184 THE GALLINOMERO, 
engines, his vast enterprises, his thundering locomotives; all their fine broad 
valleys wrenched from them with bloody violence; themselves jostled, 
elbowed back, crushed to earth; all their rich nut-bearing forests filled with 
the swarming flocks and herds of the avaricious and never resting American, 
consuming the acorns which are their subsistence, and for presuming to 
gather which off lands which were their own from time immemorial, and 
for which they have never received the compensation of one poor dollar, 
they have been sometimes pursued and shot unto death like jackals. They 
see themselves swiftly dwindling, dwindling, melting away before some 
mysterious and pathless power, which they can neither comprehend nor 
resist; they foresee that they can leave to their degraded and unhappy off- 
spring nothing but a heritage of contempt, isolation, and discontent; and 
in the voiceless and unreasoning bitterness of their ‘‘small-knowing souls”, 
in mere sullen ‘dumb despair”, they resolve to cut them off im unconscious 
infancy from a fate so miserable and so sad. 
To me the prevalence of infanticide among the Indians of California 
(for other tribes also confess it) is an eloquent testimonial to their great 
antiquity as a race, for we see it likewise among the Chinese, confessedly 
one of the oldest races on the globe, and in many things, especially in their 
dark and abominable cruelties, closely resembling the Indians of this vicinity ; 
and it testifies not alone to their antiquity, but also to the dense masses of 
population who must have existed here before the advent of either Spaniard 
or American. 
LITTLE HARVEY BELL. 
For many months during the year 1571 the stage-road between Healds- 
burg and Cloverdale was so infested by robbers that many and valuable 
packages were frequently sent through hidden deep in the capacious bodies 
of lumiber-wagons. The bandits were commanded by one Houx, and among 
them was a little Indian boy, called Harvey Bell, who was supposed to be 
about fourteen years old. At last all of the band were arrested except little 
Harvey, who it appears was not suspected. Being left alone he could not 
at once abandon his calling, but like that chicken-thief mentioned by the 
Chinese philosopher Mencius he could break off only by degrees. So on 
Christmas day, in the soft gloaming which was rendering all things dim, he 
