Shadows of Shasta

by Joaquin Miller

But there was another and an all-sufficient reason why neither man or woman came that way. She was an Indian. Do not imagine this a wild Indian woman. Indian she was; but remember, the Catholics had more than half civilized nearly all the native Californians long before we undertook to kill them.

This Indian woman would have been called by strangers a Mexican woman. She was very religious, and had imbued her boy with all her beautiful faith and simple piety.

I know that the spectacle of an old Indian woman and her "half-breed" son, represented as the morality and religion of a camp made up of "civilized" Saxons, will seem somewhat novel to you. But I knew this Indian boy and his mother well, and know every foot of the ground I intend to go over, and every fact I propose to narrate. And if you are not prepared to receive this as truth, I prefer you to close this page right here.

To make a moment's digression, with your permission, let me state briefly and frankly, once for all, that the only really religious, unquestioning and absolutely devout Christians I ever met in America are the Indians. I know of no other people so faithful and so blindly true to their belief, outside of the peasantry of Italy. Be their beautiful faith born of ignorance or what, I do not say. I simply assert that it exists. There is no devotion so true as that of a converted Indian. Maybe it is the devotion of idolatry, the faith of superstition. But I repeat, it is sincere. And let me further say, it seems to me whatever is worth believing at all, is worth believing utterly and entirely—just as these simple children of the wilderness believe, without doubt or question.

I know nothing so beautiful—may I say picturesque?—as the Ummatilla Indians of Oregon at worship on Sunday. Not a man, woman or child of all the tribe absent. Not one voice silent when the hymns are given out, in all that vast, gaily colored and singular assemblage.

This is the tribe of which the white settlers asked and received protection last year when the Shoshonees ravaged the country, beat off the soldiers, and slew some of the settlers. And yet there is a bill before Congress to-day to take away the few remaining acres from this tribe and open up the place to white settlers. Indeed, it seems that every member of Congress from Oregon has just this one mission; for the first, and almost the only thing he does while there, is to introduce and urge the passage of this bill, whereby the red man is to be turned out of his well-tilled fields, and the white man turned into them.

In truth, these very fields have long been staked off and claimed by bold, bad white men, who hover about the borders of this Reservation, waiting for the long-promised law which is to take this land from the owners and give it to them. They nominate their members of Congress on his pledge and bond, and constant promise, to take this land from the Indian. They vote for and elect the only member of Congress from this State on that promise, certain that their absolute ownership of this graveyard of the Indian is only a question of time. Year by year the graveyard grows broader; the fields grow narrower; they grow less in number; for now and then an Indian is found wandering away from the Reservation to his former hunting-grounds and ancient graves of his fathers. He seldom comes back. Sometimes his murderers trouble themselves to throw the body in the brush or some gorge or canyon. But most frequently it is left where it falls. To say that all the people or the best people of this brave young State approve of this, would be unfair—untrue. Yet this does not save the Indian, who is doing his best to fit into the new order of things around him. He is shot down, and neither grand or petit jury can be found to punish his murderer.

But to the story. This little piece of land where the old Indian woman had lived and brought up her boy, was rich and valuable. It was therefore coveted by the white man. At first men had said: "She will die soon; the boy will then sell the hut for a song, gamble off the money, and then go the way of all who are stained with the dark and tawny blood of the savage—death in a ditch from some unknown rifle, or death by the fever in the new Reservation." But the old woman still lived on; and the boy, by his industry, sobriety, duty and devotion to his mother, put to shame the very best among the new generation of white men in the mountains. The singular manhood of John Logan was the subject of remark by all who knew him. With the few true men on this savage edge of the world it made him fast friends; with the many outlaws and evil natures it made him the subject of envy and bitter hatred.

What power behind this boy had lifted him up and led him on? Surely no Indian woman, wholly unlettered in the ways of the white man, good and true as she may have been, had brought him up to this high place on which he now stood. Who was his father? and what strong hand had reached out all these years and kept his mother there in that little hut with her boy, while her tribe perished or passed away to the hated and horrible Reservation down toward the sea?

Who was his father? The Camp had asked this a thousand times. The boy himself had looked into the deep, pathetic eyes of his mother, and asked the question in his heart for many and many a year; but he never opened his lips to ask her. It was too sad, too sacred a subject, and he would not ask of her what she would not freely give. And now she lay dying there alone on the porch, as her boy stopped to talk with the two children, "the babes in the wood," and her secret hidden in her own heart.