And now all changes, but slowly, gradually. The cactus, the Spanish
nettle, the prickly pear continue, even into and upon the mountains; but
the pines, though stunted and at first scattered, give variety, softness
and beauty to the landscape, which becomes more rolling, with deeper and
more frequent valleys, and water in nearly all of them; the cotton-woods
along the streams no longer skulk behind bluffs or hide in casual
hollows; you may build an honest camp-fire without fear of robbing an
embryo county of its last stick of wood, and water your mules generously
without drying up some long, pretentious river, and condemning those who
come after you to weary, thirsty marches through night and day. The
cotton-woods, as you near the wind-quelling range of protecting heights,
which rise, rank above rank, to the westward, (the more distant still
white-robed with snow) grow large and stately—some of them sixty to
seventy feet high, and at least three feet in diameter; the unwooded
soil ceases to be desert and becomes prairie once more; but still this
is in the main a sandy, thinly grassed region, which cannot compare with
the prairies of Illinois, of Iowa, or eastern Kansas.
There seems to be as rich and deep soil in some of the creek-bottoms,
especially those of the South Platte, as almost anywhere; and yet I fear
the husbandman is doomed to find even this belt of grassed and
moderately rolling land, which stretches along the foot of the Mountains
to a width of perhaps twenty miles, less tractable and productive than
fertile. It lies at such an elevation—from five thousand to six thousand
feet above the ocean level—that, though its winters are said to be
moderate, its springs cannot be early. There was a fall of a foot of
snow in this region on the 26th of May, when ice formed to a
quarter-inch thickness on the Plains; and when summer suddenly sets in,
about the 1st of June, there are hot suns by day, and cool, strong winds
by night, with a surfeit of petty thunder squalls, but little or no
rain. The gentle rain of last Thursday in the mountains fell, for a
short time, in sheets just at their feet—say for a breadth of five
miles—and there ceased. Hardly a drop fell within five miles west, or
for any distance east of this place, though the earth was soaked only
ten miles further west. Hence, the enterprizing few who have commenced
farms and gardens near this point, tell me that their crops have made no
progress for a week or two, and can make none till they have rain. I
trust wheat and rye will do well here whenever they shall be allowed a
fair chance; barley and oats, if sowed very early on deeply-plowed land,
may do tolerably; but corn, though it comes up well and looks rank at
present, will hardly ripen before frost, even should it escape paralysis
by drouth; while potatoes, peas, and most vegetables will probably
require irrigation, or yield but sparingly. Yet, should the gold mines
justify their present promise, farming, in the right localities at the
base of these mountains, even by the help of irrigation, will yield—to
those who bring to it the requisite sagacity, knowledge, and
capital—richer rewards than elsewhere on earth. Everything that can be
grown here will command treble or quadruple prices for years; and he who
produces anything calculated to diversify and improve the gross,
mountainous diet of salt pork, hot bread, beans, and coffee, now
necessarily all but universal in this region, will be justly entitled to
rank with public benefactors.
