SHASTA RAMBLES 



behind trees, where they can crouch and gUde 

 Uke panthers, without casting up defenses that 

 would betray their positions; but the Modoc 

 castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite 

 Indians made raids on the settlers of the lower 

 Merced, they withdrew with their spoils into 

 Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted 

 that in case of war they had a stone house into 

 which no white man could come as long as they 

 cared to defend it. Yosemite was not held for a 

 single day against the piu:suing troops; but the 

 Modoos held their fort for months, until, weary 

 of being hemmed in, they chose to withdraw. 



It consists of mnnerous redoubts formed by 

 the unequal subsidence of portions of the lava- 

 flow, and a compUcated network of redans 

 abundantly supplied with salient and reenter- 

 ing angles, being united each to the other and 

 to the redoubts by a labyrinth of open and 

 covered corridors, some of which expand at 

 intervals into spacious caverns, forming as a 

 whole the most complete natural Gibraltar I 

 ever saw. Other castles scarcely less strong 

 are connected with this by subterranean pas- 

 sages known only to the Indians, while the 

 unnatural blackness of the rock out of which 

 Natxu-e has constructed these defenses, and the 

 weird, inhuman physiognomy of the whole 

 region are well calculated to inspire terror. 

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