Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands Part 14

But if you are a guardian, and have a ward, you are not satisfied if your ward, presumedly an ignorant person in a state of pupilage, merely has enough to eat and to wear. You endeavor to form his manners and morals.

Well, the Indian camp at Round Valley is in a deplorable state of disorder. No attempt is made to teach our wards to be clean or orderly, or to form in them those habits which might elevate, at least, their children. The plain around the shanties is full of litter, and overgrown with dog-fennel. As Mr. Burchard, the superintendent, walked about with me, half-grown boys sat on the gra.s.s, and even on the school-house steps, gambling with cards for tobacco, and they had not been taught manners enough to rise or move aside at the superintendent's approach. As we sat in the school-house, one, two, three Indian men came in to prefer a request, but not one of them took off his hat. We entered a cabin and found a big he-Indian lying on his bed. "Are you sick?" inquired Mr.

Burchard, and the lazy hound, without offering to rise, muttered "No; me lying down."

The agent, in reply to my questions, said that they gambled a good deal for money and beads during the week, but he had forbidden it on Sundays; and he would not allow them to gamble away their clothing, as they formerly did.

There are about eighty scholars on the school-list, and about fifty attend school. Was there any compulsion used? I asked, and he said No. Now surely here, if anywhere, one might begin with a compulsory school-law.

Did he attempt to regulate the conduct of the growing boys and girls? No.

Do the Indians marry on the reservation? No. One chief has two wives; men leave their wives, or change them as they please.

What if children are born irregularly? Well, the reservation feeds and supports all who are on it. n.o.body suffers.

Are the women often diseased? Yes, nearly all of them.

Have you a hospital, or do you attempt to isolate those who are diseased?

No; the families all take care of their sick. The doctor visits them in their shanties. (Bear in mind this reservation was established, and has had Indians on it since 1860.)

Do the Indians have to ask permission to go to the town? No; they go when they please.

Is there much drunkenness? No; singularly little.

Do you attempt to make them rise at any specified hour in the morning? No.

Have you a list or roster of the Indians who belong on the reservation?

No.

How many Indians own horses? I do not know.

On Sunday there is preaching; the audience varies; and those who do not come to church--where the preaching is in English--play shinny.

Is not all this deplorable? Here is a company of ignorant and semi-barbarous people, forcibly gathered together by the United States Government (with the help of a mob), under the pretense that they are the "unfortunate wards of the nation;" and the Government does not require the officers it sets over them to control them in any single direction where a conscientious guardian would feel bound to control his ward. How can habits of decency, energy, order, thrift, virtue, grow up--nay, how can they continue, if in the beginning they existed, with such management?

Captain Jack and his forty-five Modocs were at least brave and energetic men. Can any one blame them, if they were bored to desperation by such a life as this, and preferred death to remaining on the reservation?

Nor is this all. Of the two thousand acres of arable land on the reservation, about five hundred are kept for grazing, and one thousand acres are in actual cultivation this year--seven hundred in grain and hay, one hundred and ninety-five in corn, and one hundred and nine in vegetables. A farmer, a.s.sistant-farmer, and gardener manage this considerable piece of land. When they need laborers they detail such men or women as they require, and these go out to work. They seldom refuse; if they do, they are sent to the military post, where they are made to saw wood. Not one of the cabins has about it a garden spot; all cultivation is in common; and thus the Indian is deprived of the main incentive to industry and thrift--the possession of the actual fruits of his own toil; and, unless he were a deep-thinking philosopher, who had studied out for himself the problems of socialism, he must, in the nature of things, be made a confirmed pauper and shirk by such a system, in which he sees no direct reward for his toil, and neither receives wages nor consciously eats that which his own hands have planted.

In the whole system of management, as I have described it, you will see that there is no reward for, or incentive to, excellence; it is all debauching and demoralizing; it is a disgrace to the Government, which consents to maintain at the public cost what is, in fact, nothing else but a pauper shop and house of prost.i.tution.

And what is true of this reservation is equally true of that on the Tule River, in Southern California, which I saw in 1872. In both, to sum up the story, the Government has deprived the farmers of an important laboring force by creating a pauper asylum, called a reservation; and, having thus injured the community, it further injures the Indian by a system of treatment which ingeniously takes away every incentive to better living, and abstains from controlling him on those very points wherein an upright guardian would most rigidly and faithfully control and guide his ward.

To force a population of laboring and peaceable Indians on a reservation is a monstrous blunder. For wild and predatory or unsettled Indians, like the Apaches, or many tribes of the plains, the reservation is doubtless the best place; but even then the Government, acting as guardian, ought to control and train its wards; it ought to treat them like children, or at least like beasts; it ought not only to feed and clothe them, but also to teach them, and enforce upon them order, neatness, good manners, and habits of discipline and steady labor. This seems plain enough, but it will never be done by "Indian agents," selected from civil life, be these ministers or laymen.