And the Rocky Mountains, with their grand, aromatic forests, their
grassy glades, their frequent springs, and dancing streams of the
brightest, sweetest water, their pure, elastic atmosphere, and their
unequalled game and fish, are destined to be a favorite resort and home
of civilized man. I never visited a region where physical life could be
more surely prolonged or fully enjoyed. Thousands who rush hither for
gold will rush away again disappointed and disgusted, as thousands have
already done; and yet the gold is in these mountains, and the right men
will gradually unearth it. I shall be mistaken if two or three millions
are not taken out this year, and some ten millions in 1860, though all
the time there will be, as now, a stream of rash adventurers heading
away from the diggings, declaring that there is no gold there, or next
to none. So it was in California and in Australia; so it must be here,
where the obstacles to be overcome are greater, and the facilities for
getting home decidedly better. All men are not fitted by nature for
gold-diggers; yet thousands will not realize this until they have been
convinced of it by sore experience. Any good phrenologist should have
been able to tell half the people who rushed hither so madly during the
last two months that, if these mountains had been half made of gold,
they never would get any of it except by minding their own proper
business, which was quite other than mining. And still the long
procession is crossing the Platte and Clear Creek, and pressing up the
“Hill Difficulty” in mad pursuit of gold, whereof not one-fifth will
carry back to the states so much as they brought away. New leads will
doubtless be discovered, new veins be opened, new “diggings” or
districts become the rage—for it were absurd to suppose that little
ravine known as Gregory’s, running to Clear Creek, the sole depository
of gold worth working in all this region—and in time the Rocky Mountains
will swarm with a hardy, industrious, energetic white population. Not
gold alone, but lead, iron, and (I think) silver or cobalt, have already
been discovered here, and other valuable minerals, doubtless will be, as
the mountains are more thoroughly explored—for as yet they have not been
even run over. Those who are now intent on the immediate organization
and admission of a new state may be too fast, yet I believe the Rocky
Mountains, and their immediate vicinity—say between Fort Laramie on the
north, and Taos on the south—will within three years have a white
population of one hundred thousand, one-half composed of men in the full
vigor of their prime, separated by deserts and waste places from the
present states—obliged to rely on their own resources in any emergency,
and fully able to protect and govern themselves. “Why not let them be a
state so soon as reasonably may be.
Mining is a pursuit akin to fishing and hunting, and, like them,
enriches the few at the cost of the many. This region is doubtless
foreordained to many changes of fortune; to-day, giddy with the
intoxication of success—to-morrow, in the valley of humiliation. One
day, report will be made on the Missouri by a party of disappointed
gold-seekers, that the “Pike’s Peak humbug” has exploded, and that every
body is fleeing to the states who can possibly get away; the next report
will represent these diggings as yellow with gold. Neither will be true,
yet each in its turn will have a certain thin substratum of fact for its
justification. Each season will see its thousands turn away
disappointed, only to give place to other thousands, sanguine and eager
as if none had ever failed. Yet I feel a strong conviction that each
succeeding month’s researches will enlarge the field of mining
operations, and diminish the difficulties and impediments which now
stretch across the gold-seeker’s path, and that, ten years hence, we
shall be just beginning fairly to appreciate and secure the treasures
now buried in the Rocky Mountains.
XIII.
THE GOLD IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
DENVER, _June 20, 1859_.
For some ten years past, vague stories affirming or implying the
existence of gold in our country’s principal chain of mountains, have
from time to time reached the public ear; but they seemed to rest on
very slight or insecure foundations, and attracted but limited and
transient attention. An Indian’s, or trapper’s, or trader’s bare
assertion that, in traversing the narrow ravines and precipitous heights
of our American Switzerland he had picked up a piece of quartz lustrous
with gold, or even a small nugget of the pure metal, was calculated to
attract little attention, while California was unfolding her marvelous
treasures, and while the fact stood forth clear and unquestioned, that
not one pound of the precious dust from all the region watered by the
Missouri’s mountain tributaries had ever been known to swell the world’s
aggregate of the all-desired metal, and not one company, or individual
even, was known to be seeking the yellow idol on this side of the
backbone of our continent. So far as I can learn, the first three
parties ever organized to search for gold in all this Rocky Mountain
region, were fitted out in the spring of 1858, from the Cherokee nation
from Missouri, and from Kansas (Lawrence) respectively; and these,
though they carried home or sent home large stories of the auriferous
character of the country they “prospected,” took with them precious
little gold. But their reports aroused a spirit of gold-seeking
adventure in others, so that the ensuing (last) fall witnessed a rush of
three or four hundred, mainly men of broken fortunes from the dead
mushroom “cities” of Nebraska and Kansas, to the region watered b; the
South Platte and the more northerly sources of the Arkansas. For some
reason, this point—the junction of Cherry Creek with the South
Platte—became the focus of the gold-hunt; here those who staid through
the autumn and winter busied themselves in putting up log cabins, and
writing home to their friends in the states, accounts of the richness of
this region in gold—a metal which, except in very minute quantities,
they had seen but with the eye of faith. I doubt that three thousand
dollars’ worth of gold in every shape, had been taken out by the five or
six hundred seekers who came to this region in hot pursuit of it, down
to the first day of last month—May, 1859. I doubt it, not merely because
I have never seen any reliable accounts of that much gold being sent or
received from here prior to that date, but because the gold does not
exist where it had almost exclusively been sought down to that day.
