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Show But if they had resented such behavior by white men to their squaws, knowing that it reflected white men's scorn of them as a lower form of human beings, they could hardly have carried the case to court. The old story about sexual looseness on the part of the Indian would have been brought up against them. If they had shown their anger physically, it would have been an "Indian outbreak" against the whites. One thing we knew about the Paiutes: they had to suffer invasions of their lands by white sheepmen and deerhunters. They resigned themselves to the mistreatment and injustice with smoldering anger. If we had been inclined to be superstitious we might have thought spirits of mistreated or murdered redmen were avenging themselves on us when we planted our first crop on the new field to the northeast. Father had hired men to "rail" the brush off a large tract to the northeast. That meant hitching teams of horses to steel rails obtained from the San Pedro when the railroad replaced the old steel with a heavier type to accomodate bigger locomotives and heavier trains. After the brush had been railed Father and I pitched the sage into windrows and burned it. Then we had the field plowed and planted to rye. Another of those deceptive wet springs occurred. The rye grew swiftly, beautifully, a luscious blue. I walked out into the field with Father in the cool of the morning one time when the grain was finger-high. Nothing could have been lovelier. Under a pure blue heaven with only a stir of breeze, the rye waved in its young promise. In mid-morning, however, from down-valley grew a devastating gale. As I said, if we had been superstitious we could have imagined that the Great Spirit was avenging dead braves who had lived and died there. For the plowing had turned |