THE BATTLE OF CASTLE CRAGS 

                  Joaquin Miller

 I am not certain. Col. Hastings was the first proprietor-1844. Hastings was the first man to open a permanent trail up the Sacramento River, and pass with a pack train and a hand of Spanish cattle from California to Oregon by this route; though McCloud, a Hudson's Bay trapper, after whom the McCloud River was named, was here before him-1841. 

Hastings was so charmed with Soda Springs, and so delighted with the waters, that he built a small fort or barracks on the north side of the little valley opposite the springs, and, Mountain Joe said, applied for a grant, which was to include Mount Shasta, then known as Chaste Butte. I have heard this old barracks spoken of as Fremont's Fort. Fremont was not here at all in the early days. He lost nearly half his force in a night battle with the Klamath and Modoc Indians east of here, on the other side of Mount Shasta, in 1846, and but for Kit Carson would have been annihilated, 

       In his reports to the Government, published in the first volume of his Memoirs, and all know that he was very elaborate. The scene of his operations lay entirely to the east and southeast side of the great snow pyramid, and was full of battles. He concludes his report to Congress of the fatal night attack in these words: "I have since fought these Indian nations from one end of their possessions to  the other." 

He complains bitterly of the British traders for furnishing the Klamath Indians with steel for arrows, saying, "Kit Carson pronounces them the most beautifully warlike arrows ever made." True, Fremont and Kit  Carson did their hard fighting not far away from what is now Castle Crag Tavern, and you could reach their battle grounds easily any day now; but you must bear in mind that in those days there were no roads, and men had to keep compactly together and out of dangerous passes or perish.  

Besides, I have heard of Mountain Joe, who served under Fremont through the Mexican War, and was also much with him on the plains, say that it was Hastings, not Fremont, Whether it was the winter snows; the savages that drove out the first proprietor of Soda Springs, no one can say; but it was doubtless the latter. Down on the south side of Castle Creek stands, or stood a few years ago, a white-oak tree with this bit of history cut in shapely letters on its widening bark, "Killed with Hastings, 1844." A mile or so further down the old pack trail is or was another oak, telling, with its lone cross, where a whole party with its laden pack-train perished at the hands of the red men.

  It is equitable to set Mountain Joe down as the first earnest and permanent proprietor of all this region 

  round  about here, for he tilled the soil, built some houses, and kept a suite at the hotel, and guided people to the

 top of Mount Shasta, to say nothing of his ugly battles with the Indians for his home.

I first saw this strange man at his own campfire when a school-lad at home in Oregon, where he had camped near our place with his pack-train. He told us he was in the habit of going to Mexico for half-wild horses, driving them up to Oregon, and then packing them back to California, by which time they were tamed and ready for sale He told my brother and me most wondrous tales about his Soda Spring, Mont Shasta, the Lost Cabin, and a secret mine of gold. He talked to us of Fremont till the night was far spent, and father, with the school teacher, had to come out after us. But my heart was entirely at ease with which he reached his left hand, and taking  "Di Bella Galica" from my father, divided "Gaul in three parts" in the ashes of the campfire as he read and translated the mighty Roman by the road in Oregon. He was a learned foreigner, of noble birth, it was said, certainly of noble nature. I could not forget Mountain Joe and his red men, and his Mexicans and mules and horses; and so, in the fall of 1854, I ran away from school and joined him at Soda Springs, now Castle Crag Tavern.

He was my ideal, my hero. You will find him in one character or another, for he had many char­acters, in nearly all my work. I cannot say certainly as to his hidden treasures, though he always seemed to have pots of gold to draw on in those days; but I can frankly confess that I have draw it on him and his stories, making them my own, of course, for all  these years,-a veritable mine, indeed,  to me.