Cherry Creek, though its extreme sources are near Pike’s Peak, is so
headed off from the mountains by the South Platte, that I can hardly
realize that it should bring down any gold at all; and, at best, washing
for gold the sands of either of these streams near their junction, seems
to me much like washing the banks of the Amazon, in Maritime, Brazil,
for the gold of the Andes. Yet nearly all the gold-hunting of this
region, up to last month, had been done in the sands of these creeks,
most of it miles distant from the mountains. There is testimony that
several dollars’ worth of dust per day to the hand was thus washed out
in certain happily chosen spots; but such successes were transient; and,
despite all the glowing accounts set forth in letters to the states, it
is clear that all the gold-washing done throughout this region up to
last month, had not paid an average of fifty cents per day’s work; while
the cost of each man’s subsistence, while thus employed, cannot have
fallen short of a dollar per day. And the high waters of the streams
preclude advantageous washing in the spring, even were gold far more
abundant and enduring in their sands than it has yet been proved.
Such was the actual state of things when the first flood of gold-seeking
immigration began to pour in upon Auraria and Denver two months or more
ago. Many of the seekers had left home with very crude ideas of
gold-digging, impelled by glowing bulletins from writers who confounded
sanguine expectations with actual results, and at best spoke of any
casual realization of five to ten dollars from a day’s washing as though
it were a usual and reliable reward of gold-seeking industry throughout
this region. Many who came were doubtless already wearied and disgusted
with the hardships of their tedious journey—with sleeping in wet
blankets through storms of snow and hurricanes of hail, and urging
hollow and weary cattle over immense, treeless plains, on which the
grass had hardly started. Coming in thus weather-beaten, chafed and
soured, and finding but a handful of squalid adventurers living in the
rudest log huts, barred out from the mountains by snow and ice, and
precluded from washing the sands of the streams on the plains by high
water, they jumped at once to the conclusion that the whole thing was a
humbug, got up by reckless speculators to promote selfish ends. They did
not stop to reason, much less to explore; but, spurred by a laudable
even if untimely longing to “see Nancy and the children,” they turned
their cattle’s heads eastward and rushed pell-mell down the Platte,
sweeping back nearly all they met. I estimate the number who have
started for “Pike’s Peak” this season and turned back at not less than
forty thousand, and their positive loss by the venture (in time,
clothing and money) at not less than an average of fifty dollars
each—or, in all, two millions of dollars.
Meantime, a few of the pioneers of this region—mainly experienced
gold-miners from Georgia, California, and even Australia—were quietly
proceeding to prospect the mountains, so fast as the disappearance of
snow and ice would permit—and, before the snow was fairly off the hither
ranges, while it still lay solid and deep on the central and higher
chain, Mr. J. H. Gregory, a veteran Georgia gold-digger, had struck the
lead on a branch of Vasquer’s Fork (Clear Creek) some thirty miles west
of this place by an air line and forty-five by trail, which has since
been the main focus and support of the gold-fever. Other leads have
since been opened in the same ravine and its vicinity; Mr. Green Russell
(another Georgian) is reported to be doing exceedingly well in his
“gulch diggings” three miles south-west of Gregory’s; we have various
reports of good leads struck at sundry points ten to fifteen miles west,
south and north of Gregory’s; and we have a further report that quartz
of marvelous richness in gold has been found on the other side of the
snowy range, some sixty miles west of Gregory’s, and not far from the
Middle Park, whence the water flows to Grand River, and thence, through
the Colorado, into the Gulf of California.
