It sounds a bit melodramatic, in these days of “Carlisle” education
for the Indian, and with “Lo” himself on the lecture platform, to tell
of a band of one time hostile red men having a white chief--once a
captive--who so learned to love his captivity that when freedom was
to be had for the taking, he refused it, and still lives among them,
voluntarily. Contentedly--happily? Who knows? He says so; and with no
proof to the contrary we must needs believe him.
Once in every three years he leaves his home among the mountains of
eastern Oregon, and goes for a week to San Francisco by the sea. Once
in every three years he may be seen there on the streets, in the
parks, at the theaters, on the beach, at the Cliff or the Heights, as
strangers are seen daily, and with nothing about him to mark him in
any wise different from a thousand others. You might pass him dozens
of times without particularly observing him, save that he is always
accompanied by a woman so evidently of a different world than that
which he has known, that your attention is at once arrested, and your
curiosity is whetted to know the story--for story there is, you are
sure. And what a story! One does not have to go to fiction for tales
of the marvelous; and these two--he, roughened, bearded and browned,
clothed as the average American laborer taking a holiday; she, with
the bearing of a gentlewoman, and dressed as they do who have found the
treasure-trove that lies at the end of the rainbow--these two have a
tragic story, all their own, that few know. It is this:
Back in those far days when the Pacific Railroad was undreamed
of--before we had so much as ever guessed there might in reality be a
stage line between the Missouri and the Sacramento--one noon the wheels
of an emigrant wagon were moving down a wide Nevada valley, where the
sage gray of the short greasewood was the only thing remotely green;
moving so slowly that they seemed not to move at all. It was a family
from one of the States of our Middle West, going to California. The man
walked beside the slow-moving wagon. Sometimes some of the children
walked, too. The woman rode and held in her arms a wee boy whose own
arms fought and sturdy legs struggled often to walk with the others--a
blue-eyed boy, bonny and beautiful.
Days and days of unblinking sunshine; and always the awful stillness
of the plains. There had been weeks of it; and this day when they came
down the broad wash that was the drain from the bordering mountain
range, a thick heat lay on the land, making welcome the promised noon
rest where the greasewood grew tall. All down the length of the now dry
wash the brush was more than shoulder high--annually wetted as it was
by the full spring creek.
When the greasewood grows so high it may easily hide a foe.
The wagon bumped and ground its wheels over the stones of the road here
in the wash toward the row of tall greasewood, a dozen yards away. Over
there they would halt for a noon rest. Over there they would eat their
noon meal--drink from their scanty water supply--and then resume the
dreary journey.
This day was just such an one as all their other desert days had been;
the place seemed to them not different in any way from the other
miles of endless monotony. As they neared the high brush, one of the
children--a fair-haired girl of eight--picking up a bright pebble from
the road, held it up that her father might see. The other children
walking beside the wagon picked up pebbles, too--pebbles red, and
purple, and green, that had come down the bed of the creek when the
flood came. In the wagon the woman sat holding the blue-eyed boy in her
arms.