uld not get down by land. In those days, he said, if a
company of miners could not make twenty dollars a day each, the "prospect"
was too poor to detain them; and they made but a short stay at most points
on the Upper Sacramento.

The country was then full of Indians; and it was very strange, indeed, to
hear this miner--a thoroughly kind-hearted man he was, and now the father
of a family of children--tell with the utmost unconcern, and as a matter
of course, how they used to shoot down these Indians, who waylaid them at
favoring spots on the river, and tried to pick them off with arrows.

I remember hearing a little boy ask a famous general once how many men he
had killed in the course of his wars, and being disappointed when he heard
that the general, so far as he know, had never killed any body. I suppose
a soldier in battle but rarely knows that he has actually shot a man. But
one of these old Indian fighters sits down after dinner, over a pipe, and
relates to you, with quite horrifying coolness, every detail of the death
which his rifle and his sure eye dealt to an Indian; and when this one,
stroking meantime the head of a little boy who was standing at his knees,
described to me how he lay on the grass and took aim at a tall chief
who was, in the moonlight, trying to steal a boat from a party of
gold-seekers, and how, at the crack of his rifle, the Indian fell his
whole length in the boat and never stirred again, I confess I was dumb
with amazement. The tragedy had not even the dignity of an event in this
man's life. He shot Indians as he ate his dinner, plainly as a mere matter
of course. Nor was he a brute, but a kindly, honest, good fellow, not in
the least blood-thirsty.

[Illustration: STREET IN OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON TERRITORY.]

The poor Indians have rapidly melted away under the fervent heat of
forty-rod whisky, rifles, and disease. This whole Northern country must
have been populous a quarter of a century ago; General Bidwell and other
old Californians have told me of the surprisingly rapid disappearance of
the Indians, after the white gold-seekers came in. It was, I do not doubt,
a pleasant land for the red men. They lived on salmon, clover, deer,
acorns, and a few roots which are abundant on mountain and plain, and of
all this food there is the greatest plenty even yet. If you travel toward
Oregon, by stage, in June, July, or August, you will see at convenient
points along the Sacramento parties of Indian