Peter Kane now had the store and he also kept whiskey and a rough
house. He would sell whiskey to the Indians and get drunk himself,
having trouble all around. He said one fall that he had two five
gallon kegs of whiskey and that the Indians close around there had
four hundred dollars and that he would get it all out of them for the
two kegs of whiskey. His selling to them was the cause of four of them
getting killed. Peter Kane had an Indian woman belonging to Redwood
creek. She spoke the Hoopa tongue and bore him three children. One day
one of the little girls about seven months old was crying and Kane
grabbed her roughly by the neck, held her out, shook her at the same
time, he walked out through the kitchen and threw the child flat on the
ground with its face down, then turned and walked back into and store
cursing the child and its mother. The next morning the mother got her
things together and started for her home on Redwood creek. Arriving at
the Klamath river which she had to cross she proceeded to cross over
with her children and had almost reached the other side before Kane
found that she was leaving. As soon as he discovered that she was
going he ran into the store, grabbed his rifle and ran down the bank to
the water’s edge and began firing. He fired several shots at her, the
bullets striking close by but failing to strike her. She went to her
home in the night, some twenty miles away, over a rough mountain trail
and through heavy timber most of the way. She never came back. The
Indians preventing him from following her that night was all that kept
him from killing her. It got too warm for him and he sold the store to
C. H. Johnson and afterwards went to the Indian woman on Redwood creek
and remained there with her. This brute took the same little girl by
her legs and dashed her brains out against a large redwood post, so
every one said. The woman again had to flee for her life. She left for
Hoopa Valley, where she could get some protection and Kane did not
dare to follow her there. He drifted down on the coast and lived for a
number of years but finally took sick and died in the County Hospital.
The woman he had lived with and bore him children remained at Hoopa
and raised the other children. Can you expect children, born to such
fathers under such conditions to grow up to be good and respectable
men and women? Many of them are a credit to their Indian mothers while
those who have good respectable fathers and are born under wed-lock,
having a birth that they can be proud of, over the average, make the
best of men and women.
I have strenuously fought the whiskey traffic carried on by the
unprincipled white men for years and did all that I could to stop it,
and made bitter enemies in doing so. Yet it is going on just the same
under the very eyes of some of those who are employed by the U. S.
Government to put it down. It looks as if they were paid to keep their
eyes closed and not see it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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