Under the stars and stripes, these scenes are repeated year after year;
and they will be continued until they are made impossible by the
civilization and sense of justice which righted that other though far
less terrible wrong.
As that greatest man has said, "We are making history in America." This
is a conspicuous fact, that no one who would be remembered in this
century should forget. We are making dreadful history, dreadfully fast.
How terrible it will all read when the writer and reader of these lines
are long since forgotten! Ages may roll by. We may build a city over
every dead tribe's bones. We may bury the last Indian deep as the
eternal gulf. But these records will remain, and will rise up in
testimony against us to the last day of our race.
J. M.
CHAPTER I.
MOUNT SHASTA.
_To lord all Godland! lift the brow
Familiar to the moon, to top
The universal world, to prop
The hollow heavens up, to vow
Stern constancy with stars, to keep
Eternal watch while eons sleep;
To tower proudly up and touch
God's purple garment-hems that sweep
The cold blue north! Oh, this were much!_
_Where storm-born shadows hide and hunt
I knew thee, in thy glorious youth,
And loved thy vast face, white as truth;
I stood where thunderbolts were wont
To smite thy Titan-fashioned front,
And heard dark mountains rock and roll;
I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll
The awful autograph of God!_
And what a mighty heart these Sierras have! Kissing the purple of heaven
now, and now in their awful deeps hiding the shrinking form of darkness
from the sun.
The shaggy monsters that prowl there, the mountains of gold that lie
waiting there, the mystery and the splendor! Oh keep with me, my friend,
for a little while in the Sierras; breathe their balm and health, see
their sublimity, feel their might and their majesty; step upward, as on
stepping stairs to heaven; and my word for it, you will be none the
worse.
In a canyon here, deep, deep, away down in the darkness, where night
seems to have an abiding place, where the sun sifts through the
pine-tops timidly, where the loftiest trees tip-toe up and seem to
strive to reach out of the edge of the chasm, there gurgles a little
muddy stream among the boulders, about the miners' legs, as they bend
their backs wearily and toil for gold.
Here the smoke curls up from a low log cabin; there a squirrel barks a
nut on the roof of a ruined and deserted miner's home, and away up
yonder, where the deep gorge is so narrow you can almost leap across it,
the wild beasts prowl as if it were really night, and great owls beat
their wings against the boughs of the dense wood in everlasting
darkness. But high over gorge and wilderness, gleaming against the cold
blue sky, towers Mount Shasta, the monarch of the Sierras.