When a person was attacked with it, it seemed the worst kind of malady,
as it would take them months to return if they had the money to pay
their passage. Many were married men, separated a great distance from
their wives and children. Others, young men, who had their engaged ones
waiting for them to return, with their fortunes made in the gold mines,
to marry them. I can recall several instances where I have known them to
lie down and die from despair. I was talking with an old Californian of
those days. He said he had once given up and made up his mind to wander
off by himself on the mountains and die, which he did. As he lay there
in despair, after a while he thought he would look around him, and he
saw the hill was covered with every variety of beautiful wild flowers.
He said their beauty seemed to refresh and revive his mind, and give him
new resolution, and he decided to try his fortune again, and he became
successful and returned to the States with a competency.
[Illustration: THE DESPONDENT MINER.]
The early pioneers had some conflict with the Indians in the interior of
the country. Five Oregon men were massacred by them when engaged in
digging gold, but a terrible retribution was visited upon those Indians
concerned in it by the enraged Forty-niners. The Indians, at first, had
nothing but bows and arrows, and, of course, could not compete with
rifles. Several other small engagements were rumored, but they soon
gave up all contests with the whites, for they saw it was useless. There
was an acorn that was quite plenty in California, being longer than
ours, but not of a bitter taste. The squaws made flour of them. The
Digger Indians were the next tribe east of them; they were probably the
lowest grade. They would set fire to the prairie grass to burn the
grasshoppers, and pick them up and eat them. They deemed them a luxury.
The Oregon tribes were a higher grade, a warlike race, and superior in
every respect. The highest grade of them, in the United States now, are
the Choctaws and Chicksaws that formerly occupied the northern parts of
the State of Mississippi. When a young man, I spent three weeks in their
nation, travelling alone, and was treated with great hospitality by
them. They are quite intelligent, and they have laws and customs as
civilized nations. We generally look upon all of them as alike, but such
is not the case--there is as great a difference between different
tribes as much as between different white nations. The California
Indians were not naturally warlike, and when the early pioneers expected
any trouble from them, they would appoint a committee to go and see
them, and they generally settled their difficulty without any conflicts.