A WAR TO THE DEATH. 279 
canic terraces and low mountains west of Mill Creek Meadows. Down to 
1858 they lived at peace with the whites, but since that time they have 
waged unrelenting and ceaseless war—ceaseless except for a casual truce 
like that above described. Their hostilities have been characterized by so 
many and such awful atrocities that there are men, as above-mentioned, 
who have sworn an oath that they shall die. All these seventeen years 
they have warred against the world and against fate. Expelled from the 
rich and teeming meadows which were their chosen home ; hemmed in on 
these great, hot, voleanic table-lands where nothing can live but a few 
stunted trees, and so destitute of water that this forms at once a security 
against civilized foes and their own constant menace of death—a region 
accursed-of Heaven and spewed out even by the earth—they have seen one 
after another of the craven tribes bow the knee and make terms with the 
enemy; but still their voice has been stern and steady for war ; still they 
have crouched and hovered in their almost disembodied life over these arid 
plains until all are gone but five. Despite all their bloody and hellish 
treacheries, there is something sublime in this. 
So far as their customs have been observed, they have some which are 
Californian, but more which are decidedly foreign. They burn the dead, 
and are remarkably fond of bathing. 
On the other hand, the customs which are foreign to California are 
numerous and significant. First, they have no assembly chamber and con- 
sequently no indoor dances, but only circular dances in the open air. ‘The 
assembly chamber is the one capital shibboleth of the California Indian. 
Second, they did not erect the warm and heavily-earthed lodges which the 
Indians of this State are so fond of, but mere brush-wood shelters, and often 
they had no refuge but caves and dens. Third, they inflicted cruel and awful 
tortures on their captives, like the Algonkin races. Whatever abomina- 
tions the indigenous races may have perpetrated on the dead, the torture 
of the living was essentially foreign to California. Fourth, they had a 
mode of capturing deer which no other California tribe employed, as far as 
known. Taking the antlers of a buck when they were green and velvety, 
they split them open on the under side and removed the pith, which ren- 
