AVARICE, INGRATITUDE, AND REVENGE. Ail 
the gates who seems to be friendless may lose the very blankets off him in 
the night. They resemble the fox, which never steals near its nest. 
. The northern tribes are much the most miserly and given to hoarding 
treasure, and none of them do a white man the smallest service without 
expecting payment. For instance, Ta’-kho Kol’-li, chief of the Ta-ta-ten’, 
refused to count ten in his language unless I paid him for the service in ad- 
vance. Once I was sitting with three stalwart and sinister-looking Yurok 
on a rugged promontory, waiting for the tide to ebb; and when lunch-time 
arrived we fell to—they on their dried smelt, I on some sandwiches. They 
had no claim on me, and therefore asked for nothing; but presently I com- 
menced talking with one about Indian matters, and in an instant the crafty 
savage perceived the drift, saw he had established a claim, and said, ‘* Me 
talk you Injun talk, you give me piece of bread and meat.” No Indian in 
Southern California ever thought of driving such petty bargains as this. 
White men who have had dealings with Indians, in conversation with me 
have often bitterly accused them of ingratitude. ‘Do everything in your 
power for an Indian,” they say, “and he will accept it all as a matter of 
course; but for the slightest service you require of him he will demand 
pay.” These men do not enter into the Indian’s ideas. This “ingratitude” 
is really an unconscious compliment to our power. The savage feels, 
vaguely, the unapproachable elevation on which the American stands above 
him. He feels that we had much and he had little, and we took away from 
him even his little. In his view giving does not impoverish us, nor withhold- 
ing enrich us. Gratitude is a sentiment not in place between master and 
slave; it is a sentiment for equals. The Indians are grateful to one another. 
Sambo did not feel that he was stealing when he took his owner’s chickens ; 
it is very much so with the Indian. 
Though not by any means a warlike people, and therefore generally 
laying very little stress on the taking of scalps, they have the usual treach- 
ery, revengefulness, and capacity for rancorous hate of allsavages. I have 
before me as I write a terrible memento, and-one that opens up a dark and 
bloody picture of savage life. It is only a stone, a longish stone, rudely 
blocked out to be made into a pestle, with which a Nishinam woman beat 
out her sister's brains, while the husband of the murderess looked on. 
But, worse still, a niece of the murdered woman, in addition to this cunt, 
