LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 153 



sensible effect on the spirits of the mountaineers. They traveled 

 on in silence through the deserted plains ; the hi-hi-hiya of their 

 Indian chants were no longer heard enlivening the line of march. 

 More than once a Digger of the Piyutah tribe took himself and 

 hair, in safety, from their path, and almost unnoticed ; but as 

 they advanced they became more cautious in their movements, 

 and testified, by the vigilant watch they kept up, that they an- 

 ticipated hostile attacks even in these arid wastes. They had 

 passed without molestation through the country infested by the 

 bolder Indians. The mountain Yutas, not relishing the appear- 

 ance of the hunters, had left them unmolested ; but they were 

 now entering a country inhabited by the most degraded and ab- 

 ject of the western tribes ; who, nevertheless, ever suffering from 

 the extremities of hunger, have their brutish wits sharpened by 

 the necessity of procuring food, and rarely fail to levy a contri- 

 bution of rations, of horse or mule flesh, on the passenger in their 

 inhospitable country. The brutish cunning and animal instinct 

 of these wretches is such, that although arrant cowards, their 

 attacks are more feared than those of bolder Indians. These 

 people — called the Yamparicas, or Root Diggers — are, neverthe- 

 less, the degenerate descendants of those tribes which once overran 

 that portion of the continent of North America now comprehended 

 within the boundaries of Mexico, and who have left such start- 

 ling evidences in their track of a comparatively superior state of 

 civilization. They now form an outcast tribe of the great nation 

 of the Apache, which extends under various names from the Great 

 Salt Lake along the table-lands on each side the Sierra Madre to 

 the tropic of Cancer, where they merge into what are called the 

 Mexican Indians. The whole of this nation is characterized by 

 most abject cowardice ; and they even refuse to meet the helpless 

 Mexicans in open fight — unlike the Yuta or Camanche, who carry 

 bold and open warfare into the territories of their civilized enemy, 

 and never shrink from hand to hand encounter. The Apaches 



