Mr. Coke and his friend saw and shot a good many bisons after that, but never again one that so nearly turned their trip into a tragedy.
CHAPTER XV
HOW THE YO-SEMITE VALLEY WAS DISCOVERED
Till 1851, the peaks and valleys of the Californian Sierra Nevada were known only as a grim, mysterious region that white men, who valued their lives, would do well not to pry into. Parties of diggers travelling westwards had crossed the range in certain places, but even the strongest bands of them carried their lives in their hands in so doing, for the Snake Indians regarded the whole neighbourhood as their special property. All that was definitely known was that, between the hills, lay deep, uninviting valleys, walled and overhung with granite blocks. The deepest and most picturesque of these, the Yo-Semite, was the great stronghold of the Indian banditti; a cunningly hidden natural fortress whose approaches no stranger would suspect; and it was only by sheer accident that white men ever discovered it.
Only too often, “civilisation” has been another name for importing white men’s most degrading vices into a country whose people could originally have taught the civilisers many a lesson in dignified humility and self-restraint. And in no instance is this more true than in that of the Snake or Shoshonean branch 190 of the Indian race; for whereas, in 1805, the worst complaints that Captains Lewis and Clarke[3] had to make of them was that they were treacherous and given to pilfering, by 1851 they had already become drunken, lazy highway robbers and gamblers; and for this the white gold-seekers were largely to blame.
On account of the rush of the “forty-niners,” San Francisco and Sacramento had developed, all in five minutes, from mere Spanish market-villages into great, raw, ugly towns or camps, whose principal buildings were drinking and gaming dens and money-brokers’ offices. The Indians stood by and watched, and wondered; and then coveted; for a vulgar tawdriness, that soon became positively idiotic, was to them a world of magnificence—and the gold which paid for it all was derived from their own soil; a wealth which they ought to have been enjoying! They went back to their hill-camps and reported; the matter was pondered and discussed. They could not take San Francisco, but at least they could prevent the white man’s territory from spreading beyond certain limits; and this they determined to do to the best of their ability.
The strangers most likely to be affected by such an attitude were those restless spirits who, dissatisfied with the output of their “claims,” were already wandering farther into the unknown country in search of better ones; and the store and tavern keepers who supplied travellers and the more outlying diggers. Two such stores were the property of a young American 191 named John Savage, a good-hearted, respectable fellow, who, because he was wise enough to ignore little thefts on the part of his Indian neighbours, yet man enough to hit out uncompromisingly if necessary, was very popular among the redskins; and this popularity he increased by marrying an Indian girl. He, his wife, and his mother conducted the store at Mariposa Creek, while that on the Frezno River was left in charge of a manager and two assistants.
Every evening a crowd of Snake Indians would collect outside Savage’s house, or in the store, and while he smoked a friendly pipe with them, he was sometimes able to gauge their feelings towards the fresh inhabitants of the tiny settlement, whose number was steadily increasing. The chief of the Snakes was one José Jerez, a comparatively young man, who certainly had not benefited by contact with white men. Bit by bit this brave had succeeded in supplying most of his tribe with muskets; but ammunition was not so easy to obtain. Savage had, from the beginning, firmly refused to supply the Indians with powder; and now that San Francisco was becoming a power in the land, few of them dared enter it to make purchases, lest some of their tribe’s recent depredations should be visited on them. Thus Jerez was dependent on what ammunition he could bully or steal or wheedle from passing travellers or raw new-comers.