I indorse none of these reports as absolutely true, though all but the
last are probably so. Tens of thousands will vainly ransack these
mountains for gold through weeks and months, and leave them at last
ragged and despondent, as hundreds are leaving them now; yet rich leads
will continue to be struck, veins to be opened, sluices to be
constructed, through years to come; and I shall not be disappointed to
find the district yet prospected a mere corner of the Rocky Mountain
Gold Region, of which the center is very probably a hundred miles north
or south of this point. It may be north of Laramie even. All that has
yet been done toward the thorough development of the gold-producing
capacity of the Rocky Mountains is very much what tickling an elephant’s
ear with a pin would be toward dissecting him.
But will disemboweling these mountains in quest of gold _pay_? A very
pregnant question. I answer—It will pay some; it will fail to pay
others. A few will be amply and suddenly enriched by finding “leads” and
selling “claims;” some by washing those “claims;” other some by
supplying the mountains with the four apparent necessaries of mining
life—whisky, coffee, flour, and bacon; others by robbing the miners of
their hard earnings through the instrumentality of cards, roulette, and
the “little joker;” but ten will come out here for gold for every one
who carries back so much as he left home with, and thousands who hasten
hither flushed with hope and ambition will lay down to their long rest
beneath the shadows of the mountains, with only the wind-swept pines to
sigh their requiem. Within this last week, we have tidings of one young
gold-seeker committing suicide, in a fit of insanity, at the foot of the
mountains; two more found in a ravine, long dead and partially devoured
by wolves; while five others, with their horse and dog, were overtaken,
some days since, while on a prospecting tour not far from Gregory’s, by
one of those terrible fires which, kindled by the culpable recklessness
of some camping party, finds ready aliment in the fallen pine leaves
which carpet almost the entire mountain region, and are fanned to fury
by the fierce gales which sweep over the hill-tops, and thus were all
burned to death, and so found and buried, two or three days since—their
homes, their names, and all but their fearful fate, unknown to those who
rendered them the last sad offices. Ah! long will their families and
friends vainly await and hope for the music of footsteps destined to be
heard no more on earth! Thus, Death seems to be more busy and relentless
on these broad, breezy plains, these healthful, invigorating mountains,
than even in the crowded city or the rural district thick-sown with
venerable graves.
It is my strong belief that gold is scarcely less abundant in the Rocky
Mountains than in California, though it seems, for many reasons, far
less accessible. It is, _first_. Much further from the seaboard, or from
any navigable water or means of easy approach; _second_. Belted by
deserts and by regions on which little or no rain falls in summer, so
that food, and almost every necessary of life, will here be permanently
dearer than in California; _third_. So elevated (six thousand feet and
over above tide-water) that little can be done at mining for a full half
of each year; and _fourth_. Most of the gold which has been broken down
and washed out of the veins by water-courses has been so swept along and
dispersed by the fierce mountain-torrents that very little of it can be
profitably washed out; hence, mining here must be mainly confined to the
veins, and will thus involve blasting, raising by windlass, etc., etc.,
and so require large investments of capital for its energetic and
successful prosecution. While, therefore, I believe that these mountains
will soon be yielding gold at the rate of many millions per annum, I say
most emphatically to the poor men who want gold and are willing to work
for it,—This is not the country for you! Far better seek wealth further
east through growing wheat, or corn, or cattle, or by any kind of manual
labor, than come here to dig gold. One man may possibly acquire wealth
faster in this gold-lottery than in New England or Kansas; but let one
thousand poor men come hither to mine, while the same number resolve to
win a competence by eminent industry and frugality in the east, and the
latter will assuredly have more wealth at five years’ end than the
former—and will have acquired it with far less sacrifice of comfort,
health and life.
