In about the year 1861 Snider sold the stock of goods to Bill McGarvey,
a jolly Irishman. It was Bill McGarvey that named me Lucy, yet he
always called me by my Indian name, Che-na-wah. Bill McGarvey kept in
stock plenty of whiskey, always in the flat pint bottles, which he sold
at a dollar a bottle to the whites and Indians alike. He would only
bring out one bottle at a time in selling it to the Indians so that any
time they became quarrelsome he could tell them that it was all gone.
Bill McGarvey had many ups and downs in the way of his trading there
among them and I will tell of some of his experiences.
Three Indians came to the store one day bringing with them a fine
looking young Indian girl and wanted to borrow thirty dollars and
leave the girl as security. He talked it over for awhile, the Indians
saying that they had to have this amount to make a settlement with some
other Indians, that they would come back and pay him and take the girl
in thirty days. So he decided to let them have the money without due
consideration of how he would take care of the girl. After they were
gone he began to think of the situation that he had placed himself
in, as he was a bachelor. So he made up a room for her and when it
came to cooking he thought he would have her wash the dishes and sweep
the house but she would do no house work unless he paid her for it.
McGarvey tried to argue the case with her and told her that he had to
furnish her food and cook it, also furnish a room and a bed to sleep
in and that she ought to clean up the house. She answered by telling
him that he was doing only what he had to do and that she would not
work unless he paid her for it. McGarvey had to absolutely wait on her
for the whole thirty days as completely as if she had owned him as a
slave. She could go and come as she liked, always coming back in time
so he could not make a complaint, telling him that if he said so, she
would stay in the house all the time. He said that the experience was
in after years a lesson to him in dealing with the Indians. When the
thirty days were up they came with the money, paid him and took the
girl.
Another time he wanted to get in his winter supplies and at that time
he got his goods from Crescent City, (Caw-paw) and he went to Cortep
village which is about six hundred yards above the store and on the
same side of the river to see if he could hire them to go down the
Klamath and out to sea to Crescent City with their canoes, as they
had a large new one. He hired five of them, all Cortep Indians to go
and bring his goods into the mouth of the river and store them there
until they had them all in before the ocean would get too rough, as the
winter months were coming on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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