"Nother d.a.m.ned suspicious looking character wants cold beans."
Fifteen Years Apart.
The American Indian approximates nearer to what man should be-manly, physically perfect, grand in character, and true to the instincts of his conscience-than any other race of beings, civilized or uncivilized. Where do we hear such n.o.ble sentiments or meet with such examples of heroism and self-sacrifice as the history of the American Indian furnishes? Where shall we go to hear again such oratory as that of Black Hawk and Logan? Certainly the records of our so-called civilization do not furnish it, and the present century is devoid of it.
They were the true children of the Great Spirit. They lived nearer to the great heart of the Creator than do their pale-faced conquerors of to-day who mourn over the lost and undone condition of the savage. Courageous, brave and the soul of honor, their cruel and awful destruction from the face of the earth is a sin of such magnitude that the relics and the people of America may well shrink from the just punishment which is sure to follow the a.s.sa.s.sination of as brave a race as ever breathed the air of Heaven.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AT FIFTEEN.]
I wrote the above scathing rebuke of the American people when I was 15 years of age. I ran across the dissertation yesterday. As a general rule, it takes a youth 15 years of age to arraign Congress and jerk the administration bald-headed. The less he knows about things generally, the more cheerfully will he shed information right and left.
At the time I wrote the above crude attack upon the government, I had not seen any Indians, but I had read much. My blood boiled when I thought of the wrongs which our race had meted out to the red man. It was at the time when my blood was just coming to a boil that I penned the above paragraph. Ten years later I had changed my views somewhat, relative to the Indian, and frankly wrote to the government of the change. When I am doing the administration an injustice, and I find it out, I go to the president candidly, and say: "Look here, Mr. President, I have been doing you a wrong. You were right and I was erroneous. I am not pig-headed and stubborn. I just admit fairly that I have been hindering the administration, and I do not propose to do so any more."
So I wrote to Gen. Grant and told him that when I was 15 years of age I wrote a composition at school in which I had arraigned the people and the administration for the course taken toward the Indians. Since that time I had seen some Indians in the mountains-at a distance-and from what I had seen of them I was led to believe that I had misjudged the people and the executive. I told him that so far as possible I would like to repair the great wrong so done in the ardor of youth and to once more sustain the arm of the government.
He wrote me kindly and said he was glad that I was friendly with the government again, and that now he saw nothing in the way of continued national prosperity. He said he would preserve my letter in the archives as a treaty of peace between myself and the nation. He said only the day before he had observed to the cabinet that he didn"t care two cents about a war with foreign nations, but he would like to be on a peace footing with me. The country could stand outside interference better than intestine hostility. I do not know whether he meant anything personal by that or not. Probably not.
He said he remembered very well when he first heard that I had attacked the Indian policy of the United States in one of my school essays. He still called to mind the feeling of alarm and apprehension which at that time pervaded the whole country. How the cheeks of strong men had blanched and the G.o.ddess of Liberty felt for her back hair and exchanged her Mother Hubbard dress for a new cast-iron panoply of war and Roman hay knife. Oh, yes, he said, he remembered it as though it had been yesterday.
Having at heart the welfare of the American people as he did, he hoped that I would never attack the republic again.
And I never have. I have been friendly, not only personally, but officially, for a good while. Even if I didn"t agree with some of the official acts of the president I would allow him to believe that I did rather than hara.s.s him with cold, cruel and adverse criticism. The abundant success of this policy is written in the country"s wonderful growth and prosperous peace.
Dessicated Mule.
The red-eyed antagonist of truth is not found alone in the ranks of the newspaper phalanx. You run up against him in all walks of life. He flourishes in all professions, and he is ready at all times to entertain. There is quite a difference between a malicious falsehood and the different shades of parables, fables with a moral, Sabbath-school books, newspaper sketches, and anecdotes told to entertain.
A malicious lie is injurious personally. A business lie is a falsehood for revenue only. But the yarns that are spun around camp-fires, in mining and logging camps, to while away a dull evening, are not within the jurisdiction of the criminal code or the home missionary.
