PITFALLS—MEAGER RANGE OF FOOD. 269 
unctuousness ; the foreheads are like a wall; in those solid, round-capped 
cheek-bones, standing over against one another so far apart, and in those 
massive lower jaws, there is unmistakable strength, bred in the bone through 
tranquil generations. They laugh with a large and placid laugh which 
comes all the way up from their stomachs, soundless, but agitating their 
well-fed bodies with slow and gentle undulations. Here is a hearty and 
a lusty savagery which is pleasant to see. 
There was one custom of the Pit River nation wherein they differed 
from all other California Indians, and that was their custom of digging pit- 
falls for the trapping of game. Selecting some trail where the deer passed 
frequently, they would, with no other implements but fire-hardened sticks, 
excavate pits ten or twelve feet deep, and carry all the earth away out of 
sight in baskets. Then they would cover the pits with thin layers of 
brushwood and grass, sprinkle earth over all, scatter dead leaves and twigs 
on the earth, restore the trail across it, and even print tracks in it with a 
deer’s hoof; then back out and conceal their own tracks. Such an infinity 
of trouble would they give themselves to capture one deer—a fact which 
shows them to have been, as we otherwise know was the ease, indifferent 
hunters. These pitfalls were very numerous along the river-banks where 
the deer came down to drink; and the early settlers lost so many cattle in 
them and fell in so often themselves that they compelled the Indians to 
abandon the practice. It is these pits which named the river. 
Mention has been made of the meager diet of the Hot Spring tribes. 
They have no acorns, no salmon (acorns and salmon are the flour and pork 
of the California Indians). They have a fine range of game-birds—Cen- 
trocercus urophasianus, Pediocetes Columbianus, Bonasa Sabinii, Oreortyx 
pictus—but they trap few of them and shoot fewer. Venison they are able 
to indulge in rarely. They have grasshoppers, very large and juicy crickets, 
the ntiserable suckers and a few trout from the river, cammas, clover in the 
spring, and the sickening, diseusting bear-berries (Frangula Californica). 
After the vast crystal volume of Fall River enters and overcomes the 
swampiness of the snaky Pit, then salmon are caught, the Indians say, 
though the whites assert that they do not ascend above a certain tre- 
mendous cataract which is said to exist on the lower river. When the 
