THE SEQUOIA 317 



clear. Marking- the direction I pushed gladly on, 

 hoping to find some hunter who could spare a 

 little food. Within a few hundred rods I struck 

 the track of a shod horse, which led to the camp 

 of two Indian shepherds. One of them was 

 cooking supper when I arrived. Glancing curi- 

 ously at me he saw that I was hungry, and gave 

 me some mutton and bread, and said encour- 

 agingly as he pointed to the west, " Putty soon 

 Indian come, heap speak English." Toward 

 sundown two thousand sheep beneath a cloud of 

 dust came streaming through the grand Sequoias 

 to a meadow below the camp, and presently the 

 English-speaking shepherd came in, to whom I 

 explained my wants and what I was doing. 

 Like most white men, he could not conceive how 

 anything other than gold could be the object 

 of such rambles as mine, and asked repeatedly 

 whether I had discovered any mines. I tried to 

 make him talk about trees and the wild animals, 

 but unfortunately he proved to be a tame Indian 

 from the Tule Reservation, had been to school, 

 claimed to be civilized, and spoke contemptuously 

 of " wild Indians," and so of course his inherited 

 instincts were blurred or lost. The Big Trees, 

 he said, grew far south, for he had seen them in 

 crossing the mountains from Porterville to Lone 

 Pine. In the morning he kindly gave me a 

 few pounds of flour, and assured me that I would 

 get plenty more at a sawmill on the South Fork 



