FUR ROBES—BILLY THE CHIEF. 97 
lines of small dots on the backs of their hands. They make beautiful 
robes of hare-skins, and you may any time see a stout brave slumbering 
on the naked earth with his head pillowed on a convenient billet of 
wood and his body covered with a wild cat-skin rug that a San Francisco 
millionaire might envy for an afghan. An Indian will trap and 
slaughter seventy-five hare for one of these robes, making it double, 
with fur inside and out; and on one of the dank nights when the sea- 
wind howls dismally in from Humboldt Bay, or when the fog broods so 
dense over the land that one can cleave a rift in it with his swung fist, 
these are very comfortable to lie under. They also make very substan- 
tial tule-mats, almost equal to the Chinese manufacture of bamboo. 
One day I talked a long while with one Billy, the only son of the last 
recognized chief, an Indian with a good knowledge of English, and a suit 
of clothing which was neat and chastened in tone and complete even to the 
dapper little necktie. He was a man of about five feet two inches in stat- 
ure; with a pudding-sack face broader than it was long perhaps; his voice 
was soft; his manner gentle; and his round cheeks easily rippled into a 
pleasant smile. He said he was fully entitled to the succession and nobody 
else pretended to be chief; but the tribe was so wasted that he took nothing 
upon him, and he seemed to grow melancholy when the subject was broached. 
He appeared to have sufficient acumen to perceive what a mournful farce 
it would be for him to strut in a little fifteen-man authority. 
In my conversation with him I caught a glimpse of what might be 
called hereditary imbecility—that is, the stunting of intellect which comes 
of afew families marrying in and in for a long period of years. He said the 
chief of the I-tok on Kel River (there is no tribe calling themselves that 
he probably meant the Vi-ard) had lately died, leaving the succession to 
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his son ; but the latter was unfit to rule, being a natural. ‘‘ White man call 
him crazy”, said Billy in explanation. He also said that himself was not in 
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his sound mind. ‘Me no want to be chief; me too much like play”, he 
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said. Billy was far from being crazy, but he was a fine specimen of that 
placid and vacuous inutility which we occasionally see illustrated in Europe, 
among those born in the purple. 
Eee 
