Cincinnatus Heine Miller

“ Here, for the first time, I found myself alone in an Indian camp without any obligation or anything whatever binding me or calling me back to the Saxon. I began to look on the romantic side of my life, and was not displeased. I put aside the little trouble of the old camp and became as careless as a child.
The wood seemed very very beautiful. The air was so rich, so soft and pure in the Indian summer, that it almost seemed that you could feed upon it. The antlered deer, fat, and tame almost as if fed in parks, stalked by, and game of all kinds filled the woods in herds. ”

“ A strange sort of inspiration it was, and more beautiful, that made the miners bring the first dead out here from the camp, from the dark, and dig his grave here on the hill- side, full in the light of the lifted and eternal front of snow.
Dead men are even more gregarious than the living. No one lies down to rest long at a time alone, even in the wildest parts of the Pacific. The dead will come, if his place of rest be not hidden utterly, sooner or later, and even in the wildest places will find him out, and one by one lie down around him. ”

“ I heard the shouts of children in the hills, and saw the old man sitting in his cabin porch that overlooks the river. He had some books and papers near him. His face and demeanour were majesty itself.
He arose as he saw us through the trees and vines, and shaded his brow with his hand as he peered down the path. Men in the mountains do not forget faces. Mountaineers never forget each other, though they may separate for twenty years. In a city you may meet a thousand new faces a year; there a new face is a rare thing. ”

“ The poor little waif, when I look into her great wondering eyes, I fancy she is a little rabbit, startled and frightened from the forest into the clearing, where she knows not whether to return or bound forward, and so sits still and looks in wonderment around her. A little waif is she, blown like some strange bird from out the forest into a strange and uncertain land.
Will she succeed in the new scene? Poor child, the chances are against her. Only fancy yourself the last one of your race, compelled to seek out and live with another and not an over-friendly people. ”

“ An Eve untouched and unstained, fresh from the hand of God, gazing at her reflection in the mossy mountain stream, amazed at her beauty, and in love with herself; even in this first act setting an example for man that he has followed too well for his own peace !
This canon was as black as Erebus down there a sea of sombre firs ; and down, down as if the earth was cracked and cleft almost in two. Here and there lay little nests of clouds below us, tangled in the tree- tops, no wind to drive them, nothing to fret and dis turb. They lay above the dusks of the forest as if asleep. ”

“ Men are there, down in these dreadful canons, out of sight of the sun, swal lowed up, buried in the impenetrable gloom of the forest, toiling for gold. Each one of these camps is a world in itself. History, romance, tragedy, poetry in every one of them. They are connected together, and reach the outer world only by a narrow little pack trail, stretching through the timber, stringing round the mountains, barely wide enough to admit of footmen and little Mexican mules with their apparajos, to pass in single file. ”

“ The blood, the burning camp, the cold and cruel butchery, the perfect submission, the savage silence in which the wretches died, the naked, bony forms
in the snow, had gone to the hearts of the men, and they were glad to get away when all was over.
There was not an adventure, not an achievement, not a hazard or escape of any one to allude to. The only heroic act was that of the little skeleton savage with his club. I think they almost wished they had butchered and scalped this boy as they had threatened. ”

“ The Indian drew his pistol, called to us to leap our horses down the bank into the river, and as we did so, fired in the face of the officer. Then, with a yell of defiance, he followed us over the precipice into the boiling, surging river, cold and swollen from the melting snows of Mount Shasta.
It was a fearful leap; not far, but sudden and ugly, with everything on earth against us. My horse and myself went far down in the blue, cold river, but he rose bravely, and struck out fairly for the other side. ”

“ Any new truth is always worthy of attention. I mention this particularly as an item of evidence confirmative of my belief, that we have only to trust man to make him honest, and, on the other hand, to watch and suspect him to make him a knave.
The principal saloon of The Forks was the "Howlin Wilderness;" an immense pine-log cabin, with higher walls than most cabins, earth floor, and an immense fire-place, where crackled and roared, day and night, a pine-log fire, that refreshes me even to this day to remember. ”

“ When the Modoc has led his last warrior to battle up yonder in his rocky fortress, fired his last shot, and the grass is growing in the last war-path of those people, then, and not till then, I may go up where the solemn trees with their dead limbs stand around, making faces at something in the centre, pitch a tent there, and go down in the canon with men, and picks and shovels, and bars of steel and iron. ”

“ They stand with their backs against this mountain, frowning down dark-browed, and con fronting the face of the Saxon. They defy the ad vance of civilization into their ranks. What if these dark and splendid columns, a hundred miles in depth, should be the last to go down in America ! What if this should be the old guard gathered here, mar shalled around their emperor in plumes and armour, that may die but not surrender !
Ascend this mountain, stand against the snow above the upper belt of pines, and take a glance be low. Toward the sea nothing but the black and unbroken forest. ”

