and other Southern people have settled in this
part of the State. The better class of these make good farmers; but the
person called "Pike" in this State has here bloomed out until, at times,
he becomes, as a Californian said to me about an earthquake, "a little
monotonous."

The Pike in Mendocino County regards himself as a laboring-man, and in
that capacity he has undertaken to drive out the Indians, just as a still
lower class in San Francisco has undertaken to drive out the laboring
Chinese. These Little Lake and Potter Valley Pikes were ruined by Indian
cheap labor; so they got up a mob and expelled the Indians, and the result
is that the work which these poor people formerly performed is now left
undone.

As for the Indians, they are gathered at the Round Valley Reservation to
the number of about twelve hundred, where they stand an excellent chance
to lose such habits of industry and thrift as they had learned while
supporting themselves. At least half the men on the reservation, the
superintendent told me, are competent farmers, and many of the women are
excellent and competent house-servants. No one disputes that while they
supported themselves by useful industry in the valleys where were their
homes they were peaceable and harmless, and that the whites stood in no
danger from them. Why, then, should the United States Government forcibly
make paupers of them? Why should this class of Indians be compelled to
live on reservations?

Under the best management which we have ever had in the Indian Bureau--let
us say under its present management--a reservation containing tame or
peaceable Indians is only a pauper asylum and prison combined, a nuisance
to the respectable farmers, whom it deprives of useful and necessary
laborers, an injury to the morals of the community in whose midst it is
placed, an injury to the Indian, whom it demoralizes, and a benefit only
to the members of the Indian ring.

Round Valley is occupied in part by the Nome Cult Reservation, and in part
by farmers and graziers. In the middle of the valley stands Covelo, one
of the roughest little villages I have seen in California, the
gathering-place for a rude population, which inhabits not only the valley,
but the mountains within fifty miles around, and which rides into Covelo
on mustang ponies whenever it gets out of whisky at home or wants a spree.

The bar-rooms of Covelo sell more strong drink in a day than any I have
ever seen elsewhere;