3.26.2002

 
"They make them perfectly watertight."


* Near each ranch is generally a village of Indians.* --These are for the most part perfectly naked at all seasons of the year, the women having only a small tuft of grass before them, though those employed about the house are dressed " a la Americain ," but I have seen scores of men lounging around a ranch as naked as they were born, where were several women of the household. A more filthy and disgusting class of human beings you cannot well conceive. They are dark-skinned, nearly as dark as a negro, covered with dust, living upon acorns, wild fruit and fish. They have nothing of the noble bearing of the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains, and they seem to be only a few degrees removed from brutes. Their dwellings resemble almost exactly large coal pits where wood is charred; a hole is dug in the ground, a circular framework is built, and this is covered with dirt six or eight feet high, with a small hole at the base to creep in and out of, and another at the top to let out the smoke. You will always see numbers of men sitting on the tops of their hives sunning themselves, while the squaws are generally engaged in preparing their acorn flour or in weaving baskets and pans, in which they are very ingenious. They make them perfectly watertight. Their acorns are dried, then pounded fine and mixed with some kind of berries, making a kind of bread which is by no means unpalatable, but it requires a man who has the courage to eat a rattlesnake to taste it. In fact, a man must cross the plains before he can summon resolution to eat it, especially after seeing them prepare it. The men are very expert in spearing salmon, of which there is the finest here I ever saw, and very abundant. They are now frequently employed in the mines for a mere trifle, and such generally contrive to get a shirt, and a few get rich enough to buy a coat and pantaloons, but since the rains have set in I have seen hundreds of them wading the streams for fish or traveling on the plain naked, and paying no more regard to the wet chilly storm than dumb beasts. In the Valley they are now inoffensive, as the number of whites overawe them, but in the mountains they sometimes give the miners trouble and some collisions have taken place.

Alonzo Delano's California correspondence: being letters hitherto uncollected from the Ottawa (Illinois) Free Trader and the New Orleans True Delta, 1849-1952.



p. 28
posted by D.S. Monoclonius 10:45 PM

 
At the behest of the Eziest, this section has been eliminated. To say anything further is to mitigate the watertight mission.



posted by D.S. Monoclonius 10:38 PM