On the train, yesterday several old lumbermen were telling about hard roads and steep hills, engineering skill and so forth. Finally they told about "snubbing" a loaded team down bad hills, and one man said:
"You might "snub" down a cheap hill, but you couldn"t do it on our road. We tried it. Couldn"t do a thing. Finally we got to building snow-sheds and hauling sand. You build a snow-shed that covers the grade, then fill the road in with two feet of loose sand, and you"re O.K. We did that last winter, and when you drive a four-horse load of logs down through them long snow-sheds on bare ground, mind ye, and the bobs go plowing through the sand, the sled-shoes will make the fire fly so that you can read the President"s message at midnight."
Then an old man who went to Pike"s Peak during the excitement and returned afterward, woke up and yawned two or three times, and said they used to have some trouble, a good many years ago getting over the range where the South Park road now goes from Chalk Creek Canon through Alpine Tunnel to the Gunnison.
"We tried "snubbing" and everything we could think of, but it was N.G.
"Finally we got hold of a new kind of "snub" that worked pretty well. We had a long table made a-purpose, that would reach to the foot of the hill from the top, and we"d tie a three-ton load to the end at the top of the hill; then we would hitch six mules to the end at the foot of the hill. Well, the principle of the thing was, that as the load went down on the Gunnison side it would pull the mules up the opposite side, tails first."
"How did it work?"
"Oh, it worked all right if the mules and the load balanced; but one day we put on a light mule named Emma Abbott, and the load got a start down the Gunnison side that made that old cable sing. The wagon tipped over and concussed a keg of blasting powder, and that obliterated the rest of the goods.
"But the air on the other side was full of mules. You ought to seen "em come up that hill!
"It takes considerable of a crisis to affect the natural reserve of six mules; but when they saw how it was, they backed up that mountain with great enthusiasm. They didn"t touch the ground but once in three thousand feet, but they struck the canopy of heaven several times.
"When the sky cleared up, we made a careful inventory of the stock.
"We had a second-hand three-inch cable and some desiccated mule. We never went to look for the wagon; but when the weather got warm, the Coyotes helped us find Emma Abbott.
"She was hanging by the ear in the crotch of an old hemlock tree.
"Life was extinct.
"We found a few more of the mules, but they were fractional.
"Emma Abbott was the only complete mule we found."
Time"s Changes.
I fixed myself and went out trout fishing on the only original Kinnickinnick river last week. It was a kind of Rip Van Winkle picnic and farewell moonlight excursion home. I believe that Rip Van Winkle, however, confined himself to hunting mostly with an old musket that was on the retired list when Rip took his sleepy drink on the Catskills. If he could have gone with me fishing last week over the old trail, digging angle-worms at the same old place where I left the spade sticking in the grim soil twenty years ago-if we could have waded down the Kinnickinnick together with high rubber boots on, and got nibbles and bites at the same places, and found the same old farmers with nearly a quarter of a century added to their lives and glistening in their hair, we would have had fun no doubt on that day, and a headache on the day following. This affords me an opportunity to say that trout may be caught successfully without a corkscrew. I have tried it. I"ve about decided that the main reason why so many large lies are told about the number of trout caught all over the country, is that at the moment the sportsman pulls his game out of the water, he labors under some kind of an optical illusion, by reason of which he sees about nine trout where he ought to see only one.
I wish I had as many dollars as I have soaked deceased angle-worms in that same beautiful Kinnickinnick. There was a little stream made into it that we called Tidd"s creek. It is still there. This stream runs across Tidd"s farm, and Tidd twenty years ago wouldn"t allow anybody to fish in the creek. I can still remember how his large hand used to feel, as he caught me by the nape of the neck and threw me over the fence with my amateur fishing tackle and a willow "stringer" with eleven dried, stiff trout on it. Last week I thought I would try Tidd"s creek again. It was always a good place to fish, and I felt the same old excitement, with just enough vague forebodings in it to make it pleasant. Still, I had grown a foot or so since I used to fish there, and perhaps I could return the compliment by throwing the old gentleman over his own fence, and then hiss in his ear "R-r-r-r-e-v-e-n-g-e!!!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: I BECAME MORE FEARLESS.]