An army officer, methodical, orderly, and having the habit of command, is the proper person for superintendent of a reservation; for drill and discipline, regular hours, regular duties, respectful manners, cleanliness, method--these are the elements of civilization that are needed, and which an army officer knows how to impress without harshness, because they are the essence of his own life. But under our present Indian policy the army is the mere servant of the Indian agent. If it were not for the small military force at Camp Wright, Mr. Burchard, the agent, could not keep an Indian on his reservation. But the intelligent, thoroughly-trained, and highly-educated soldier who commands there has neither authority nor influence at the reservation. He is a mere policeman, to whom an unruly Indian is sent for punishment, and who goes out at the command of the superintendent, a person in every way his inferior except in authority, to catch Indians when no mob is at hand to drive them in.

A true and humane Indian policy would be to require all peaceable Indians to support themselves as individuals and families among the whites, which would at once abolish the Round Valley and Tule River reservations; to place all the nomads on reservations, under the control of picked and intelligent army officers, and to require these to ignore, except for expediency's sake, all tribal distinctions and the authority of chiefs; to form every reservation into a military camp, adopting and maintaining military discipline, though not the drill, of course; to give to every Indian family an acre of ground around its hut, and require it to cultivate that, demanding of the male Indians at the same time two or three days of labor every week in the common fields, or on roads and other public improvements within the reservation during the season when no agricultural labor is required; to curb their vices, as a parent would those of his children; to compel the young to attend schools; to insist upon a daily morning muster, and a daily inspection of the houses and grounds; to establish a hospital for the sick; and thus gradually to introduce the Indian to civilization by the only avenue open to savages--by military discipline.

Under such a system a reserve like that of Round Valley would not to-day, after thirteen years of occupation, be a ma.s.s of weeds and litter, with bad roads, poor fences, and an almost impa.s.sable corduroy bridge over a little ditch. On the contrary, in half the time it would be a model of cleanliness and order; it would have the best roads, the neatest cottages, the cleanest grounds, the most thorough culture; and when the Indians had produced this effect, they would not fail to be in love with it.

Nor is it impossible to do all this with Indians. But it needs men used to command, well educated, and with habits of discipline--the picked men of the army. At present, an Indian reservation differs from an Indian rancheria or village only in that it contains more food, more vice, and more lazy people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIEW ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER.]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE REDWOODS AND THE SAW-MILL COUNTRY OF MENDOCINO.

Some years ago, before there was a wagon-road between Cloverdale and Mendocino City, or Big River, as it is more commonly called up here on the northern coast, the mail was carried on horse--or, more usually, on mule--back; and the mail-rider was caught, on one stormy and dark night, upon the road, and found himself unable to go farther. In this dilemma he took refuge, with his mule and the United States mails, in a hollow redwood, and man and mule lay down comfortably within its shelter. They had room to spare indeed, as I saw when the stage-driver pointed out the tree to me and kindly stopped until I examined it.

At a road-side inn I found they had roofed over a hollow stump, and used it as a capacious store-room.

All these were large trees, of course; but there is no reason to believe that they were the biggest of their kind; and when you have traveled for two or three days through the redwood forests of the northern coast of California you will scarcely be surprised at any story of big trees.

The redwood seems to be found only near the coast of California; it needs the damp air which comes from the sea and which blows against the mountain slopes, which the tree loves. The coast, from fifty miles north of San Francisco to the northern border of Humboldt County, is a dense redwood forest; it is a mountainous and broken country, and the mountains are cut at frequent intervals by streams, some but a few miles in length, others penetrating into the interior by narrow canons forty or fifty miles, and dividing in their upper waters into several branches.

The man who wondered at the wisdom of Providence in causing great rivers to flow past large cities would be struck with admiration at the convenient outflow of these streams; for upon them depends the accessibility of the redwood forests to the loggers and saw-mill men who are busily turning these forests into lumber. At the mouth of every stream is placed a saw-mill; and up these little rivers, many of which would hardly aspire to the dignity of creeks in Missouri or Mississippi, loggers are busy chopping down huge trees, sawing them into lengths, and floating them down to the mills.

The redwood has the color of cedar, but not its fragrance; it is a soft wood, unfit for ship-building, but easily worked and extraordinarily durable. It is often used in California for water-pipes, and makes the best fence posts, for it never rots below ground. Moreover, it is excellent material for houses. When varnished, it keeps its fine red color, but without this protection it slowly turns black with exposure to the air. It is a most useful lumber, and forms a not unimportant part of the natural wealth of California.

The saw-mills are mostly on so large a scale that about every one grows up a village or town, which usually contains several saloons or grog-shops, one or two billiard-rooms, a rude tavern or two, a doctor or two, several stores, and, in some cases, a church. There are, besides, the houses of those mill-men who have families, shanties for the bachelors, and usually one or two houses of greater pretensions, inhabited by the owners or local superintendents.

Not easily accessible, these little saw-mill ports are rarely visited by strangers, and the accommodations are somewhat rude; but the people are kindly, and the country is wonderfully picturesque, and well repays a visit.

