KLAMATH JIM. 4] 
eastern Indian story of Michabo, the Great White One, is simply a sun- 
myth, mingled with a very weak analogue to the Greek fire-myth of 
Prometheus. The bringing of the fire-brand from the east carried by the 
various animals in succession, is the daily progress of the sun, while the 
pursuing hags are the darkness which follows after. Of course this poor 
little story of the Indians is not for a moment to be compared with the 
majestic tragedy wrought out by the sublime and gorgeous imagination of 
the Greeks ; and it suffers seriously even when set alongside of the ingenious 
Algonkin myth of Michabo. It falls not a little behind it in imaginative 
power, albeit there is in it, as in most of the California fables, an element 
of practical humor and slyness which is lacking in the Atlantic Indian 
legends. Though the Karok are probably the finest tribe of the State, their 
imagination is not only feeble but gratuitously filthy. This is shown in 
their tradition of the flood, which cannot be recited here on account of its 
obscenity. 
STORY OF KLAMATH JIM. 
Early in the year 1871, an Indian called Klamath Jim murdered 
a white man in Orleans Bar, and by due process of law he was tried, 
condemned, and hanged. In the presence of his doom, even when the fatal 
hour was hard by, he exhibited the strange and stoical apathy of his race 
in prospect of dissolution. He might almost have been said, like Daniel 
Webster, to have coolly anatomized his sensations as he went down to his 
death. He asked the sheriff curious and many questions on the grim topic, 
how the hanging was performed, how long it lasted, whether it would give 
him any pain, whether an Indian could die as quickly when hanging in an 
erect posture as when lying in his blanket, whether his spirit would not also 
be strangled and rendered unable to fly away to the Happy Western 
Land, ete. 
In going to the gallows he walked with nerve and balance, tranquilly 
puffing a cigar, and he mounted the scaffold with an unfaltering tread, daintily 
held out his cigar and filliped off the ashes with his little finger, took a final 
whiff, then tossed it over his shoulder. He assisted the sheriff in adjusting 
the noose about his neck, shook that officer’s trembling hand without the 
tremor of a muscle, spoke a few parting words without the least quivering 
