The Klamath Indians were, at the coming of the white man, a very large
tribe, there being several thousand of them. It taxed every resource
of the country in which they lived for all of them to obtain a
subsistence, therefore everything was owned in the same way that it is
now owned by the white man. The land was divided up by the boundaries
of the creeks, ridges and the river. All open prairies for gathering
grass seeds, such as Indian wheat, which looks similar to rye, besides
other kinds of seed; the oak timber for gathering acorns, the sugar
pine for gathering pine nuts, the hazel flats for gathering hazel nuts
and the fishing places for catching salmon.
The most frugal and saving of the families had become the owners of
these places and their ownership undisputed and these ownerships were
handed down from one generation to another by will. In time this left
a great many of them owning no property by which they could make a
living and many of their own people became slaves to the wealthy class.
They made the slaves work and kept them from starving, and by this
there came about the “half married” system. There are some of these
Indians that were born slaves living yet, and they are the ones that
are always ready to tell the white man all of the Indian legends in a
way to fit their own cases. They cannot tell the true legends at all,
as they are ignorant of such facts. The wealthy ones would see that the
men got wives and that the girls got husbands, build them houses and
some families were very kind to their slaves. When they were sick they
saw that they had doctors and the proper care. Some families were mean
and over-bearing to their slaves, giving no care to the sick, letting
them die and going so far as to throw them into a hole, leaving them
there to suffer and starve until they died. This sort of treatment
was looked down upon by the ones that had better humane feelings and
they sometimes prevented such inhuman actions. The most of the doctors
are women and they exercised great power, especially those who had a
high standing as to family, and the art of curing most all diseases or
cases of sickness. A few of the doctors were men and they used roots
and herbs of different kinds and they are hard to beat as doctors in a
great many kinds of sickness. They can cure the bite of a rattle snake,
not one of them ever dying from the bite. I knew many of the people
that were bitten by the rattle snake at different times and they were
cured and lived to be very old. For this cure they use salt water out
of the ocean and the root or the onion of what you call kelp and which
is taken out of the ocean. They pound the onion of the kelp and make
a poultice out of it, place it over the wound and keep it wet with the
salt water, at the same time letting the patient drink all he can of
the salt water. The patient is kept perfectly still and not allowed to
move about more than is necessary. They bind the limb or place where
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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