“ I am bound to confess, right here, that after this murder, when the whole camp seemed turned against this shy, shrinking, silent man, when he was despised by all, when no one would share the path with him, but would make him stand aside and leave the trail as if he had been an Indian or a Chinaman, I began to sympathize with him. When the world pointed its finger and set the mark of Cain upon the man, I began to like him. ”

“ Sandy saw this, set down the glass of gin and peppermint untouched, and went straight up to the man. He seized him by the throat and shook him till his teeth smote and ground together like quartz rocks in a feeder. Then he picked up the hat reverently and respectfully as his condition would allow, and laid it gently on the roaring pine-log fire. That was the last of the first beaver hat of Humbug.
The Doctor appeared out of place in this camp from the first. Every one seemed to feel that perhaps no one felt it more keenly than himself. ”

“ The world is fooling you. It will laugh and be amused to-day, as you dance before it in your youth, and sing wild songs, but to-morrow it will tire of the forest fragrance and the breath of the California lily; your green leaves will wither in the hot atmosphere of fashion, and in a year or two you will be more wretched than you can think; you will be neither mountaineer nor man of the world, but vibrate hopelessly between, and be at home in neither capacity. ”

“ There is a great difference in the density and colour of the smoke made by different combustibles. You know, or at least all who read ought to know as much as an Indian about a thing so simple as this, that the smoke of dry straw or grass, particularly of the wild grass of California, is so much lighter than the atmosphere of even the rarest season, that it goes straight up a long, thin, white thread, surging and veering toward heaven against the blue sky like the tail of a Chinese kite. ”

“ Let this be a great national park peopled by the Indian only. I saw the justice of this, but did not at that time conceive the possibility of it.
No man leaps full-grown into the world. No great plan bursts in full and complete magnificence and at once upon the mind. Nor does any one sud denly become this thing or that. A combination of circumstances, a long chain of reverses that refuses to be broken, carries men far down in the scale of life, without any fault whatever of theirs. A similar but less frequent chain of good fortune lifts others up into the full light of the sun. ”

“ Indians to do, I find; though a Christian king can wait a lifetime, and a Christian nation wait a century. They saw their tribe wasting away every year ; every year the hordes of white settlers were eating into the heart of their hunting grounds, still they lay in their lava beds or moved like shadows through the stormy forests and silently waited, and then when the whites came into their camp to talk for peace, as they had gone into the camp of the whites, they showed themselves but too apt scholars in the bloody lesson of long ago. ”

“ I had read some flaming picture books of Indian life, and I had mixed all my life more or less with the Indians, that is, such as are willing to mix with us on the border, but the real Indian, the brave, simple, silent and thoughtful Indian who retreats from the white man when he can, and fights when he must, I had never before seen or read a line about. ”

“ I had always hated war and despised warriors. Warriors a re coarse - natured men trained to destroy what refined and gentle men build up.
Men fight for freedom of body. There is no such thing. For six thousand years men have struggled for a mistake. There is a freedom of mind, and a man can have that just as much in a monarchy as in a land even beyond the pale of law. A shoemaker or mender of nets may be as free of mind as a monarch. Give us freedom of mind, or rather let each man emancipate his mind, and all the rest will follow. ”

“ But Paquita was shy. She would not dance, for somehow she seemed to consider that this was a kind of savage entertainment, and out of place for her. She had seen just enough of civilized life . to deprive her of the pleasures of the wild and free.
There had grown a cast of care upon her lovely face of late. She was in the secret of all the Indians plans. At least she was a true Indian true to the rights of her race, and fully awake to a sense of their wrongs. ”

“ Let the historian enter into the heart, the private life of his hero ; let him refuse to be dazzled by the dome of the temple, but enter in and see for himself, and let him give the world the cold, clean truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as he is in duty and in honour bound, and we will find the hero of war is much the more a brute and much the less a man than the bully of the prize ring. The bully harms no one but his single antagonist ; no cities are burned, no fields laid waste, no orphans made ”

“ Fast, faster, the rain in great warm drops began to strike us in the face, as we miners hastened up the hill to the shelter of the cabin. At the door we turned to look. The darkness of death was upon us ; we could hear the groans and the battling of the trees, the howling of the tempest, but all was dark ness, blackness, desolation. Lightning cleft the heavens. ”

“ You must be a pebble, a smooth, quiet pebble. Be a big pebble if you can, a small pebble if you must. But be a pebble just like the rest, cold, and hard, and sleek, and smooth, and you are all right. But I was as rough as the lava rocks I roamed over, as broken as the mountains I inhabited ; neither a man nor a boy.
How I am running on about myself, and yet how pleasant is this forbidden fruit ! The world says you must not talk of yourself. The world is a tyrant. ”

“ One night he came boldly down and laid hands on the muddy little stream, and stretched a border of ice all up and down its edges ; spread frost-work, white and beautiful, on pick, and torn, and sluice, and flume and cradle, and made the miners curse him to his beard. He cut down the banners of the spring that night, lamb-tongue, Indian turnip and catella, and took possession as completely as of old. ”