even 3000; they wander over the southeast portion of the Territory, and, like the Uinta Yutas, are the most independent of white settlers.
Weber-River Yutas are those principally seen in Great Salt Lake City; they are a poor and degraded tribe. Their chief settlement is forty miles to the north, and, like the Gosh Yutas, they understand Shoshonee.
Among the Yutas are reckoned the Washoe, from 500 to 700 souls. They inhabit the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, from Honey Lake to the West Fork of Walker's River in the south. Of this troublesome tribe there are three bands: Captain Jim's, near Lake Bigler, and Carson, Washoe, and Eagle Valleys, a total of 342 souls; Pasuka's band, 340 souls, in Little Valley; and Deer Dick's band, in Long Valley, southeast of Honey Lake. They are usually called Shoshoko,[1] or "Digger Indians"—a, term as insulting to a Shoshonee as nigger to an African.
Besides the Parawat Yutas, the Yampas, 200—300 miles south, on the White River; the Tabechyă, or Sun-hunters, about Tête de Biche, near Spanish lands; and the Tash Yuta, near the Navajoes: there are scatters of the nation along the Californian road from Beaver Valley, along the Santa Clara, Virgen, Las Vegas, and Muddy Rivers to New Mexico.
The Indian Bureau of Utah Territory numbers one superintendent, six agents, and three to six farm-agents, The annual expenditure is set down at $40,000; the Mormons declare that it is iniquitously embezzled, and that the total spent upon the Indians hardly exceeds $1000 per annum. The savages expect blankets and clothing, flour and provisions, arms and ammunition: they receive only a little tobacco, become surly, and slay the settlers. It is understood that the surveyor general has recommended to the federal government the extinction of the Indian title—somewhat upon the principle of the English in Tasmania[2] and New Zealand—to grounds in the Utah Territory, and the establishment of a land-office for the sale of the two millions of acres already surveyed. Until the citizens can own their farms and fields under the existing pre-emption laws, and until the troublesome Indians can be removed by treaty to reservations remote from white settlements, the onward march of progress will be arrested. The savage and the civilized man, like crabbed age and youth, like the black and gray rat, can not live together: the former starves unless placed in the most fertile spots, which the latter of course covets; the Mormons attempt a peace policy, but
- ↑ It is said to mean "one who goes on foot."
- ↑ Van Diemen's Land, in the days of Captain Flinders (A.D. 1800, two generations ago), had a population of 100,000 souls, now well-nigh annihilated by strong waters and corrosive sublimate. Neither man nor woman was safe in the vicinity of a native tribe; the Anglo-Scandinavian race thus found it necessary to wipe out a people that could not be civilized—a fair instance of the natural selection of species. And New Zealand now threatens to walk the path of Tasmania.
