404 GENERAL FACTS. 
would be a proper subject of explication in a medical work but not in these 
pages. Suffice it to say that the Indian women thus chosen for wives were 
generally the finest and most ambitious of their race, while their white 
husbands were the lowest of theirs. 'The above-named fact certainly seems 
to indicate that the California Indian is not without a certain aggressiveness 
of vitality. 
It has been said that the two cardinal tests of national greatness are 
war and women—prowess in one and progress in the other. Tested by 
this ordeal, the California Indians seem to fall short. They certaimly were 
not a martial race, as is shown by the almost total absence of the shield, 
and the extreme paucity of their warlike weapons, which consisted only of 
bows and arrows, very rude spears, slings, and stones and clubs picked up 
on the battle-field. It is unjust to them to compare their war record with 
that of the Algonkins. Let it not be forgotten that these latter tribes 
gained their reputation for valor, such as it is, through two long and bloody 
centuries, wherein they contended, almost always in superior force, with 
weak border settlements, hampered with families, and enfeebled by the 
malarial fevers which always beset new openings in the forest. Let it be 
remembered, on the other hand, that after the Republic had matured its 
vast strength and developed its magnificent resources, it poured out hither 
a hundred thousand of the picked young men of the nation, unincumbered 
with women and children, armed with the deadliest steel weapons of mod- 
ern invention, and animated with that fierce energy which the boundless 
lust for gold inspired in the Americans, and pitted them against a race 
reared in an indolent climate, and in a land where there was scarcely even 
wood for weapons. They were, one might also say, burst into the air by 
the suddenness and the fierceness of the onslaught. Never before in history 
has a people been swept away with such terrible swiftness, or appalled into 
utter and unwhispering silence forever and forever, as were the California 
Indians by those hundred thousand of the best blood of the nation. They 
were struck dumb; they crouched in terror close around the few garrisoned 
forts; if they remained in their villages, and a party of miners came up, 
they prostrated themselves and allowed them to trample on their bodies to 
show how complete was their submission. Let a tribe complain that the 