The absolute coast is almost barren, by reason of the harsh, strong winds which prevail during the greater part of the year. The redwood forests begin a mile or two back from the sea. The climate of this part of the coast is remarkably equal, cool but not cold, all the year round; they have fires in the evening in July, and don't shut their doors, except in a storm, in December. They wear the same clothing all the year round, and seldom have frost. But when you get out of the reach of the sea, only a mile back, you find hot weather in July; and in winter they have snow, quite deep sometimes, in the redwoods.

Where the little saw-mill rivers enter the sea, there is usually a sort of roadstead--a curve of the sh.o.r.e, not enough to make a harbor, but sufficient to give anchorage and a lee from the prevailing north-west wind, which makes it possible, by different devices, to load vessels.

There are rivers in Humboldt County where nature has not provided even this slight convenience, and there--it being impossible to ship the lumber--no saw-mills have been established.

Vessels are frequently lost, in spite of all precautions; for, when the wind changes to south-west, the whole Pacific Ocean rolls into these roadsteads; and, when a gale is seen approaching, the crews anchor their ships as securely as they can, and then go ash.o.r.e. It has happened in Mendocino harbor, that a schooner has been capsized at her anchorage by a monstrous sea; and Captain Lansing told me that in the last twenty years he had seen over a hundred persons drowned in that port alone, in spite of all precautions.

The waves have cut up the coast in the most fantastic manner. It is rock-bound, and the rock seems to be of varying hardness, so that the ocean, trying every square inch every minute of the day for thousands of years, has eaten out the softer parts, and worked out the strangest caverns and pa.s.sages. You scarcely see a headland or projecting point through which the sea has not forced a pa.s.sage, whose top exceeds a little the mark of high tide; and there are caves innumerable, some with extensive ramifications. I was shown one such cave at Mendocino City, into which a schooner, drifting from her anchors, was sucked during a heavy sea. As she broke from her anchors the men hoisted sail, and the vessel was borne into the cave with all sail set. Her masts were snapped off like pipe-stems, and the hull was jammed into the great hole in the rock, where it began to thump with the swell so vehemently that two of the frightened crew were at once crushed on the deck by the overhanging ceiling of the cave. Five others hurriedly climbed out over the stern, and there hung on until ropes were lowered to them by men on the cliff above, who drew them up safely. It was a narrow escape; and a more terrifying situation than that of this crew, as they saw their vessel sucked into a cave whose depth they did not know, can hardly be imagined outside of a hasheesh dream.

The next morning the vessel was so completely broken to pieces that not a piece the size of a man's arm was ever found of her hull.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LUMBERING IN WASHINGTON TERRITORY--PREPARING LOGS.]

I suppose all saw-mills are pretty much alike; those on this coast not only saw lumber of different shapes and sizes, but they have also planing and finishing apparatus attached; and in some the waste lumber is worked up with a good deal of care and ingenuity. But in many of the mills there is great waste. It is probably a peculiarity of the saw-mills on this coast, that they must provide a powerful rip-saw to rip in two the larger logs before they are small enough for a circular saw to manage. Indeed, occasionally the huge logs are split with wedges, or blown apart with gunpowder, in the logging camps, because they are too vast to be floated down to the mill in one piece. The expedients for loading vessels are often novel and ingenious. For instance, at Mendocino the lumber is loaded on cars at the mill, and drawn by steam up a sharp incline, and by horses off to a point which shelters and affords anchorage for schooners.

This point is, perhaps, one hundred feet above the water-line, and long wire-rope stages are projected from the top, and suspended by heavy derricks. The car runs to the edge of the cliff; the schooner anchors under the shipping stage one hundred feet below, and the lumber is slid down to her, a man standing at the lower end to check its too rapid descent with a kind of brake. When a larger vessel is to be loaded, they slide the lumber into a lighter, and the ship is loaded from her. The redwood is shipped not only to California ports, but also to China and South America; and while I was at. Mendocino, a bark lay there loading for the Navigator Islands.

A large part of the lumbering population consists of bachelors, and for their accommodation you see numerous shanties erected near the saw-mills and lumber piles. At Mendocino City there is quite a colony of such shanties, two long rows, upon a point or cape from which the lumber is loaded.

I had the curiosity to enter one of these little snuggeries, which was unoccupied. It was about ten by twelve feet in area, had a large fire-place (for fuel is shamefully abundant here), a bunk for sleeping, with a lamp arranged for reading in bed, a small table, hooks for clothes, a good board floor, a small window, and a neat little hood over the door-way, which gave this little hut quite a picturesque effect. There was, besides, a rough bench and a small table.

It seemed to me that in such a climate as that of Mendocino, where they wear the same clothes all the year round, have evening fires in July, and may keep their doors open in January, such a little kennel as this meets all the real wants of the male of the human race.

This, I suspect, is about as far as man, unaided by woman, would have carried civilization anywhere. Whatever any of us have over and above such a snuggery as this we owe to womankind; whatever of comfort or elegance we possess, woman has given us, or made us give her. I think no wholesome, right-minded man in the world would ever get beyond such a hut; and I even suspect that the occupant of the shanty I inspected must have been in love, and thinking seriously of marriage, else he would never have nailed the pretty little hood over his door-way. So helpless is man! And yet there are people who would make of woman only a kind of female man!