THE SAIAZ—THEIR ABJECT CONDITION. 123 
It is the testimony of white men, who had had a taste of their quality, 
that they were once among the bravest of the California Indians. It was only 
after a long and heroic resistance that they gave under, and were led away 
captive to the Smith River Reservation. It was in Hoopa Valley that I saw 
them, and it was indeed hard to believe then that they had ever done any- 
thing manly. They were the most abject of human beings—many of them 
from living eternally in the smudge, with one or both eyes swollen and 
horribly protruding ; some with their noses half eaten away ; all with their 
coarse black hair drooping over faces pitted and slashed, or purple, blotched, 
and channel-worn with the dribblings of bleared and sodden eyes. Their 
naked and unspeakably filthy board cabins stood on a hot mesa beside the 
river, with never a tree or a shrub to dapple their roofs with a sprinkle of 
shade; the flaming sun made riot in the exhalations staggering up from the 
fouled earth; bones, chips, skins, festering flesh were strewn about; and in 
this place of miasma and famine the ghastly beings lay about in their 
swarming tatters, basking in the sun like muddy-skinned caymans of Lou- 
isiana, or drowsily shelling a few acorns, for they received no rations. 
Most tribes of California either burn their lodges annually or abandon 
them frequently to escape from the vermin; but here, condemned to live 
always on one spot and in the same lodges which they were not taught how 
to cleanse, they are almost devoured alive. In their native state they always 
bathe the entire person daily in cold water; but here, huddled together in 
foul, reeking quarters, what little pride of person they ever had was in a 
fair way to be crushed out of them. 
Judging from the wretched remnants that are left, the Saiaz resemble 
most Kel River Indians, having rather squatty, adipose bodies, chubby 
heads, and long simian hands. Like the Kelta they frequently scarify the 
outside of their legs when they lose a bet in gambling. 
They entertain a belief in what, out of contradistinction to Pantheism, 
may be called Pandemonism. Most tribes living near the coast believe 
that the devils or evil spirits of the world pervade many forms of animal 
life, or at least are able to assume those forms at pleasure for the torment- 
ing of men (though all of them have some one or more animals, as a 
