The aged Pah-ute had, while this was passing, been regarding me with that stoical indifference of feature which is so characteristic of the red man. Looking fixedly at him, I said:
"If you were not an old fellow, I would at once kill you. But if anything has gone wrong with the General or his party, see that you never again allow yourself to come within sight of me."
Immediately after this, we started for Summit Lake, and passing it, went down the cañon as far as the Puabla. On the following day about noon, we came to a cabin which had very evidently been occupied by Wright and his companions. It was now empty. The small cañon in which this rough cabin stood was filled with cottonwood trees and a dense growth of small underbrush. As we were examining the place, I came upon the first fragmentary testimony of the dark tragedy which had branded this spot with an ineffaceable stain. This was the leg of a man, which had been hewn off just below the knee. While I was yet looking at it, Arnold called out in a tremulously hollow voice, which at once indicated from how intensely nervous an agitation he must be suffering:
"Come here, Mose."
He was but a short distance in advance of me; and when I arrived where he was standing, let me own that I frankly regretted not having cut the throat of the wrinkled old ruffian whose possession of the General's pipe had placed me on the track of this most dastardly and savage murder—aye! and the throats of all the squaws who were with him, too. Had I not, in my own person, had a sufficient experience of the gentleness of these she-devils? Could I doubt that it had been also displayed in the atrocious massacre of General Wright and the unfortunate men who had accompanied him?
I shall, of course, be asked for the full particulars of this ferocious butchery. Let me be as brief as I can in penning the details, which almost sicken me while I recall them.
We found the General actually spitted, a pointed stake having been forced lengthwise from behind through his body, and protruding beneath his chin. This stake had then been placed upon two crotched limbs of trees, above a fire, of which nothing but the dead embers now remained. As far as we could make out, there were no other marks of violence on the charred shape of the victim. He must have been killed by the terrible torture of thrusting this stake through his entrails. The remainder of his party had been literally cut into pieces. Arms, hands, heads, feet, legs, thighs, and bodies had been hewn apart, and were scattered around in the brush. Nor was there more than one of the victims who might have been slain before they were subjected to this inch by inch torture. Only a single wound by a bullet could be found by us, on any of these mutilated fragments of what had once been life.
And these brutal devils are the race that the Government of the United States demand should be dealt gently with by its children. I should refrain from denouncing them, perhaps, when the barbarities I had twice experienced at their hands are remembered by me. But in such a case as the present one, where my memory has no individual suffering to give it edge and bitterness, I may surely be permitted to express my opinions. This, the more specially, when I know that these opinions are shared in by every settler who has had some two or three years' practical dealing with the falsehood, rascality, treachery, blood-thirstiness, and demon-like barbarity, which, almost invariably, in every instance, characterize the Western Indian.
What, let me fearlessly ask, could in any way have been the natural result of the hesitation of the Government at Washington, to operate efficiently for the protection of its own children?
These men had, undoubtedly, the right to claim such a protection. Any other country to which they might have belonged, would have given it to them. It has, however, been consistently refused, or accorded them in a way which renders it worse than useless. They have, consequently, been compelled to rely upon themselves for protection, it being carried out after their own fashion. Necessarily, this fashion has varied. But, in no case, could it take a shape other than of the struggle ever-existent between the conflicting parties, when law has become paralyzed, or neglects to put in a satisfactory appearance. For many years, legal restraint had been overridden in San Francisco. At length, the condition of society resulting from this became unbearable. It was then that the citizens of the capital of the young and vigorous West took the matter into their own hands, independently of the State authorities. A vigilance committee sprung from their actual necessity, and, in a short space of time, daily crime was reduced to the ordinary ratio it bears in civilization. Even in the great Eastern metropolis, during the past two or three years, a similar necessity has been proclaimed, and a like exertion of the popular will has been predicted by some of the leading New York journals. There, however, law seems recently to have awakened from its long slumber, and, if consistently active and severe, will repress the lawlessness of passion or criminality.