On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the
entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It
was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of
white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest
type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the
Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are
very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of
California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to
even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually
inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. Indeed, I have been
obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood’s “Uncivilized Races
of Men” clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded
enough to take rank with the Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open
to that shameful verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa.
Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the
stations, were small, lean, “scrawny” creatures; in complexion
a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands
bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months,
years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a
silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything,
covertly, like all the other “Noble Red Men” that we (do not)
read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent,
everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless
beggars—for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he
would not “go,” any more than a clock without a pendulum;
hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would
eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no
higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits, crickets and
grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages
who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit
show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is
referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these
Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no
gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities—a
people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of
the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive
wastes that our country or any other can exhibit.
The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same
gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians
trace them to.
One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots, and yet
they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months
and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn down
the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out. And once,
in the night, they attacked the stage-coach when a District Judge, of
Nevada Territory, was the only passenger, and with their first volley of
arrows (and a bullet or two) they riddled the stage curtains, wounded a
horse or two and mortally wounded the driver. The latter was full of
pluck, and so was his passenger. At the driver’s call Judge Mott
swung himself out, clambered to the box and seized the reins of the team,
and away they plunged, through the racing mob of skeletons and under a
hurtling storm of missiles. The stricken driver had sunk down on the boot
as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he would
manage to keep hold of them until relieved.
And after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head
between Judge Mott’s feet, and tranquilly gave directions about the
road; he said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun
and left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be
at an end, and then if the Judge drove so and so (giving directions about
bad places in the road, and general course) he would reach the next
station without trouble. The Judge distanced the enemy and at last rattled
up to the station and knew that the night’s perils were done; but
there was no comrade-in-arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly
driver was dead.
Let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the Overland
drivers, now. The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper
and a worshipper of the Red Man—even of the scholarly savages in the
“Last of the Mohicans” who are fittingly associated with
backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part
critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part
just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway
clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett’s works
and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks—I
say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set
me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been
over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine
of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious
to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him
treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences
accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found
Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but
Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have
mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.
There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad
Company and many of its employees are Goshoots; but it is an error. There
is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to mislead
the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes.
But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start the
report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have been,
the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have a
hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains,
Heaven knows! If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked
creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name let
us at least not throw mud at them.
