may take all I have, leave my people theirs, and I will go away into the mountains, and there I will live and die.” But the agent would not hear to it, and they all had to pay their share. My brother Torn said, “If we don’t pay it we shall have to leave the reservation.”
The agent thought it necessary to make a show of some kind, and this is the way he did it. There are unprincipled men in all tribes, as I suppose there are among all people, and the agent found one for his work. He is known as “Captain Dave.” His Indian name is Numana. The plan made and carried out was this: Captain Dave was furnished with money, and appointed captain of police, a useless office, for Indians could not arrest either an Indian or a white man. They really were nothing but private servants to the agent. But this was promised to Captain Dave, provided he and six others would go to San Francisco, and do what the agent wanted them to do.
They were furnished with a drawing of a bridge that had been built, and told to go to the newspaper offices in San Francisco, and say beautiful things of the agent and his men. Every reasonable person will see by reading this paper, which was published in a newspaper, that the most intelligent Indian could not have given such a description of a bridge without he had been furnished with a memorandum of it:—
“Captain Dave and the Reservation.—Numana, better known as Captain Dave, one of the leading men of the Piute nation, called on us yesterday, and showed us several papers, among which was a letter of recommendation from Governor Kinkead, and an appointment from the Indian Commissioner as captain of the Indian police at Pyramid Reservation. Dave is a very intelligent Indian, and gave us the following facts connected with the Piutes and their doings: He and his body-guard of six Piutes have just
