CHAPTER XXXVII. 
GENERAL FACTS. 
It has been the melancholy fate of the California Indians to be more 
vilified and less understood than any other of the American aborigines. 
They. were once probably the most contented and happy race on the con- 
tinent, in proportion to their capacities for enjoyment, and they have been 
more miserably corrupted and destroyed than any other tribes within the 
Union. They were certainly the most populous, and dwelt beneath the 
most genial heavens, and amidst the most abundant natural productions, 
and they were swept away with the most swift and cruel extermination. 
Pity for the California Indian that he was not a Christian born, instead 
of a “Gentile”, as the good God made him, for therefore he was written 
down by the Jesuit padres near to the lowest levels of humanity, that the 
more conspicuous might appear that self-sacrificing beneficence which reached 
down to pluck him up to salvation. Pity for him that his purple-tinted 
and snowy mountains were ribbed with silver and fat, with gold-dust, for 
thereby he became to the American a vagabond thief and a liar, “ uncanny 
and repulsive ”. 
Pity for him that his shining valleys, lying warm and genial . 
in the sun, were capable of making the greedy wheat-grower rich in seven 
good harvests, for thereby he became to him “a mean, thieving, revengeful 
scoundrel, far below the grade of the most indifferent white ”. 
It is small concern to pioneer miners to know aught of the life-story, 
customs, and ideas of a poor beggar who is so fatuously unwise as to com- 
plain that they darken the water so he can no longer see to pierce the red- 
fleshed salmon, and his women and children are crying for meat. And 
when, persisting, he is shot down and lies stark and stiff in the arid gulch, 
where the pitiless sun of California shakes above him the only winding- 
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