I found him fortressed in the old Hastings barracks, before mentioned, though the place bad been nearly destroyed by fire in his absence. We guided a few parties here and there, taking the first party to the top of the mountain, he ever reached that point with ladies, I believe, and then returned to Treks for the winter, going back to Lower Soda over the spring snow banks with a tremendous rush of miners that Mountain Joe had worked up by his stories of the Lost Cabin and mysterious gold mines. Thousands on thousands of men  The little valley of Soda Creek back of Castle Crag Tavern was a white sea of tents. Every bar on the Sacramento was the scene of excitement. The world was literally turned upside down. The rivers ran dark and sullen with sand and slime. The fishes turned on their sides. But the enraged miners found almost nothing. Mountain Joe disappeared. Men talked of hanging " Mountain Joe's boy." The game disappeared before the avalanche of angry and hungry grew.  The Indians had vanished at their first approach, and were starving in the mountains. 

The tide went out as it came in-suddenly, savagely. Deeds of cruelty to Mexicans and half-tamed Indians who tried to be friendly and take fish in the muddied waters were not rare. as the disgusted miners retired from the country either up or down the river, leaving trails of dead animals. As they went Joe came, and the Indians came,! We treated them well, tried to make friends of then once more, but they would have none of it. 

By the end of June, 1855, the last miner had left nor section; and soon the last Indian left us to go on the warpath. Mountain Joe and I were now utterly alone, with not even a Mexican to take care of the pack-train and do the cooking. But we kept on. We had quite a garden, but it was needing water ; so Joe and I took our guns each day, leaving the store or trading-post to care for itself, and went up the creek to work on a ditch. Meantime, ugly stories were afloat; and ugly, sullen Indians came by now and then-Modoc  on their way across to the Trinity Indians, by the pass up little Castle Creek. They would not sit down, nor eat, nor talk. They shook their heads when we talked, and assumed to not know either the Shasta or Chinook dialect. The Trinity Indians were in open revolt beyond Castle Crags, and Captain Crook from Fort Jones, near Yreka, the famous General Crook, was in the field there. He drove them up Trinity River to Castle Crags. 

One hot morning, while we were at work on the ditch, Joe suddenly dropped his pick and caught up his gun. A horse went plunging up the valley past with an arrow quivering in his shoulder; and smoke began to curl up from the burning trading-post. We hastened down, but did not see a single Indian, nor did we see another horse or mule. All had silently disappeared in the half hour we had held our faces to the earth in the ditch. Blotches of flour from torn sacks here and there made a white trail up over the red foothills near the barn, sweet-smelling pine-quills, and, without a word, Joe led cautiously on, I at his heels. The savages divided some, the party with the horses going to the right, toward the Modoc country, the party with the stores supplies leaving a trail, to the left, toward Castle Crags. This latter Joe followed, crossing the river at a ford, and go up the left bank of little Castle Creek. Joe led across the spurs of the mountain what is now Sisson. It was called Strawberry Valley and was kept by two brothers by the name of Gordon 

We were  desperately worn and hungry, and they treated us well As said before, there were and had for some time been rumors of coming trouble. Joe and I turned back front Sisson to give the alarm and get help along the river. Portuguese Flat, which it took us two days to reach through the mountains, as we dared not take the trail, was the nearest post. Dog Creek, the ghost of which may be dimly seen in Delta now, was their  prosperous camp, and full of men. Judge Gibson, then the only magistrate in the country, had married an influential chief's daughter, and, by a wise and just course, had gained great authority, and had kept this tribe, the Shasta's, from taking part in the great uprising which finally spread all over the Coast. The Indians had determined on a war of extermination. It ended in the extinc­tion of many tribes in Oregon and some in California. those in revolt, while Joe and I went hack, and, with such friends 55 we could gather, waited at the base of Castle Crags for Gibson and his men. 

Amazing as it may seem, he brought but about fifty, all told, Indian and whites; and yet he was the only man who could have done as well. The miners were already more than disgusted with the country; and Indians rarely fight Indians in a general uprising like this. Mountain Joe could raise but ten men of his own. Gibson led straight up Big Castle Creek, as if avoiding Castle Crags and the savages entrenched there. He kept himself  almost entirely with his Indians, and hard things were said of him by the worn and discouraged white volunteers. They suspected that he was afraid to take the fight, and was trying to join the regulars under  General Crook in the Trinity Mountains. 

