eet from Los
Angeles to Alameda, and Nigger Alley, were crowded with a
mass of drunken Indians, yelling and fighting: men and women,
boys and girls using tooth and nail, and frequently knives,
but always in a manner to strike the spectator with horror.

"At sundown, the pompous marshal, with his Indian special
deputies, who had been confined in jail all day to keep them
sober, would drive and drag the combatants to a great corral
in the rear of the Downey Block, where they slept away their
intoxication. The following morning they would be exposed for
sale, as slaves for the week. Los Angeles had its slave-mart
as well as New Orleans and Constantinople,--only the slaves
at Los Angeles were sold fifty-two times a year, as long as
they lived, a period which did not generally exceed one, two,
or three years under the new dispensation. They were sold for
a week, and bought up by vineyard men and others at prices
ranging from one to three dollars, one-third of which was to
be paid to the _peon_ at the end of the week, which debt, due
for well-performed labor, was invariably paid in
_aguardiente,_ and the Indian made happy, until the following
Monday morning, he having passed through another Saturday
night and Sunday's saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality.
Those thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely
destroyed in this way."

In reference to these statements of the sale of the Indians as slaves,
it should be noted that the act was done under the cover of the law. The
Indian was "fined" a certain sum for his drunkenness, and was then
turned over to the tender mercies of the employer, who paid the fine.
Thus "justice" was perverted to the vile ends of the conscienceless
scoundrels who posed as "officers of the law."

Charles Warren Stoddard, one of California's sweetest poets, realized to
the full the mercenary treatment the Missions and the Indians had
received, and one of the latest and also most powerful poems he ever
wrote, "The Bells of San Gabriel," deals with this spoliation as a
theme. The poem first appeared in _Sunset Magazine, the Pacific
Monthly,_ and with the kind consent of the editor I give the
last stanza.

"Where are they now, O tower!
The locusts and wild honey?
Where is the sacred dower
That the Bride of Christ was given?
Gone to the wielders of p