hed the ugliness of aboriginal
specimens which we had encountered on the west verge of the Goshoot
country; and if any earthly pilgrimage, short of the mountains of
Nightmare, can reveal _their_ rivals, I should like to get into a prime
state of health and be allowed a peep at them through a spy-glass.

The condition of the white men who live and make alliances with these
poor creatures is too heart-sickening to print. The law that governs all
associations of culture with barbarism, where the latter is in dynamic
excess, holds rigorously true in California. The higher race recollects
only the cultivated evil of the state whence it fell,--and carrying to
its savage mates subtler means of accomplishing vice than they knew
before, presently gives rise to a combination from which all the
simplicity of the low race is eliminated, and into which enter all the
devils of mature civilization. Nor do these devils come accompanied by a
single grace or angel which softened or restrained crime in the
developed community. The attachment of this region's older settlers for
their savage comrades is something incredible. To enjoy their society
they cheerfully embrace a life as impure, uncleanly, free from all
humanizing influences, as that of the lowest Digger with whom they
consort. Sometimes a strange incongruous romance, like moonlight on a
puddle, lights up these mongrel _liaisons_, and infuses into them a
burlesque of sentiment. We found one old hunter whose squaw ran away
from him into the mountains at regular six-months' intervals, and who
invariably spent hundreds of dollars and no end to hardships in hunting
her up and restoring her to his wigwam. Another, who had kept an Indian
seraglio from the time of the earliest gold-discoveries, had repeatedly
been to the nearest legal officer, (two or three days' journey off,) and
besought him, without effect, to marry him to one of his squaws in
Christian fashion. It certainly did seem hard that the poor fellow
should be forbidden to make the only reparation in his power for wrongs
of twelve years' standing; but the aesthetic, naturally enough to those
who have seen Diggers, predominated over the legal and moral in the
judicial mind, and he was finally sent away with an injunction never to
show his face again while "this court continued to know herself" in the
Shasta region.

As often happens in the discipline of human life, the thorn in the flesh
was withdrawn as soon as we had learne