WAR AND WOMEN. 405 
miners muddied their salmon-streams, or steal a few pack-mules, and in 
twenty days there might not be a soul of them living. 
It is not to this record that we should go to form any fair opinion of 
the California Indians’ prowess, but rather back to those manuscript histo- 
ries of the old Spaniards, every whit as brave and as adventurous as our- 
selves, who for two generations battled so often and so gallantly, and were 
so often disastrously beaten by ‘‘los bravos Indios,” as the devout chron- 
iclers of the missions were forced against their wills to call them. The 
pioneer Spaniards relate that at the first sight of horsemen they would flee 
and conceal themselves in great terror; but this was an unaccustomed spec- 
tacle, which might have appalled stouter hearts than theirs; and this fact is 
not to be taken as a criterion of their courage. It is true also that their 
battles among themselves, more especially among the lowlanders of the 
interior—battles generally fought by appointment on the open plain—were 
characterized by a great deal of shooting at long range, accompanied with 
much voluble, Homeric cursing; but the brave mountaineers of the Coast 
Range inflicted on the Spaniards many a sound beating. It is only neces- 
sary to mention the names of Marin, Sonoma, Solano, Colorado, Quintin, 
Calpello, and the stubborn fights of the Big Plains, around Blue Rock, at 
Bloody Rock, on Eel River, and on the Middle Trinity, to recall to mem- 
ory some heroic episodes 
And it is much to the credit of the California Indians, and not at all to 
be set down to the account of cowardice, that they did not indulge in that 
fiendish cruelty of torture which the Algonkin races practiced on prison- 
ers of war. They did not generally make slaves of female prisoners, but 
destroyed them at once. 
But if on the first count they must be allowed to rank rather inferior, 
in the second, I think, they were superior to the Algonkin races, as also 
to the Oregon Indians. For the very reason that they were not a martial 
race, but rather peaceable, domestic, fond of social dances, and well pro- 
visioned (for savages), they did not make such abject slaves of their women, 
were far less addicted to polygamy (the Klamaths are monogamists), and 
consequently shared the work of the squaws more than did the Atlantic 
Indians. The husband always builds the lodge, catches all the fish and 
