"Let us go to the Great Father in Washington and plead with him—I and some of my people," requested Cecilio.
"It cannot be. It would be useless. There is only one thing to be done."
"And that thing we shall never do of our own free will," cried Cecilio, flinging out his arms and shaking his black locks in the face of the speaker.
Then began a loud talk in the Cupeño language, for in this emergency the Spanish failed them. The white men waited quietly until the tumult had subsided, knowing that it was best to let them give vent to their feelings so long repressed. At length a fine-looking young woman stepped forward and, without the least embarrassment, offered to translate the answers of her people into the Spanish tongue.[G]
"We thank you for coming here to speak with us," she said, as courteously as any lady in the land.
"We thank you for coming here to talk with us in a way we can understand. It is the first time any one has done so. They have said, 'You must go, you must go,' but they have not told us, assembled together, why we must go. Some of our old people have never believed it till now, and some of us will not yet believe that it can happen.
"You ask us to think what place we like next best to this place, where we always have lived. You see that graveyard out there? There are our fathers and our grandfathers. You see that Eagle-nest Mountain, and that Rabbit-hole Mountain? When God made them he gave us this place. We have always been here; we do not care for any other place. It may be good, but it is not ours. We have always lived here, we would rather die here. Our fathers did; we cannot leave them. Our children were born here—how can we go away? If you give us the best place in the world it is not so good for us as this. The Captain he say his people cannot go anywhere else; they cannot live anywhere else. Here they always live; their people always live here. There is no other place. This is our home. We ask you to get it for us. The Indians always here. We stay here. Everybody knows this is Indian land. These Hot Springs always Indian. We cannot live anywhere else. We were born here, and our fathers are buried here. We do not think of any place after this. We want this place and not any other place."
"But if the government cannot buy this place for you, then what would you like next best?"
"There is no other place for us. We do not want you to buy any other place. If you will not buy this place we will go into the mountains like quail and die there, the old people and the women and children. Let the government be glad and proud. It can kill us. We do not fight; we do what it says. If we cannot live here we want to go into those mountains and die. We do not want any other home."
It was useless to parley with the poor Cupeños. That they would receive the value and more than the value of their houses, that they would be given material to build other and better dwellings, that soil as fertile and water as abundant would be found for them, that they would be provided with new agricultural tools, that they would be transported free of charge to their new home—none of these things availed. To each and every argument they made the same reply: