They manifest but little affection for one another, only when death has separated them, and then they show the deep inhumanity and abject heathenism to which they have sunk by the horrid rites that prevail in the disposing of their infirm kindred and their dead. They burn the one and the other with equal impunity and satisfaction.
The marriage relation among them is not honored, scarcely observed. The least affront justifies the husband in casting off his chosen wife, and even in taking her life. Rapine and lust prey upon them at home; and war is fast wasting them abroad. They regard the whites as enemies from all antiquity, and any real injury they can do them is considered a virtue, while the taking of their lives (especially of males) is an act which is sure to crown the name of the perpetrator with eternal honors.
With all their boasting and professed contempt for the whites, and with all their bright traditions and prophecies, according to which their day of triumph and power is near at hand, yet they are not without premonitions of a sad and fatal destiny. They are generally dejected and cast down; the tone of their every-day life, as well as sometimes actual sayings, indicating a pressing fear and harassing foreboding.
Some of the females would, after hours of conversation with Olive, upon the character, customs, and prosperity of the whites, plainly, but with injunctions of secrecy, tell her that they lived in constant fear; and it was not unfrequent that some disaffected member of the tribe would threaten to leave his mountain home and go to live with the whites. It is not to be understood that this was the prevailing state of feeling among them.
Most of them are sunk in an ignorance that forbids any aspiration or ambition to reach or fire their natures; an ignorance that knows no higher mode of life than theirs, and that looks with jealousy upon every nation and people, save the burrowing tribes that skulk and crawl among these mountains and ravines.
But fate seems descending upon them, if not in “sudden,” yet in certain night. They are waning. Remnants of them will no doubt long survive; but the masses of them seem fated to a speedy decay. Since this narrative was first written, a very severe battle, lasting several weeks, has taken place between the allied Mohaves and Yumas on the one side, and the Cochopas on the other. The former lost over three hundred warriors; the latter but few, less than threescore. Among the slain was the noble Francisco. It is rumored at Fort Yuma, that during the engagement the allied tribes were informed by their oracles that their ill-success was owing to Francisco; that he must be slain for his friendship to the whites; then victory would crown their struggles; and that, in obedience to this superstition, he was slain by the hands of his own tribe.
Had Olive been among them during this unsuccessful war, her life would have been offered up on the return of the defeated warriors; and no doubt there were then many among them who attributed their defeat to the conciliation on their part by which she was surrendered to her own people. Such is the Indian of the South and Southwest.
We have tried to give the reader a correct, though brief history of the singular and strange fate of that unfortunate family. If there is one who shall be disposed to regard the reality as overdrawn, we have only to say that every fact has been dictated by word of mouth from the surviving members of that once happy family, who have, by a mysterious Providence, after suffering a prolonged and unrelieved woe of five years, been rescued and again restored to the blessings of a civilized and sympathizing society.
Most of the preceding pages have been written in the first person. This method was adopted for the sake of brevity, as also to give, as near as language may do it, a faithful record of the feelings and spirit with which the distresses and cruel treatment of the few years over which these pages run, was met, braved, endured, and triumphed over. The record of the five years of captivity entered upon by a timid, inexperienced girl of fourteen years, and during which, associated with naught but savage life, she grew up to womanhood, presents one of heroism, self-possession, and patience, that might do honor to one of maturity and years. Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.
We have confidence that every reader will share with us the feelings of gratitude to Almighty God for the blessings of civilization, and a superior social life, with which we cease to pen this record of the degradation, the barbarity, the superstition, the squalidness, that curse the uncounted thousands who people the caverns and wilds that divide the Eastern from the Western inheritance of our mother republic.