ath--this Reservation had been established.

"Ah, just the place. A place where we can use our cavalry when they
attempt to escape," said the young sprig of an officer, when some men
with a spark of humanity dared to protest.

And that was the reason for removing it so far from the sweet, pure air
and water of the Sierras, and setting these poor captives down in the
valley of death.

When they try to escape! Did it never occur to the United States to make
a Reservation pleasant and healthy enough for an Indian to be content
in? My word for it, if you will give him a place fit to live in, he will
be willing to make his home there.

I know nothing in history so dark and dreadful as the story of the
Indians in this dreaded and deadly Reservation of the valley. The
Indians surrendered on condition that they should be taken to good homes
and taught the ways of the white man. Once in the white man's power, the
chains began to tighten, tighten at every step. Once there, they were
divided into lots, families torn apart, and put to work under guard;
men stood over them with loaded muskets. The land was full of malaria.
These men of the mountains began to sicken, to die; to die by
degrees,--to die, as the hot weather came on, by hundreds. At last a few
of the strongest, the few still able to stand, broke away and found
their way back to the mountains. They were like living skeletons, skin
and bone only, hollow-eyed and horrible to look upon. Toward the last,
these poor Indians had crawled on their hands and knees to get back.
They were followed by the soldiers, and taken wherever they could be
found; taken back to certain death. One, a young man, still possessed of
a little strength, fought with sticks and stones with all his might as
he lay in the trail where he had fallen in his flight. He lifted his two
bony hands between the foe and his dying old father. The two were taken
and chained together. That night the young man with an old pair of
scissors, which he had borrowed on pretense of wanting to trim his hair,
killed the old man by pushing one of the points into his heart. You
could see by the marks of blood on the young man's hand next morning,
that he had felt more than once to see if the old man was quite dead.
Then he drove the point of the scissors in his own heart, and crawled
upon the old man's body, embraced it and died there. And yet all this
had been done so quietly that the two guards who marched back and forth