ere captives at Alcatraz
for some time, but finally were permitted to return to the reservation, where the chief died a few years later.
Port Orford has been selected for a harbor of refuge for this part of the coast, and an appropriation of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars has been secured to commence the work. Curry County is well supplied with game and fish. Its splendid cedar forests are worth more than gold-mines to whomsever will convert them into lumber. Cedars from three to eight feet in diameter and with not a limb on them for a hundred feet grow here. Here sea-fogs keep vegetation forever green, and miasmatic diseases are unknown. The residents of the valleys would like to live upon the coast, were it not for the mountains which divide it from their fertile prairies. Yet it is by these mountains the climate is rendered what it is, —partially confining the fogs and winds to the coast, making this section cool and moist, and the interior warm and dry.
Ellensburgh, situated at the mouth of Rogue River, is famous for stirring scenes in the Indian war of 1855-56. It was at the mouth of Rogue River that a camp of volunteers, a company of settlers, and the Indian agent, Ben. Wright, were surprised and massacred. Wright was killed, and his heart cut out and eaten by his Indian wife and her people. The reason given by this unchristianized Ramona for this repast was that her husband had a big (good and brave) heart, and that (on the accepted principle that a part helps a part, as we say when we eat calves’ brains), herself and tribe would be made more courageous by it.
There are various myths extant about this same Ben. Wright. By some he is represented as an illiterate, bad man, with a record shocking to civilized sensibilities. It is said he deliberately poisoned a large number of Pit River and Modoc Indians whom he had invited to a council at Modoc or Tule Lake. By others he is spoken of as a sort of Spanish caballero, riding a glossy black horse, wearing the fringed buckskin suit, red sash, broad-brimmed hat, and jingling spurs of the gente de razon of California. It is said he had handsome features, fine dark eyes, and wore his black hair long. Investigation seems to prove that he was a Philadelphian by birth, of a good family, who was drawn to the Pacific coast by the gold-mines, who dug gold on the Klamath River and about Jacksonville. In 1852 there
