They Are
Perfect Savages, Without Any Aptitude For Even Aboriginal
Civilization, And Are Altogether The Most Degraded Of The
Ill-Fated Tribes Which Are Dying Out Before The White Races.
They were all very diminutive, five feet one inch being, I should
think, about the average height, with flat noses, wide mouths,
and black hair, cut straight above the eyes and hanging lank and
long at the back and sides.
The squaws wore their hair thickly
plastered with pitch, and a broad band of the same across their
noses and cheeks. They carried their infants on their backs,
strapped to boards. The clothing of both sexes was a ragged,
dirty combination of coarse woolen cloth and hide, the moccasins
being unornamented. They were all hideous and filthy, and
swarming with vermin. The men carried short bows and arrows, one
of them, who appeared to be the chief, having a lynx's skin for a
quiver. A few had fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that
they lived almost entirely upon grasshoppers. They were a
most impressive incongruity in the midst of the tokens of an
omnipotent civilization.
The light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the
Sierras, and as the dew fell, aromatic odors made the still air
sweet. On a single track, sometimes carried on a narrow ledge
excavated from the mountain side by men lowered from the top in
baskets, overhanging ravines from 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, the
monster train SNAKED its way upwards, stopping sometimes in front
of a few frame houses, at others where nothing was to be seen but
a log cabin with a few Chinamen hanging about it, but where
trails on the sides of the ravines pointed to a gold country
above and below.
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Words from 1615 to 1909
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