No doubt the town at one time had great expectations, as it formerly was the capital of the State. It is now a capital joke to see a person undertaking to walk through the town in the winter season, without faith strong enough or feet broad enough to support him upon the surface of the oceans of mud he will find himself gazing wistfully across.
On my way down a man was pointed out to me on the boat who is said to be the meanest man in his county. My informant assured me that when the mean individual’s wife died last year, he borrowed a pair of forceps from the dentist at Benicia, and extracted all her gold-filled teeth. And on the morning prior to her funeral he sat upon the door-step, hammer in hand, with a flat-iron upon his knees, cracking the teeth like English walnuts, and with a sewing awl extracting the filling from the cavities.
During my journey I didn’t cultivate that man’s acquaintance. He is a person to stand away from, especially when clouds are charged with electricity.
Take away the dish; I have had my fill of Modoc; have had buck for breakfast, squaw for dinner, and papoose for supper, until at the very name of Indian my appetite forsakes me.
The appellations that for a season fell upon my ears, like a new poem from the lips of some sweet bard, have poetry for me no longer. The names, “Captain Jack,” “Scarfaced Charlie,” “Shacknasty Jim,” “Rain-in-the-face,” “Old-man-afraid-of-his-horse,” “Sitting Bull,” or “Ellen’s Man,” have lost their charm. They have become dull and uninteresting, and I would hear them no more forever. I have been duped, deceived, defrauded, on account of these rascally Indians.
I have gazed in silent awe upon what I supposed to be the scalp of no less a personage than “Old Sconchin,” and it now transpires that the redoubtable old chief turns up among the Indians recently captured.
Oh! Oh! how this world is given to lying!
I have journeyed long and far, by water and by rail, on horseback and on foot, and purchased at an extravagant price an Indian’s scalp which the seller under oath, with lifted hand, assured me was the veritable crown lock of that same “Old Sconchin.”
With tears coursing down his sunburned cheeks he informed me, that with his own eyes, in the full light of day, he saw it plucked smoking from the sconce of the expiring brave.