She was taken to Jackson County, Oregon, where she has been since, and is still residing there.
* Since writing the above Miss Oatman, with her brother, have spent about six months at school in Santa Clara Valley, California. On the fifth day of March, 1858, they left San Francisco, in company with the writer and his family, on the steamship Golden Age, for New-York, where they arrived on the 26th of the same month.
LORENZO OATMAN.
CONCLUSION.
How strange the life of these savages. Of their past history how little is known; and there is an utter destitution of any reliable data upon which to conjecture even concerning it. By some they are considered the descendants of a people who were refined and enlightened. That a period of civilization, and of some progress in the arts, preceded the discovery of this continent by Columbus, there can be but little doubt. The evidences of this are to be seen in the relics of buried cities and towns, that have been found deep under ground in numerous places.
But whether the people of whom we have these traces extended to the Pacific slope, and to the southwest, we know not. This much we do know: there are large tracts of country now occupied by large and numerous tribes of the red race, living in all the filth and degradation of an unmitigated heathenism, and without any settled system of laws or social regulations.
If they have any system of government, it is that of an absolute monarchy. The chief of each tribe is the sole head and sovereign in all matters that affect the wellbeing of the same, even to the life and death of its members.
They are human, but live like brutes. They seem totally destitute of all those noble and generous traits of life which distinguish and honor civilized people. In indolence and supineness they seem content to pass their days, without ambition, save of war and conquest; they live the mere creatures of passion, blind and callous to all those ennobling aims and purposes that are the true and pleasing inspiration of rational existence. In their social state, the more they are studied the more do they become an object of disgust and loathing.