“I also came near losing my corn by the blackbirds. Driven by the same hunger, seemingly, that was preying upon the human tribe, they would fairly darken the air, and it was difficult to keep them off, especially as I was compelled to be absent to get food for immediate use. But they were not the only robbers I had to contend against. There were some who, like our white loafers, had a great horror of honest labor, and they would shun even a little toil, with a conscientious abhorrence, at any hazard. They watched my little corn-patch with hungry and thieving eyes, and, but for the chief, would have eaten the corn green and in the ear. As harvest drew near I watched, from before daylight until dark again, to keep off these red vultures and the blackbirds from a spot of ground as large as an ordinary dwelling-house. I had to do my accustomed share of musquite gathering, also, in June and July. This we gathered in abundance. The Colorado overflowed this winter and spring, and the wheat and corn produced well, so that in autumn the tribe was better provided with food than it had been for several years.
“The social habits of these Indians, and the traits of character on which they are founded, and to which they give expression, may be illustrated by a single instance as well as a thousand. The portion of the valley over which the population extends, is about forty miles long. Their convivial seasons were occasions of large gatherings, tumultuous rejoicings, and (so far as their limited productions would allow) of excess in feasting. The year 1854 was one of unusual bounty and thrift. They planted more than usual; and by labor and the overflow of the river, the seed deposited brought forth an unparalleled increase. During the autumn of that year, the residents of the north part of the valley set apart a day for feasting and merry-making. Notice was given about four weeks beforehand; great preparations were made, and a large number invited. Their supply for the appetite on that day consisted of wheat, corn, pumpkins, beans, etc. These were boiled, and portions of them mixed with ground seed, such as serececa, (seed of a weed,) moeroco, (of pumpkins.) On the day of the feast the Indians masked themselves, some with bark, some with paint, some with skins. On the day previous to the feast, the Indians of our part of the valley, who had been favored with an invitation, were gathered at the house of the chief, preparatory to taking the trip in company to the place of the feast. Some daubed their faces and hair with mud, others with paint, so as to give to each an appearance totally different from his or her natural state. I was told that I could go along with the rest. This to me was no privilege, as I knew too well what cruelty and violence they were capable of when excited, as on their days of public gathering they were liable to be. However, I was safer there than with those whom they left behind.
“The Indians went slowly, sometimes in regular, and sometimes in irregular march, yelling, howling, singing, and gesticulating, until toward night they were wrought up to a perfect phrenzy. They halted about one mile from the “north settlement,” and after building a fire, commenced their war-dance, which they kept up until about midnight. On this occasion I witnessed some of the most shameful indecencies, on the part of both male and female, that came to my eye for the five years of my stay among Indians.
“The next morning the Indians who had prepared the feast (some of whom had joined in the dance of the previous evening) came with their squaws, each bearing upon their heads a Coopoesech, containing a cake, or a stone dish filled with soup, or boiled vegetables. These cakes were made of wheat, ground, and mixed with boiled pumpkins. This dough was rolled out sometimes to two feet in diameter; then placed in hot sand, a leaf and a layer of sand laid over the loaf, and a fire built over the whole, until it was baked through. After depositing these dishes, filled with their prepared dainties, upon a slight mound near by, the whole tribe then joined in a war-dance, which lasted nearly twelve hours. After this the dishes and their contents were taken by our party and borne back to our homes, when and where feasting and dancing again commenced, and continued until their supplies were exhausted, and they from sheer weariness were glad to fly to the embrace of sleep. It would be a ‘shame even to speak’ of all the violence and indecency into which they plunged on these occasions. Suffice it to say that no modesty, no sense of shame, no delicacy, that throw so many wholesome hedges and limitations about the respective sexes on occasions of conviviality where civilization elevates and refines, were there to interfere with scenes the remembrance of which creates a doubt whether these degraded bipeds belong to the human or brute race.
“Thus ended one of the many days of such performances that I witnessed; and I found it difficult to decide whether most of barbarity appeared in these, or at those seasons of wild excitement occasioned by the rousing of their revengeful and brutal passions.
“Of all seasons during my captivity, these of concourse and excitement most disgusted me with the untamed Indian. When I remember what my eyes have witnessed, I am led to wonder and adore at my preservation for a single year, or that my life was not brutalized, a victim to their inhumanity.
“I felt cheerful again, only when that loneliness and desolateness which had haunted me since Mary’s death, would sadden and depress my spirits. The same woman that had saved my life, and furnished me with ground and seed to raise corn and wheat, and watched it for me for many days, now procured from the chief a place where I might store it, with the promise from him that every kernel should go for my own maintenance.”
It is not to go again over the melancholy events that have been rehearsed in the last chapter, that we ask the reader to tarry for a moment ere his eye begins to trace the remaining scenes of Olive’s captivity, which furnish the next chapter, and in which we see her under the light of a flickering, unsteady hope of a termination of her captivity either by rescue or death.
But when in haste this chapter was penned for the first edition, it was then, and has since been felt by the writer, that there was an interest hanging about the events of the same, especially upon the closing days and hours of little Mary’s brief life, that properly called, according to the intent of this narrative, for a longer stay. A penning of mere facts does not set forth, or glance at all that clusters about that pale, dying child as she lies in the door of the tent, the object of the enchained curious attention of the savages, by whose cold neglect the flower of her sweet life was thus nipped in the bud. And we feel confident of sharing, to some extent, the feelings of the sensitive and intelligent reader, when we state that the two years’ suffering, by the pressure of which her life was arrested, and the circumstances surrounding those dying moments, make up a record, than which seldom has there been one that appeals to the tender sensibilities of our being more directly, or to our serious consideration more profitably.
Look at these two girls in the light of the first camp-fire that glowed upon the faces of themselves and their captors, the first dreary evening of their captivity. By one hour’s cruel deeds and murder they had suddenly been bereft of parents, brothers, and sisters, and consigned to the complete control of a fiendish set of men, of the cruelty of whose tender mercies they had already received the first and unerring chapter. Look at them toiling day and night, from this on for several periods of twenty-four hours, up rugged ascents, bruised and whipped by the ruggedness of their way and the mercilessness of their lords. Their strength failing; the distance between them and the home and way of the white man increasing; the dreariness and solitude of the region enbosoming them thickening; and each step brooded over by the horrors left behind, and the worse horrors that sat upon the brightest future that at the happiest rovings of fancy could be possibly anticipated.