“How de do—Whoa haw! G—d d—n you!”
On another occasion when a party of Pioneers were inquiring of some Indians about a certain camping-ground ahead of them, they were assured that there would be “plenty of grass there for the whoa haws, but no water for the g—d d—ns.”
Later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked attacks by emigrants, the Indians became hostile and dangerous. Many Pioneers were robbed and some were killed by them. The Western Indian was a figure at once grotesque and terrible; and Bret Harte’s description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant boy lost on the Plains, gives the reader such a pleasant thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since Robinson Crusoe made his awful discovery of a human footprint in the sand.
“He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between him and the horizon!... A human figure, but so dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of a childish dream. It was a mounted figure, yet so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization, surmounted by a turkey’s feather, was on its head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of some distant point.... Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony’s legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon. There was no mistaking it now! The painted Hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! It was an Indian!”[24]
There were some cases of captivity among the Indians the details of which recall the similar occurrences in New England in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most remarkable case was that of Olive Oatman, a young girl from Illinois, who was carried off by one tribe of Indians, was sold later to another, nearly died of starvation, and, finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered safe and sound. Her brother, a boy of twelve, was beaten with clubs by the Indians, and left for dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of Pima Indians, who treated him with kindness. Forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through a desert where no water could be obtained.
Abner Nott’s daughter, Rosey, the attractive heiress of the Pontiac, was made of the same heroic stuff. “The Rosey ez I knows,” said her father, “is a little gal whose voice was as steady with Injuns yellin’ round her nest in the leaves on Sweetwater ez in her purty cabin up yonder.” Lanty Foster, too, was of “that same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, ... whose father’s rifle had been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside.”
It was from these Western and Southwestern emigrants that Bret Harte’s nobler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The “great West” furnished his heroic characters,—California was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep.
The Pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte himself occasionally points out. “She brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath—as soft and warm as the Southwest trades—stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry as it was perhaps from educated delicacy.”[25]
And yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte’s women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one of his characters, “He had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;” and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. In fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of Bret Harte’s Pioneers, and perhaps, moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life.
Be this as it may, the defects of Bret Harte’s heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis, is founded the greatness of nations. A sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte “did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman.” No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte’s best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from the capacity for deep affection. They have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense, the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than American, which certainly is not a part of the typical American woman as we know her in the Eastern States.