peace Commission sent out by President Grant in 1873.

The seed was sown while he was carrying on business at Galena, or fighting rebels around Vicksburg. The harvest came while he was in power. It was rich in valuable lives. It was costly in treasure.

It was a natural yield. It came true to the planting. The seed was sown broadcast, and harrowed deep into human hearts by the constant repetition of insult and wrong, irrigated often by the blood of the Indian race. It slumbered long (sometimes apparently dead, save here and there an outcropping giving signs of life), so long, indeed, that Judge Steele thought “the matter was nearly forgotten by all,” until Schonchin called it up during one of Steele’s visits to the Lava Beds in 1873.

If the harvest was delayed in part, it was none the less prolific when it came. The reapers were few, but their sheaves were many, and bound together with the lives of the humble, the great, the noble, the good.

Does my reader yet understand why the policy, under which we settled a great matter of difference with a great nation, was not successful in settling a small matter with a small nation? Does he see, now, on whom the blame rests?

I hear some one answer:—

“On the frontier men, of course.”