And here let me say, in closing up the subject, that I think the report
made by Messrs. Richardson, Villard and myself, of what we saw and
learned at Gregory’s Diggings, is fully justified by more recent
results. For example: we gave the first four days’ product of W. Defrees
& Co. from Indiana (running one sluice) at $66, $80, $95, and $305
respectively—the four following days not returned. I have since obtained
them; and they range as follows: $257, $281, $203, $193—or $388 more
than those of the four days for which we gave the returns. This company
then sold out their claim for seven thousand dollars, and on the eighth
of June opened a sluice on another, which in four days produced as
follows: $31, $205, $151, $213. Another Indiana company, miscalled
Sopris, Henderson & Co., in our report, ran two sluices on the 9th and
10th, realizing about $450 per day, and on the 11th had three sluices in
operation for the first, and cleaned up $1,009 (really worth about $900)
from the product of that day’s labor of twelve men. Some scores are
doing well, though few quite so well as this; but of the thousands who
are doing nothing—at least, realizing nothing—who shall report? Some of
these issue daily from the mountains, out of provisions, out of means,
out of heart; and, between this and snow-fall, thousands like them will
come out, still more hungry, weary, forlorn, and take their way down the
Platte as gaunt and disconsolate as men ever need be. But this, and much
more, will not dissuade new thousands from rushing to take their places,
so long as it is known that the Rocky Mountains contain gold.
P. S.—A friend just in from the Mountains, who had a narrow escape from
the flames, confirms our worst rumors of disaster and death. He says not
less than _fifteen_[4] men have fallen victims to the conflagration,
which is still raging, and threatens even the dense crowd of tents and
cabins at Gregory’s. My friend informs me that the fire began very near
where we camped during my first weary night in the Mountains, and would
seem to have been purposely set by reckless simpletons curious to see
the woods in a blaze! He thinks the victims were generally, if not
uniformly, smothered before the fire reached them—the dense, pitchy
smoke at once shrouding the vision and obstructing respiration. He says
the flames swept through the pines and above their tops to a height of
two hundred feet, with a roar and a rush appalling even to look on. He
was obliged to run his mule at her utmost speed for two or three miles,
in order to effect his escape. If this drouth continues—as it is likely
to do for months—the mountains this side of the snowy range will be
nearly burned over for at least fifty miles north and south of the
Gregory trail, driving out all that is left of game, killing much of the
timber, and rendering the country every way more inhospitable—a most
superfluous proceeding.
Footnote 4:
Another friend just arrived says certainly _seventeen_.
I hear of still further discoveries further up in the Mountains—some of
them gulch or water-course diggings, which are said to pay very well.
They have just begun to work the sand of Clear Creek at the point where
it issues from the mountains. Another friend just from Gregory’s, says
he fears the victims of the fires now raging in that quarter will number
_one hundred_. The limbs of the green pines are burned off close to the
trunks, and the columns of roaring flame seem to fill the sky. The
Gregory settlement was in some danger when my informants left it
yesterday.
XIV.
“LO! THE POOR INDIAN!”
DENVER, _June 16, 1859_.
I have been passing, meeting, observing and trying to converse with
Indians almost ever since I crossed the Missouri. Eastern Kansas is
chequered with their reservations—Delaware, Kaw, Ottawa, Osage,
Kickapoo, Potawatamie and others—while the buffalo-range, and all this
side belong to, and are parceled among the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, and
the Apaches—or perhaps among the two former only, as Indian boundaries
are not very well defined. At all events, we have met or passed bands of
these three tribes, with occasional visitors from the Sioux on the
north, and the Camanches on the south—all these tribes having for the
present a good understanding. The Utes, who inhabit the mountains, and
are stronger and braver than any one of the three tribes first named,
though hardly a match for them all, are at war with them; the Arapaho
chief, Left-Hand, assures me that his people were always at war with the
Utes—at least, he has no recollection, no tradition, of a time when they
were at peace. Some two or three hundred lodges of Arapahoes are
encamped in and about this log city, calculating that the presence of
the whites will afford some protection to their wives and children
against a Ute onslaught while the “braves” are off on any of their
fighting—that is, stealing—expeditions. An equal or larger body of Utes
are camped in the mountains, some forty or fifty miles west, and the
Arapaho warriors recently returned in triumph from a war party, on which
they managed to steal about a hundred horses from the Utes, but were
obliged to kill most of them in their rapid flight, so that they only
brought home forty more than they took away. They are going out again in
a day or two, and have been for some days practising secret incantations
and public observances with reference thereto. Last midnight, they were
to have had a grand war-dance, and to have left on the war-path to-day;
but their men, sent out after their horses, reported that they saw three
Utes on the plain, which was regarded as premonitory of an attack, and
the “braves” stood to their arms all night, and were very anxious for
white aid in case of a Ute foray on their lodges here in Denver. Such an
attack seems very improbable, and I presume the three Utes who caused
all this uproar were simply scouts or spies, on the watch for just such
marauding surprise-parties as our Arapaho neighbors are constantly
meditating. I do not see why they need take even this trouble. There are
points on the mountain range west of this city, where a watchman with a
sharp eye and a good glass would command the entire plain for fifty
miles north, south, and east of him, and might hence give intelligence
of any Arapaho raid at least a day before a brave entered the mountains.