      At last, when our shoes and moccasins, as well as patience, were worn out, he turned sharply to the right, making the  circuit of the Castle. We rested by a deep, dark lake which the Indians call the abode of their devil, Ku-ku-pa-rick, and they refused to approach its grassy, wooded shores. 

Here Gibson, leaving his Indians for the first time, passed from man to man as they crouched under the trees. He told them that there was to be a fight, and a fight to a finish ; that the hostiles were not an hour distant, and that no one could turn hack and live, for if we did not kill them they would kill us. He told us that they had come down out of the Castle to kill deer, and so their arrows were poisoned. 

He broke us up in parties, putting good and bad together, with Indians at the head of each. He told me to go with Joe, whom he sent to make a show of attack on the side next to Soda Springs. When near the hostiles Joe put me behind a tree on the edge of a small open place, and told me to stay there. Then he went on, creeping through the dense brush, to place the other men. I put some bullets into my mouth so as to have them handy, but I do not know what I did with them. I fired a few shots after Joe opened the fight, but hit only brush and rocks I reckon. And now pandemonium set in, Indians do not often yell in battle; but on both sides of us now the yelling was simply fiendish. They yelled from the top of the Castle to the bottom, it seemed to me. 

      We had taken the enemy entirely unaware, asleep, most of them, after the morning's chase, and our first shot brought down their dozing sentinels on the rocks. Finally the yelling, the whiz of arrows and the crack of rifles stopped. Then some Indian women came out and across the little gorge,  Joe and his men, and I, thinking they had all surrendered. Gibson called from the rocks ahead of me and to my right' "Boys, the fight now begins, and we've going to get them or they get us. Come on Who will go with me?" I answered that I would go, for it was all a picnic so far as I had yet seen, and I ran around to him. But there was blood on his hands and blood on his face, blood on all of his Indians, and most of the white men were bloody and hot. 

The enemy used arrows entirely. They could not tell where we were, but we knew where they were only when we felt their sting. Gibson led, or rather crept, hastily on, his head below the chaparral. No one dared speak, But when we got in position, right in the thick of it, our men opened. Then the arrows, then the yelling, as never before  The women and children prisoners down with Joe set up the death song, as if it was not already dismal enough. The savages bantered us and bullied us, saying we were all going to be killed before the sun went down; that we were already covered with blood, and that they had not lost a man. I had not yet fired a shot since joining Gibson, and, rising up to look for a target, he told an Indian to "pull the fool down by the hair," which he promptly did . 

The battle had lasted for hours. The men were choking, and the sun was near going down. We must kill or be killed, the white man has little show with a Indian in battle at night. Gibson gathered all who could or would go, and took still another place by storm. Then Lane fell, mortally hurt by an arrow in the eye. I saw Gibson's gun fall from his hand from the very deluge of arrows; then all was blank, and I knew no more of that battle. 

      The fight was over when I came to my senses, and it was dark. A young man by the name of Jameson was trying to drag me through the brush; I could hear, but could not see. An arrow had struck the left side of my face, knocked out two teeth, and had forced its point through at the back of my neck. I could hear. and I knew the voices of Gibson and Joe. They cut off the point of the arrow, and pulled it out of my face by the feather end. Then I could see. I suffered much pain, but was benumbed and cold as we lay under the pines. Joe held my head all night expecting that I would die. Gibson had the squaw prisoners carry his wounded down to the pack-trail on the banks of the Sacramento. They laid us down under some pines and pretty juniper tree on the west side of the swift, sweet river. And how tender and how kind these heroic men were  I was as a brother to them and their boy hero, Only the day before I had been merely "Mountain Joe's boy." 

Gibson's loss in killed was considerable for so small a number engaged several Indians, though only one white man. Indians never give their loss, because of encouragement to the enemy; and Moun­tain Joe and Gibson, fore like reason, always kept their list of killed and wounded as low as possible, and the mighty presence of Shasta. And it is Crook's monument, and Dribelbies' and Mountain Joe's. The finger of the Infinite traces and retraces in storm or sun the story and the glory of their unselfish valor while the world endures. It is enough. There are those who care to read of savage met-dents in these border battles, but such things  should be left to obscurity, and I shall set down hut two here. The first of these was the treat­ment of the dead Modoc chief, Docas Datla, by spoke of the battle of Caatle Crags as a trifling affair. Vet General Crook, ill his letter to Cap­tain Gibson, marveled that he ever got out with a single man. I had promised to mark the grave of Ike Hare with a fragment of, granite from Castle Crags, so that those who pass up and down the pleasant walks around Castle Crag Tavern might look with respect on the resting-place of a brave man and an honest legislator of two States. But my little tablet would seem so p'iti,ti~ in 

CASTLE DOME AND THE Aborigines. 

