a mystery it was a terror. I believe they accepted
it as a curse, the work of evil spirits, and so bowed to
it in sublime silence.
This loss of salmon was a greater loss than you would suppose. These fish in the spring-time pour up these streams from the sea in incalculable swarms. They fairly darken the water. On the head of the Sacramento, before that once beautiful river was changed from a silver sheet to a dirty yellow stream, I have seen between the Devil s Castle and Mount Shasta the stream so filled with salmon that it was impossible to force a horse across the current. Of course, this is not usual, and now can only be met with hard up at the heads of mountain streams where mining is not carried on, and where the advance of the fish is checked by falls on the head of the stream. The amount of salmon which the Indians would spear and dry in the sun, and hoard away for winter, under such circumstances, can be imagined; and I can now better understand their utter discomfiture at the loss of their fisheries than I did then.
A sharp, fierce winter was upon them ; for reasons above stated they had no store of provisions on hand, save, perhaps, a few dried roots and berries ; and the whites had swept away and swallowed up the game before them as fast as it had been driven by the winter from the mountains. Yet I do not know that any one thought of all this then. I am sure I did not ; and I do not remember hearing any allusion made to these things by the bearded men of the camp, old
