The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

As is the case with most savages, the Digger Indians show remarkable instances of ingenuity in some of their contrivances, and great skill in the manufacture of their weapons. Their bows and arrows are very good specimens of workmanship. The former are shorter than the bows used in this country, but resemble them in every other particular, even in the shape of the pieces of horn at the ends. The head of the arrow is of the orthodox cut, the three feathers being placed in the usual position; the point, however, is the most elaborate part. About three inches of the end is of a heavier wood than the rest of the arrow, being very neatly spliced in with thin tendons. The point itself is a piece of flint chipped down into a flat diamond shape, about the size of a diamond on a playing-card; the edges are very sharp, and are notched to receive the tendons with which it is firmly secured to the arrow.

The women make a kind of wicker-work basket of a conical form, so closely woven as to be perfectly water-tight, and in these they have an ingenious method of boiling water, by heating a number of stones in the fire, and throwing a succession of them into the water till the temperature is raised to boiling point.

We had a visit at our cabin one Sunday from an Indian and his squaw. She was such a particularly ugly specimen of human nature that I made her sit down, and proceeded to take a sketch of her, to the great delight of her dutiful husband, who looked over my shoulder and reported progress to her. I offered her the sketch when I had finished, but after admiring herself in the bottom of a new tin pannikin, the only substitute for a looking-glass which I could find, and comparing her own beautiful face with her portrait, she was by no means pleased, and would have nothing to do with it. I suppose she thought I had not done her justice; which was very likely, for no doubt our ideas of female beauty must have differed very materially.

Not many days after we had settled ourselves at Middletown, news was brought into Hangtown that a white man had been killed by Indians at a place called Johnson’s Ranch, about twelve miles distant. A party of three or four men immediately went out to recover the body, and to “hunt” the Indians. They found the half-burned remains of the murdered man; but were attacked by a large number of Indians, and had to retire, one of the party being wounded by an Indian arrow. On their return to Hangtown there was great excitement; about thirty men, mostly from the Western States, turned out with their long rifles, intending, in the first place, to visit the camp of the Middletown tribe, and to take from them their rifles, which they were reported to have bought from the storekeeper there, and after that to lynch the storekeeper himself for selling arms to the Indians, which is against the law; for however friendly the Indians may be, they trade them off to hostile tribes.

It happened, however, that on this particular day a neighboring tribe had come over to the camp of the Middletown Indians for the purpose of having a fandango together; and when they saw this armed party coming upon them, they immediately saluted them with a shower of arrows and rifle-balls, which damaged a good many hats and shirts, without wounding any one. The miners returned their fire, killing a few of the Indians; but their party being too small to fight against such odds, they were compelled to retreat; and as the storekeeper, having got a hint of their kind intentions towards him, had made himself scarce, they marched back to Hangtown without having done much to boast of.

When the result of their expedition was made known, the excitement in Hangtown was of course greater than ever. The next day crowds of miners flocked in from all quarters, each man equipped with a long rifle in addition to his bowie-knife and revolver, while two men, playing a drum and a fife, marched up and down the street to give a military air to the occasion. A public meeting was held in one of the gambling-rooms, at which the governor, the sheriff of the county, and other big men of the place, were present. The miners about Hangtown were mostly all Americans, and a large proportion of them were men from the Western States, who had come by the overland route across the plains—men who had all their lives been used to Indian wiles and treachery, and thought about as much of shooting an Indian as of killing a rattlesnake. They were a rough-looking crowd; long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the usual old-flannel-shirt costume of the mines, with shaggy beards, their faces, hands, and arms as brown as mahogany, and with an expression about their eyes which boded no good to any Indian who should come within range of their rifles.

There were some very good speeches made at the meeting; that of a young Kentuckian doctor was quite a treat. He spoke very well, but from the fuss he made it might have been supposed that the whole country was in the hands of the enemy. The eyes of the thirty States of the Union, he said, were upon them; and it was for them, the thirty-first, to avenge this insult to the Anglo-Saxon race, and to show the wily savage that the American nation, which could dictate terms of peace or war to every other nation on the face of the globe, was not to be trifled with. He tried to rouse their courage, and excite their animosity against the Indians, though it was quite unnecessary, by drawing a vivid picture of the unburied bones of poor Brown, or Jones, the unfortunate individual who had been murdered, bleaching on the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, while his death was still unavenged. If they were cowardly enough not to go out and whip the savage Indians, their wives would spurn them, their sweethearts would reject them, and the whole world would look upon them with scorn. The most common-sense argument in his speech, however, was, that unless the Indians were taught a lesson, there would be no safety for the straggling miners in the mountains at any distance from a settlement. Altogether he spoke very well, considering the sort of crowd he was addressing; and judging from the enthusiastic applause, and from the remarks I heard made by the men around me, he could not have spoken with better effect.

The Governor also made a short speech, saying that he would take the responsibility of raising a company of one hundred men, at five dollars a day, to go and whip the Indians.

The Sheriff followed. He “cal’lated” to raise out of that crowd one hundred men, but wanted no man to put down his name who would not stand up in his boots, and he would ask no man to go any further than he would go himself.

Those who wished to enlist were then told to come round to the other end of the room, when nearly the whole crowd rushed eagerly forward, and the required number were at once enrolled. They started the next day, but the Indians retreating before them, they followed them far up into the mountains, where they remained for a couple of months, by which time the wily savages, it is to be hoped, got properly whipped, and were taught the respect due to white men.