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. Back to: The Adventures of a Forty-niner |
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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.