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Show THE WAY TO OREGON. 393 This region was the range of the poet Joaquin Miller, during the wild days in which he absorbed poetry from free nature, and found inspiration in the companionship of Shasta squaws. The county rec-ords contain papers of strange import as to his reputation. The worst accusation against him is of stealing a horse ; but his friends maintain that the owner of the horse owed Miller a debt which the latter could not collect, and therefore levied on the property in a somewhat irregular way. Be that as it may, the grand jury at Shasta found a bill of indictment against him; he was in jail for some time, then broke out and fled to Oregon. Joaquin's native wife was of the Pitt River band of Diggers, and she now lives near there with an old mountaineer named Brock. This man and Miller were crack shots, and supplied themselves and brown families plentifully with game, living in all other respects as the Indians do. The poetry in Joaquin ( whose real name, by the way, is John Heiner Miller) worked out in very odd ways for some years. The most charitable opinion in Shasta is, that he was then slightly " cracked," with a crazy affectation to imitate the heroes of Spanish romance. His name was adopted from that of Joaquin Murietta, a noted outlaw, who was long the terror of the Joaquin River region. He was of the " dashing, chival-rous" Claude Duval style of bandits, spending his gains freely among the Mexican senoritas ; and the character fascinated Miller. From what I saw of the Shasta and Pitt River squaws, I should say a man must needs be very crazy to live with one of them. The sight or smell of most of them would turn the stomach of any other than a poet. Their chief luxury is dried and tainted salmon. White men not only learn to eat it, but are said to like it even more tainted than do the Indians. Many old mountaineers are scattered through these hills, each living with a squaw; and it is common testimony that after a white man has lived with a squaw some years, he would not leave her for the best white woman in the country. They learn to do housework after a fashion, and on gala days rig out in hoops and waterfalls of most fantastic pattern. But they boil or roast the car-casses of their dead relatives ; mix the grease with tar, and mat it on their heads and necks, making a sort of helmet, with only the eyes and mouth free ; then for seven weeks they howl on the hill- tops every morning and evening to scare away the evil spirits. I saw one of these " in mourning," and am convinced that if she don't scare the devil away, he must be a spirit of some nerve. A white man dis-posed to Indian life, can adopt all their customs in six months, while an Indian can not adopt ours in fifty years. Arithmetically speaking, |