The chief of our Indian allies.  When the body was dragged before him, where he stood in the heat and rage of battle directing his men, he threw off his robe, and, nearly naked, leaped on the naked body (for it had already been stripped and scalped), and there danced and yelled as no fiend of the infernal regions could have danced and yelled. He called his fallen foe by name, and mocked and leaped up and down on the dead till the body was slippery with blood which gushed from its wounds, and he could no longer keep his footing.  

Yet after all it was only the old Greek and Trojan rage, the story of Homer instill another form of expression; and Castle Crag was Troy above the clouds, One more incident, as described to me by the son of this same furious chief on revisiting the battle­ground: This son of the chief was but a lad at the time, and so was left by his father with two Indians and a few white men, who were too lame and worn out to rush into the fight, in charge of the blankets, supplies and so forth, They were left in the little depression or dimple in the saddle of the mountain a few hundred feet above and to the south of Crook's or Castle Lake, and in the Modoc pass or trail. 

When Gibson forced the fighting as night came on, the hostiles separated, some going down the gorge as to reach their stores of arrows in the caves of Battle Rock (for their supply must have been well nigh spent by this time), while others stole off up the old Modoc trail that winds up above and around the lake, and in which the son of the chief and other Indian, as well as some whites, lay concealed. And here in this dimple on the great granite backbone that heaves above and about the lake, here above the clouds. amid drifts and banks and avalanches of everlasting snow, the wounded fugitives, with empty quivers, and leaving a red path as they crawled or crept on and up over the banks and drifts of snow, were met by their mortal enemies face to face, 

If you will stand here facing Battle Rock in the south, and with your back to the take, which lies only a few hundred feet to the rear, though far below, you will see how impossible it was for the wounded savages to escape down the rugged crags to the left, or up and over the crescent of snow to the right. They could not turn back; they could not turn to the left nor to the right; and so they kept on. Two of them got through and over the ridge and onto the steep slope of snow, and slid down almost to the lake, where they lay for a few moments concealed in the tall grass. But their relentless red enemies followed their crimson trail, tomahawked and scalped them where they lay, and though their bodies into the lake. 

Like all decisive battles with swift-footed savages, this one covered a large field. The fighting, or at least the dead, and the blood on the rocks and snow, reached from the south shore of Crook's Lake to the north base' of Battle Rock.. The cross cut in the white spruce tree by the hand that writes this, and not far from the northernmost bank of the lake, may he set down as the outer edge of the battle-ground in that direction. 

. It is the custom for an Indian, when passing the since of some great disaster, especially if alone, to place in a conspicuous position a stone by the way in mem­ory of his dead. He never rears his monunicut at onetime, as does the white man. He places but one Stone, often a very small one, and leaves the rest to time and to other hands. Mountain Joe, Jameson (now of Port Gamble, Washington) and others have published accounts of this fight, So that I must say 110 more. But I will add Captain Gibson's story of it from his own tremb­ling hand:

Gibson and I went on the battle-ground alone at this last roll call, for Nelly Jameson beside survives, and he is very ill. We marked with a Greek cross on a white spruce tree the spot where we had rested above and beyond the lake, Slid then followed Ibe line of Stone mounds or cairils to the south sod above the lake, past the lesser lake in the saddle of the ridge that divides the  Castle Lake from those of Castle Creek. The battle was fought directly under the highest crag ill the northwest corner of the great Castle. although on the other side of Little Castle Creek. This Hattie-rock is conspicuous above all other Spires or rocks of Castle Crags for hours on the way around the spurs of Mount Shasta to the north.