“Heavy work for a man of your age,” I said.
He bit into an orange, eating both peeling and pulp. “Me papoose. Me only 107 years old.”
There were less than a dozen oranges left when I began to cast about for a tactful way to preserve a few for Mabel. Seeing her chopping wood in the scorching sun I said, “I’ll bet Mabel would like an orange just now. Shall I call her?”
“No—no—” George grunted. “Oranges heap bad for squaw,” and speeding up his eating, he removed the last menace to Mabel.
Once George told me of watching the sufferings of the Jayhawkers and Bennett-Arcane party:
“Me little boy, first time I see white man. Whiskers make me think him devil. I run. I see some of Bennett party die. When all dead, we go down. First time Indians ever see flour. Squaws think it what make white men white and put it on their faces.”
I asked George why he didn’t go down and aid the whites. “Why?” he asked, “to get shot?”
“How many Shoshones are left?” I asked George.
He counted them on his fingers. “Nineteen. Soon, none.”
George died in 1944 and it is safe I believe, to say that for 110 years he had baffled every agency of death on America’s worst desert. Because his ranch was a landmark and the water that came from the mountains was good, it was a natural stopping place and he was known to thousands. Following a curious custom of Indians George adopted the Swedish name Hansen because it had euphony he liked.