For, though it is true that Indians on the war-path travel or ride
mainly by night, I find that the Arapahoes do this only after they have
entered on what they consider disputed or dangerous ground—that they
start from their lodges in open day, and only advance under cover of
darkness after they are within the shadows of the mountains. Hence, the
Utes, who are confessedly the stronger, might ambush and destroy any
Arapaho force that should venture into their Rocky Mountain recesses, by
the help of a good spy-glass, and a little White forecast.
But the Indians are children. Their arts, wars, treaties, alliances,
habitations, crafts, properties, commerce, comforts, all belong to the
very lowest and rudest ages of human existence. Some few of the chiefs
have a narrow and short-sighted shrewdness, and very rarely in their
history, a really great man, like Pontiac or Tecumseh, has arisen among
them; but this does not shake the general truth that they are utterly
incompetent to cope in any way with the European or Caucasian race. Any
band of schoolboys, from ten to fifteen years of age, are quite as
capable of ruling their appetites, devising and upholding a public
policy, constituting and conducting a state or community, as an average
Indian tribe. And, unless they shall be treated as a truly Christian
community would treat a band of orphan children providentially thrown on
its hands, the aborigines of this country will be practically extinct
within the next fifty years.
I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more
allowance for, the dislike, aversion, contempt, wherewith Indians are
usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days
of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual,
palpable aborigines to convince any one that the poetic Indian—the
Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet’s eye. To
the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a
being who does little credit to human nature—a slave of appetite and
sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by
the more ravenous demands of another. As I passed over those magnificent
bottoms of the Kansas which form the reservations of the Delawares,
Potawatamies, etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on earth, and
saw their owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height
of the planting season and in as good, bright planting weather as sun
and soil ever made, I could not help saying, “These people must die
out—there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who
will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His
righteous decree.” And I yesterday tried my powers of persuasion on
Left-Hand—the only Arapaho chief who talks English—in favor of an
Arapaho tribal farm—say of two hundred acres for a beginning—to be
broken and fenced by the common efforts of the tribe, and a patch
therein allotted to each head of a family who would agree to plant and
till it—I apprehend to very little purpose. For Left-Hand, though shrewd
in his way, is an Indian, and every whit as conservative as Boston’s
Beacon street or our Fifth Avenue. He knows that there is a certain way
in which his people have lived from time immemorial, and in which they
are content still to live, knowing and seeking no better. He may or may
not have heard that it is the common lot of prophets to be stoned and of
reformers to be crucified; but he probably comprehends that squaws
cannot fence and plow, and that “braves” are disinclined to any such
steady, monotonous exercise of their muscles. I believe there is no
essential difference in this respect between “braves” of the red and
those of the white race, since even our country’s bold defenders have
not been accustomed to manifest their intrepidity in the corn-fields
along their line of march, save in the season of roasting-ears; and the
verb “to soldier” has acquired, throughout Christendom in all its moods
and tenses, a significance beyond the need of a glossary. Briefly, the
“brave,” whether civilized or savage, is not a worker, a producer; and
where the men are all “braves,” with a war always on hand, the prospect
for productive industry is gloomy indeed. If, then, the hope of Indian
renovation rested mainly on the men, it would be slender enough. There
is little probability that the present generation of “braves” can be
weaned from the traditions and the habits in which they find a certain
personal consequence and immunity from daily toil, which stand them
instead of intelligence and comfort. Squalid and conceited, proud and
worthless, lazy and lousy, they will strut out or drink out their
miserable existence, and at length afford the world a sensible relief by
dying out of it.
