94 TRIBES TRIBUTARY TO THE HUPA. 
there was a fall five or six feet high at Big Flat, above which the salmon 
could not pass. Hence the Wintiin living on the upper reaches of the river 
were not so well provisioned as their down-river neighbors. In running up 
the river the salmon would accumulate in great numbers at this obstruction, 
and the Chimariko used to allow the Patch’-a-we (Wintiin) living as far up 
as North Fork and Cafion Creek to come down in the season and catch all 
they could carry home. 
They occupied a long and narrow canon, which was rich in gold placers 
and tempting to the awri sacra fames of the early miners. The mining neces- 
sarily roiled the river, so that the Indians could not see to spear salmon. 
As a matter of course they protested. The miners replied with insults, if 
nothing worse. Being deprived of salmon, their staff of life, they stole 
the miners’ pack-mules and ate them. The miners made bloody reprisals. 
The eloquence of Pi-yel-yal-li, of Big Flat, stirred them up to seek 
revenge, and thus matters went on from bad to worse until the deep canon 
of the Trinity was luridly lighted up by the torch of war, and reéchoed to 
horrid war-whoops and the yells of the wounded and dying. In 1863~64 
the conflict raged with frightful truculence on either side. The Indians for 
the nonce got the upper hand. For twenty miles along the river there was 
scarcely a white family or even a miner left; the trading-posts were sacked 
and burned; the ponderous wheels in the bed of the river lazily flapped in 
the waters now muddied no longer, silent and untended amid the blackened 
ruins; and the miners’ cabins were very small heaps of ashes. 
But the Americans finally rallied and returned, and sternly were the 
Indians taught that they must not presume to discuss with American miners 
the question of the proper color for the water in Trinity River. They were 
hunted to the death, shot down one by one, massacred in groups, driven 
over precipices; but in the bloody business of their taking-off they also 
dragged down to death with them a great share of the original settlers, who 
alone could have given some information touching their customs. In the 
summer of 1871 it was commonly said that there was not an Indian left.’ 
The gold was gone too, and the miners for the greater part; and amid the 
stupendous ripping-up and wreck of the earth which miners leave behind 
them, in this grim and rock-bound cation, doubly lonesome now with its 
