The scattered remnants of the Digger tribes were gathered into a
reservation in Round Valley, Mendocino county, north of the Bay of San
Francisco, and were there taught a mild form of agricultural life, and
put under the care of Government agents, contractors, and soldiers, with
about the usual results. One agent, who was also a preacher, took
several hundred of them into the Christian Church. They seemed to have
mastered the leading facts of the gospel, and attained considerable
proficiency in the singing of hymns. Altogether, the result of this
effort at their conversion showed that they were human beings, and as
such could be made recipients of the truth and grace of God, who is the
Father of all the families of the earth. Their spiritual guide told me
he had to make one compromise with them--they would dance. Extremes
meet--the fashionable white Christians of our gay capitals and the
tawny Digger exhibit the same weakness for the fascinating exercise that
cost John the Baptist his head.

There is one thing a Digger cannot bear, and that is the comforts and
luxuries of civilized life. A number of my friends, who had taken Digger
children to raise, found that as they approached maturity they fell into
a decline and died, in most cases of some pulmonary affection. The only
way to save them was to let them rough it, avoiding warm bed-rooms and
too much clothing. A Digger girl belonged to my church at Santa Rosa,
and was a gentle, kind-hearted, grateful creature. She was a domestic in
the family of Colonel H--. In that pleasant Christian household she
developed into a pretty fair specimen of brunette young womanhood, but
to the last she had an aversion to wearing shoes.

The Digger seems to be doomed. Civilization kills him; and if he sticks
to his savagery, he will go down before the bullets, whisky, and vices
of his white fellow-sinners.