A singular combination of circumstances laid his
life bare to me. I was a child arid he was a child.
He permitted me to enter his heart.
As I write these opening lines here to-day in the Old World, a war of extermination is declared against the Modoc Indians in the New. I know these people. I know every foot of their once vast possessions, stretching away to the north and east of Mount Shasta. I know their rights and their wrongs. I have known them for nearly twenty years.
Peace commissioners have been killed by the Modocs, and the civilized world condemns them. I am not prepared to defend their conduct. This nar rative is not for their defence, or for the defence of the Indian, or any one ; but I could, by a ten-line paragraph, throw a bombshell into the camp of the civilized world at this moment, arid change the whole drift of public opinion. But it would be too late to be of any particular use to this one doomed tribe.
Years and years ago, when Captain Jack was but a boy, the Modocs were at war with the whites, who were then scouring the country in search of gold. A company took the field under the command of a brave and reckless ruffian named Ben Wright.
The Indians were not so well armed and equipped as their enemies. The necessities of the case, to say nothing of their nature, compelled them to fight from behind the cover of the rocks and trees. They were hard to reach, and generally came out best in the few little battles that were fought.
