But the unpierced heathenism that thus stretches its wing of night upon these swarming mountains and vales, is not long to have a dominion so wild, nor possess victims so numerous. Its territory is already begirt with the light of a higher life; and now the foot-fall of the pioneering, brave Anglo-Saxon is heard upon the heel of the savage, and breaks the silence along his winding trail. Already the song and shout of civilization wakes echoes long and prophetic upon those mountain rocks, that have for centuries hemmed in an unvisited savageness.
Until his death Francisco, by whose vigilance the place of Olive’s captivity and suffering was ascertained, and who dared to bargain for her release and restoration ere he had changed a word with her captors about it, was hunted by his own and other tribes for guiding the white man to the hiding-places of those whose ignorance will not suffer them to let go their filth and superstition, and who regard the whole transaction as the opening of the door to the greedy, aggressive, white race. The cry of gold, like that which formed and matured a state upon this far-off coast in a few years, is heard along ravines that have been so long exclusively theirs, and companies of gold hunters, led on by faint but unerring “prospects,” are confidently seeking rich leads of the precious ore near their long isolated wigwams.
The march of American civilization, if unhampered by the weakness and corruption of its own happy subjects, will yet, and soon, break upon the barbarity of these numerous tribes, and either elevate them to the unappreciated blessings of a superior state, or wipe them into oblivion, and give their long-undeveloped territory to another.
Perhaps when the intricate and complicated events that mark and pave the way to this state of things, shall be pondered by the curious and retrospective eye of those who shall rejoice in its possession, these comparatively insignificant ones spread out for the reader upon these pages, will be found to form a part. May Heaven guide the anxious-freighted future to the greatest good of the abject heathen, and save those into whose hands are committed such openings and privileges for beneficent doing, from the perversion of their blessings and mission.
“Honor to whom honor is due.” With all the degradation in which these untamed hordes are steeped, there are—strange as it may seem—some traits and phases in their conduct which, on comparison with those of some who call themselves civilized, ought to crimson their cheeks with a blush. While feuds have been kindled, and lives have been lost—innocent lives—by the intrusion of the white man upon the domestic relations of Indian families; while decency and chastity have been outraged, and the Indian female, in some instances, stolen from her spouse and husband that she really loved; let it be written, written if possible so as to be read when an inscrutable but unerring Providence shall exact “to the uttermost farthing” for every deed of cruelty and lust perpetrated by a superior race upon an inferior one; written to stand out before those whose duty and position it shall be, within a few years, in the American Council of State, to deliberate and legislate upon the best method to dispose of these fast waning tribes; that one of our own race, in tender years, committed wholly to their power, passed a five-years’ captivity among these savages without falling under those baser propensities which rave, and rage, and consume, with the fury and fatality of a pestilence, among themselves.
It is true that their uncultivated and untempered traditional superstitions allow them to mark in the white man an enemy that has preyed upon their rights from antiquity, and to exact of him, when thrown into their power, cruelties that kindle just horror in the breast of the refined and the civilized. It is true that the more intelligent, and the large majority, deplore the poor representation of our people that has been given to these wild men by certain “lewd fellows of the baser sort,” who are undistinguished by them from our race as a whole. But they are set down to our account in a more infallible record than any of mere human writ; and delicate and terrible is the responsibility with which they have clothed the action of the American race amid the startling and important exigences that must roll upon its pathway for the next few years.
Who that looks at the superstition, the mangled, fragmentary, and distorted traditions that form the only tribunal of appeal for the little wreck of moral sense they have left them—superstitions that hold them as with the grasp of omnipotence; who that looks upon the self-consuming workings of the corruptions that breed in the hotbed of ignorance, can be so hardened that his heart has no sigh to heave, no groan to utter over a social, moral, and political desolation that ought to appeal to our commiseration rather than put a torch to our slumbering vengeance.
It is true that this coast and the Eastern states have now their scores of lonely wanderers, mournful and sorrow-stricken mourners, over whose sky has been cast a mantle of gloom that will stretch to their tombs for the loss of those of their kindred who sleep in the dust, or bleach upon the sand-plots trodden by these roaming heathen; kindred who have in their innocence fallen by cruelty. But there is a voice coming up from these scattered, unmonumented resting-places of their dead; and it pleads, pleads with the potency and unerringness of those pleadings from “under the ground” of ancient date, and of the fact and effect of which we have a guiding record.
Who that casts his eye over the vast territory that lies between the Columbia River and Acapulco, with the Rocky Range for its eastern bulwark, a territory abounding with rich verdure-clad vales and pasturage hill-sides, and looks to the time, not distant, when over it all shall be spread the wing of the eagle, when the music of civilization, of the arts, of the sciences, of the mechanism, of the religion of our favored race, shall roll along its winding rivers and over its beautiful slopes, but has one prayer to offer to the God of his fathers, that the same wisdom craved and received by them to plant his civil light-house on a wilderness shore, may still guide us on to a glorious, a happy, and a useful destiny.
The following lines were written by some person, unknown to the author, residing in Marysville, California. They were first published in a daily paper, soon after the first edition was issued. They are here inserted as expressing, not what one merely, but what many felt who read this narrative in that state, and who have become personally acquainted with Miss Oatman. Many have been the assurances of sympathy and affection that, by letter and in person, have been in kindred and equally fervent strains poured upon the ear and heart of the once suffering subject of this narrative.