But it is otherwise with the women. Degraded and filthy as they are,
beyond description or belief, they bear the germ of renovation for their
race, in that they are neither too proud nor too indolent to labor. The
squaw accepts work as her destiny from childhood. In her father’s lodge,
as in that wherein she comes in turn to hold a fifth or sixth interest
in a husband—(for all Indians are polygamists in theory, and all who
have means or energy become such in practice)—she comprehends and
dutifully accepts drudgery as her “peculiar institution.” She pitches
and strikes the tent, carries it from one encampment to another, gathers
and chops the wood, and not only dresses and cooks the game which forms
the family’s food (when they have any) but goes into the woods and backs
it home, when her lord returns with the tidings that he has killed
something. Tanning or dressing hides, making tents, clothing, moccasins,
etc., all devolve on her. Under such a dispensation, it is not difficult
to believe that she often willingly accepts a rival in the affections of
her sullen master, as promising a mitigation rather than an aggravation
of the hardships of her lot.
And yet even the Indian women are idle half their time, from sheer want
of any thing to do. They will fetch water for their white neighbors, or
do any thing else whereby a piece of bread may be honestly earned; and
they would do ten times more than they do, if they could find work and
be reasonably sure of even a meager reward for it.
I urge, therefore, that in future efforts to improve the condition of
the Indians, the women be specially regarded and appealed to. A
conscientious, humane, capable Christian trader, with a wife thoroughly
skilled in household manufactures and handicraft, each speaking the
language of the tribe with whom they take up their residence, can do
more good than a dozen average missionaries. Let them keep and sell
whatever articles are adapted to the Indians’ needs and means, and let
them constitute and maintain an Industrial School, in which the Indian
women and children shall be freely taught how to make neatly and
expeditiously not only moccasins, but straw hats, bonnets, and (in time)
a hundred other articles combining taste with utility. Let a farm and
garden be started so soon as may be, and vegetables, grain, fruits given
therefrom in exchange for Indian labor therein, at all times when such
labor can be made available. Of course, the school, though primarily
industrial, should impart intellectual and religious instruction also,
wisely adapted in character and season to the needs of the pupils, and
to their perception of those needs. Such an enterprise, combining trade
with instruction, thrift with philanthropy, would gradually mould a
generation after its own spirit—would teach them to value the blessings
of civilization before imposing on them its seeming burdens; and would,
in the course of twenty years, silently transform an indolent savage
tribe into a civilized Christian community. There may be shorter modes
of effecting this transformation, but I think none surer.
Doubtless, such an enterprise demands rare qualities in its head—that of
patience prominent among them. The vagrancy of the Indians would prove
as great an obstacle to its success as their paltry but interminable
wars. Very often, in the outset, the apostle of industry and
civilization would find himself deserted by all his pupils, lured away
by the hope of success elsewhere in marauding or hunting. But let him,
having first deliberately chosen his location, simply persevere, and
they will soon come round again, glad enough to find food that may be
had even for solid work; for all I can learn impels me to believe that
hunger is the normal state of the Indian, diversified by transient
interludes of gluttony. Meat is almost his only food; and this, though
plentiful at seasons, is at others scarcely obtainable in the smallest
quantities, or dried to the toughness of leather. The Indian likes bread
as well as the white; he must be taught to prefer the toil of producing
it to the privation of lacking it. This point gained, he will easily be
led to seek shelter, clothing, and all the comforts of civilized life,
at their inevitable cost; and thus his temporal salvation will be
assured. Otherwise, his extermination is inexorably certain, and cannot
long be postponed.
XV.
WESTERN CHARACTERS.
DENVER, _June 21, 1859_.
I know it is not quite correct to speak of this region as “Western,”
seeing that it is in fact the center of North America and very close to
its backbone. Still, as the terms “Eastern” and “Western” are
conventional and relative—Castine being “Western” to a Bluenose and
Carson Valley, “Eastern” to a Californian—I take the responsibility of
grouping certain characters I have noted on the plains and in or about
the mountains as “Western,” begging that most respectable region which
lies east of the buffalo-range—also that portion which lies west of the
Colorado—to excuse the liberty.
