Shadows of Shasta

by Joaquin Miller

One evening in the hot, sultry summer, old Forty-nine rode down from the mountain into the great valley, following the trail taken by the lines of chained captives, and set his face for the Reservation.

At a risk of repetition, let us look at this Reservation. The government had ordered a United States officer, of the rank of lieutenant, to set apart a Reservation for the Indians on land not acquired and not likely to be desired by the white settlers, and to gather the Indians together there and keep them there by force, if force should be required. This young man established a Reservation on the border of a tule lake, shut in by a crescent of low sage-brush hills. The Indian camp was laid out on the very edge of this alkali lake. The crescent of sage-brush hills of a mile in circuit, reaching back and almost around the Reservation, was mounted at three points by cannon, ready to sweep the camp below. On this circuit of hills, healthy and pleasant enough the officers and soldiers had their quarters. Down in the damp, deadly valley, on the edge of the alkali lake, the newly appointed Indian Agent, with a tremendous appropriation to be expended in building houses and establishing the Indians in their new homes, built the village. It was made up of two rows of low, one-story, one-room huts. Two big lamps hung in the one street; and from lamp to lamp before the doors of the little huts with earthen floors and turf-covered roofs, paced soldiers night and day.

These houses were damp and dismal from the first. Soon they began to be mouldy; fungi and toadstools and the like began to grow up in the corners and out of the logs. Little shiny reptiles, in the long hot rainy days that followed, and worms and all sorts of hideous vermin, began to creep and crawl through these dreadful dens of death, over the sick and dying Indians. Long slimy, unnamed, and unknown worms crawled up out of the earth, as if they could not wait for the victims to die.

The Indians were dying off by hundreds. They went to the officers and complained. The officers ordered a double guard to be set. And that was all.

You marvel that these young lieutenants could be so imperious and cruel? It does seem past belief. But pardon just one paragraph of digression while we recall the conduct of a younger class only last year on the Hudson. To me the real question before the courts in the Whitaker case is not whether this quiet stranger, with a tinge of black man's blood in his veins, mutilated himself, or no. But the real question is, did they or did they not, by their determined and persistent persecutions and insults, drive him in a fit of desperation to do this in the hope of pulling down ruin on the heads of all? This seems probable to me, and to me is far more monstrous than if they had, in sudden anger, cut his ears, or even cut his throat; and if these young bloods could so treat a stranger there, standing at such a manifest disadvantage, what would they not be capable of when they are, for the first time, clothed with a little brief authority, away out on the savage edge of the world?

The water here, as the hot season came on, was something dreadful. It was slimy with alkali. Little black worms knotted and twisted themselves together at the bottom of the cup, like bunches of witch-woven horse-hair. The Indians were dying of malaria. They were burning up with the fever. And this was the only water these people, who had been used to the fresh sweet snow-water of the Sierras, could have.

What could they do? They appealed to the officers. They were answered with insult: "You must get used to it. You must get civilized."

These dying Indians began to fight and quarrel among themselves. Ah, they were very wicked. They were quarrelsome as dogs; almost as quarrelsome as Christians!

This was a small Paris in siege. It was Jerusalem surrounded by Titus. Down there, dying as they were, a savage Simon and a degenerate John, as in Jerusalem of old, led their followers against each other, even across their dead that lay unburied in the mouldy death-pens and about their dark and narrow doors, and slew each other as did God's chosen people when besieged by the son of Vespasian.

Then the men in brass and blue turned the cannon loose on the howling savages, and shot them into silence and submission.