Transcriber's Note
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SHADOWS OF SHASTA.
BY
JOAQUIN MILLER,
AUTHOR OF "SONGS OF THE SIERRAS,""THE DANITES IN THE SIERRAS," ETC.
CHICAGO:
JANSEN, McCLURG & COMPANY.
1881.
COPYRIGHT.
JANSEN, McCLURG & COMPANY.
A. D. 1881.
All rights of Dramatization reserved to the Author.
TO
WHITELAW REID.
CONTENTS.
SHADOWS OF SHASTA.
INTRODUCTORY.
And wrought and bound by golden bars,
Sierra's peaks serenely sit
And challenge heaven's sentry-stars.
Why this book? Because last year, in the heart of the Sierras, I sawwomen and children chained together and marched down from their cool,healthy homes to degradation and death on the Reservation. At the sideof this long, chained line, urged on and kept in order by bayonets, rodea young officer, splendid in gold and brass, and newly burnished, fromthat now famous charity-school on the Hudson. These women and childrenwere guilty of no crime; they were not even accused of wrong. But theirfathers and brothers lay dead in battle-harness, on the[Pg 8] mountainheights and in the lava beds; and these few silent survivors, likeIsrael of old, were being led into captivity—but, unlike the chosenchildren, never to return to the beloved heart of their mountains.
Do you doubt these statements about the treatment of the Indians? Thenread this, from the man—the fiend in the form of man—who for years,and until recently, had charge of all the