OPERATIONS IN CALIFORNIA IN 1873. 409 



to attempt any open or punishable violence. So, at night, they went 

 off', and seemed subsequently to accept in general the situation. Indi- 

 viduals frequently said to me afterward, however, that I was stealing 

 their salmon and occupying their land ; but it was more as a protest 

 against existing facts than as an endeavor to make any change in the 

 situation. Once, when I was walking alone in the woods on the other 

 side of the river, an Indian with a very forbidding aspect met me, and 

 said in the Indian dialect that he wanted to talk with me. I expressed my 

 gratification at having an interview with him, and we sat down on 

 the rocks, and the talk began. He was very much excited and very 

 wrathful. He told me that this was his land, and that his fathers 

 had always lived there, and that I had no right to be there. He said 

 the salmon were his, too ; that they belonged to his tribe, and that I 

 was stealing his salmon. He ended by saying that the white men had 

 lands and fish in other places, that the Indians did not go there and 

 steal their lands and salmon, and that white men ought not to come 

 here and take what belonged to the Indians. There is room enough in 

 the world for the white men, he said, without taking this river from the 

 Indians to live on. 



I confess that his arguments seemed sound. The whole panorama of 

 the Indian's wrongs and sufferings, as the history of this country por- 

 trays it, with the encroachments and injustice of the white man, and 

 the gradual but certain disappearance of the red man before the advance 

 of civilization, seemed to come up before my mind, and I felt that though 

 I was the representative of a powerful and enlightened nation, I could 

 not answer this poor, ignorant, indignant savage before me. I did not 

 try to answer him, but I told him I was his friend ; that I did not mean 

 to take his land or his salmon ; that I should go away in a few months ; 

 that I only wanted the spawn of the salmon ; and that the Indians 

 might have all the salmon as soon as I had taken the eggs. He was 

 not satisfied or appeased, however, and left me in the same disappointed 

 and indignant spirit with which he met me. This spirit continued to 

 prevail among the tribe until we began to take spawn and to give them 

 the salmon. Then, when they saw that they received only kind treat- 

 ment from us always, and food and medicine occasionally, and that we 

 gave them all the salmon to eat, securing only the spawn for ourselves, 

 they seemed to see things in a new light. The public sentiment, I 

 think, became entirely changed, and was pretty correctly expressed in 

 what an Indian said to me, about that time : " I understand," said he, 

 "you give Indian salmon ; you only want spawn ; that all right!" 



I had one man in my employ who had fished on theMcCloud the pre- 

 vious season for salmon on his own account ; and, having taken some 

 pains to clear away a fishing-ground for drawing the seine on the river- 

 bank, he claimed the fishing as his private property. I allowed his 

 claim at first, and paid him a considerable sum for the use of his ground, 

 as he called it ; but, after making inquiries, and taking legal advice 



