agents." Each of these cars is forty-five feet long. Then came
two cars loaded with peaches and grapes; then two "silver palace"
cars, each sixty feet long; then a smoking car, at that time
occupied mainly by Chinamen; and then five ordinary passenger
cars, with platforms like all the others, making altogether a
train about 700 feet in length.

The platforms of the four front cars were clustered over with
Digger Indians, with their squaws, children, and gear. They are
perfect savages, without any aptitude for even aboriginal
civilization, and are altogether the most degraded of the
ill-fated tribes which are dying out before the white races.
They were all very diminutive, five feet one inch being, I should
think, about the average height, with flat noses, wide mouths,
and black hair, cut straight above the eyes and hanging lank and
long at the back and sides. The squaws wore their hair thickly
plastered with pitch, and a broad band of the same across their
noses and cheeks. They carried their infants on their backs,
strapped to boards. The clothing of both sexes was a ragged,
dirty combination of coarse woolen cloth and hide, the moccasins
being unornamented. They were all hideous and filthy, and
swarming with vermin. The men carried short bows and arrows, one
of them, who appeared to be the chief, having a lynx's skin for a
quiver. A few had fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that
they lived almost entirely upon grasshoppers. They were a
most impressive incongruity in the midst of the tokens of an
omnipotent civilization.

The light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the
Sierras, and as the dew fell, aromatic odors made the still air