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Show Finally they left, with evening coming on, and bundled into their wagons. All of us were relieved. Father resolved to hide all but one or two bottles of the vanilla and lemon extract next time we saw them coming, to avoid arguments. We found later that they camped at Hot Springs two miles to the northeast. That was a traditional gathering and watering place for Indians. Father related that Escalante's diary told of the "Bearded Utes" whose hunting range extended about as far south as our Hot Springs and as far north as the "big bend" of the Sevier River, in the neighborhood of the present Mills. Our red visitors had a merry party there with dancing. But it couldn't have been very alcoholic, at least not on the "firewater" we sold them from our store. When I was in my teens Father told me how the Congress had passed laws in the early 1860's to drive Indians to reservations. Most areas chosen were dismal unproductive places that white men did not want. Many Utah Indians, he said, trailed sadly to those reservations. But some grew homesick and returned to the "graves of their fathers." Even into our time a few clung to the outskirts of white settlements existing on odd jobs, and begging. He told of one little village of such outcasts who lived on a piece of wasteland near a Southern Utah town, on stony land hopeless for any other use. They inhabited huts of odds and ends, old pieces of tin, flattened oil cans, torn tarpaper, strawboard boxes. One time he heard from what seemed like reliable sources of white poolhall loafers who bought a bottle of cheap whiskey, whites were not supposed to give whiskey to Indians. But they took the "red-eye" and called on an Indian couple they had made a brief acquaintance with. They got the man dead drunk and the squaw almost that. Then they repeatedly abused the squaw sexually, He had heard of similar cases in other parts of the West. First, the Indians did not know how to "carry" their liquor or in their anger and frustration they drank too much. Also I remembered stories of how in early trader-trapper days Indians had included in their hospitality to white visitors a squaw as a bed-partner, So there could have been a different attitude toward sex among them. |