244 THE SHASTIKA. 
Modok; the faces are mostly small and compact; eyes keen and lively ; 
noses a little better developed at the root than the Californian; color vary- 
ing from a rich maple or hazel to a walnut, or still darker. As above 
remarked, the women are larger and stronger-featured and every way more 
respectable than the handful of dandies who lord it over them. In the 
physiognomy of the Shastika women there is a notable vigor comporting 
with their character ; they bear age well; I have seen tough, old, weathered 
faces among them, long past the age of child-bearing, and yet with the 
cheeks etched only with fine spider-lines. With their wiHow skull-caps 
(used at pleasure as drinking-cups) fitting tight on their round heads, and 
walking with a brave, grenadier stride, they present quite an Amazonian 
appearance. They smear their faces all over daily with choke-cherry juice, 
which gives them a bloody, corsair aspect. 
But their foppish lords have dwelt so long amid the mining camps and 
about Yreka that they have become odiously “fast”. They sport the 
daintiest calf-boots and have an Ethiopian passion for fancy shirt-fronts, 
breastpins, rings, and the like, which look strangely bizarre in a brushwood 
booth. Dapper little fellows, impertinent, dancing, card-playing, pony- 
racing, idle, thoroughly worthless—there is not another tribe in the State 
going out of existence so rapidly, in such good clothes, and with more ele- 
gance—the squaws excepted. Taken in all their qualities, apparent and 
traditional, they are the Athenians of Northern California, and the Modok 
the Beeotians (since the Modok war I will add, the Spartans). 
They have no assembly chamber, as is the case with the California 
Indians; nothing but a kind of oven large enough that one person may 
stretch himself therein and enjoy a sweat-bath. Sometimes there is a 
family affair large enough for ten or twelve people, but it has not the other 
multiplied uses of the California sweat-house. Instead of it there is a kind 
of town-lodge, one for men, one for women. 
Reference has already been made to the theory of Judge Rosborough, 
of Yreka, that there were three lines of migration southward into California, 
one of which lodged and remained in Scott and Shasta Valleys. The Shas- 
tika have traditions that they came from the north and northwest, and found 
in these valleys a tribe (doubtless the Wintitin) who had the custom of 