I had got pretty well across the "lower forty" and had about decided that Tidd had been gathered to his fathers, when I saw him coming with his head up like a steer in the corn. Tidd is a blacksmith by trade, and he has an arm with hair on it that looks like Jumbo"s hind leg. I felt the same old desire to climb the fence and be alone. I didn"t know exactly how to work it. Then I remembered how people had remarked that I had changed very much in twenty years, and that for a homely boy I had grown to be a remarkably picturesque-looking man. I trusted to Tidd"s failing eyesight and said:
"How are you?"
He said, "How are you?" That did not answer my question, but I didn"t mind a little thing like that.
Then he said: "I sposed that every pesky fool in this country knew I don"t allow fishing on my land."
"That may be," says I, "but I ain"t fishing on your land. I always fish in a damp place if I can. Moreover, how do I know this is your land? Carrying the argument still further, and admitting that every peesky fool knows that you didn"t allow fishing here, I am not going to be called a pesky fool with impunity, unless you do it over my dead body." He stopped about ten rods away and I became more fearless. "I don"t know who you are," said I, as I took off my coat and vest and piled them up on my fish basket, eager for the fray. "You claim to own this farm, but it is my opinion that you are the hired man, puffed up with a little authority. You can"t order me off this ground till you show me a duly certified abstract of t.i.tle and then identify yourself. What protection does a gentleman have if he is to be kicked and cuffed about by Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry, claiming they own the whole State. Get out! Avaunt! If you don"t avaunt pretty quick I"ll sc.r.a.p you and sell you to a medical college."
He stood in dumb amazement a moment, then he said he would go and get his deed and his shotgun. I said shotguns suited me exactly, and I told him to bring two of them loaded with giant powder and barbed wire. I would not live alway. I asked not to stay. When he got behind the corn-crib I climbed the fence and fled with my ill-gotten gains.
The blacksmith in his prime may lick the small boy, but twenty years changes their relative positions. Possibly Tidd could tear up the ground with me now, but in ten more years, if I improve as fast as he fails, I shall fish in that same old stream again.
Letter From New York.
Dear friend.-Being Sunday, I take an hour to write you a letter in regard to this place. I came here yesterday without attracting undue attention from people who lived here. If they was surprised, they concealed it from me.
I"ve camped out on the Chug years ago, and went to sleep with no live thing near me except my own pony, and woke up with the early song of the coyote, and have been on the lonesome plain for days where it seemed to me that a hostile would be mighty welcome if he would only say something to me, but I was never so lonesome as I was here in this big town last night, although it is the most thick settled place I was ever at.
I was so kind of low and depressed that I strolled in to the bar at last, allowing that I could pound on the counter and call up the boys and get acquainted a little with somebody, just as I would at Col. Luke Murrin"s, at Cheyenne; but when I waved to the other parties, and told them to rally round the foaming beaker, they apologized, and allowed they had just been to dinner.
Just been to dinner, and there it was pretty blamed near dark! Then I asked "em to take a cigar, but they mostly cackillated they had no occasion.
I was mad, but what could I do? They was too many for me, and I couldn"t coerce the white livered aristocratic mob, for quicker"n scat they could have hollored into a little cupboard they had there in the corner, and in less"n two minits they"d of had the whole police department and the hook and ladder company down there after me with a torch-light procession.
So I swallowed my wrath and a tame drink of cultivated whiskey with Apollo Belvidere on the side, and went out into the auditorium of the hotel.
Here I was very unhappy, being, as the editor of the Green River Gazette would say, "the cynosure of all eyes."
I would rather not be a cynosure, even at a good salary; so I thought I would ask the proprietor to build a fire in my room. I went up to the recorder"s office, where the big hotel autograft alb.u.m is, and asked to see the proprietor.
A good-looking young man came forward and asked me what he could do for me. I said if it wouldn"t be too much trouble, I wisht he would build a little fire in my room, and I would pay him for it; or, if he would show me where the woodpile was, I would build the fire myself-I wasn"t doing anything special at that time.