The first circumstance that strikes a stranger traversing this wild
country is the vagrant instincts and habits of the great majority of its
denizens—perhaps I should say, of the American people generally, as
exhibited here. Among any ten whom you successively meet, there will be
natives of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Georgia,
Ohio or Indiana, Kentucky or Missouri, France, Germany, and perhaps
Ireland. But, worse than this; you cannot enter a circle of a dozen
persons of whom at least three will not have spent some years in
California, two or three have made claims and built cabins in Kansas or
Nebraska, and at least one spent a year or so in Texas. Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, have all
contributed their quota toward peopling the new gold region. The next
man you meet driving an ox-team, and white as a miller with dust, is
probably an ex-banker or doctor, a broken merchant or manufacturer from
the old states, who has scraped together the candle-ends charitably or
contemptuously allowed him by his creditors on settlement, and risked
them on a last desperate cast of the dice by coming hither. Ex-editors,
ex-printers, ex-clerks, ex-steamboat men, are here in abundance—all on
the keen hunt for the gold which only a few will secure. One of the
stations at which we slept on our way up—a rough tent with a cheering
hope (since blasted) of a log house in the near future—was kept by an
ex-lawyer of Cincinnati and his wife, an ex-actress from our New York
Bowery—she being cook. Omnibus-drivers from Broadway repeatedly handled
the ribbons; ex-border-ruffians from civilized Kansas—some of them of
unblessed memory—were encountered on our way, at intervals none too
long. All these, blended with veteran Mountain men, Indians of all
grades from the tamest to the wildest, half-breeds, French trappers and
_voyageurs_ (who have generally two or three Indian wives apiece) and an
occasional negro, compose a medley such as hardly another region can
parallel. Honolulu, or some other port of the South Sea Islands, could
probably match it most nearly.
The old mountaineers form a caste by themselves, and they prize the
distinction. Some of them are Frenchmen, or Franco-Americans, who have
been trapping or trading in and around these mountains for a quarter of
a century, have wives and children here, and here expect to live and
die. Some of these have accumulated property and cash to the value of
two hundred thousand dollars, which amount will not easily be reduced,
as they are frugal in everything (liquor sometimes excepted), spend but
a pittance on the clothing of their families, trust little, keep small
stocks of goods, and sell at large profits. Others came years ago from
the states, some of them on account each of a “difficulty” wherein they
severally killed or savagely maimed their respective antagonists under
circumstances on which the law refuses to look leniently; whence their
pilgrimage to and prolonged sojourn here, despite enticing placards
offering five hundred dollars or perhaps one thousand dollars for their
safe return to the places that knew them once, but shall know them no
more. This class is not numerous, but is more influential than it should
be in giving tone to the society of which its members form a part. Prone
to deep drinking, soured in temper, always armed, bristling at a word,
ready with the rifle, revolver or bowie-knife, they give law and set
fashions which, in a country where the regular administration of justice
is yet a matter of prophecy, it seems difficult to overrule or
disregard. I apprehend that there have been, during my two weeks
sojourn, more brawls, more fights, more pistol-shots with criminal
intent in this log city of one hundred and fifty dwellings, not
three-fourths completed nor two-thirds inhabited, nor one-third fit to
be, than in any community of no greater numbers on earth. This will be
changed in time—I trust within a year, for the empty houses are steadily
finding tenants from the two streams of emigration rolling in daily up
the Platte on the one hand, down Cherry Creek on the other, including
some scores of women and children, who generally stop here, as all of
them should; for life in the mountains is yet horribly rough. Public
religious worship, a regular mail and other civilizing influences, are
being established; there is a gleam of hope that the Arapahoes—who have
made the last two or three nights indescribably hideous by their
infernal war-whoops, songs and dances—will at last clear out on the
foray against the Utes they have so long threatened, diminishing largely
the aggregate of drunkenness and riot, and justifying expectations of
comparative peace. So let me close up my jottings from this point—which
circumstances beyond my control have rendered so voluminous—with a rough
ambrotype of