the afternoon's search and discoveries, and call for a vase, tall, shapely, graceful, and unobtrusive, that leaf, bud, and blossom may be arranged by deft and tuneful fingers. April in California may be named by many names and painted in many pictures. Through the southern counties, and in fertile, sheltered vales of the central and northern All this, however, is only a might-be rem- portions of our State, it is Nature's fairest iniscence-a possible imagination of Cali- holiday and cheeriest season. The May fornia Januaries long past and nearly and June of the Atlantic States mingle their forgotten; for two whole months have made varied charms, and brew the secret of their bloom, rapture, and mirth in dell and forest spells in one delicious cup. Yet through since. So, because we have fallen on other this month such rivers as the Merced, Maritimes, let us consider the full meaning of posa, Calaveras, and Chowchilla flow along happy April in this our realm. In January, the borders of the lowlands, full to the brim though the long slopes under foot are sweet with melted snow from the cloudy walls of and elastic with tufted grass, yet there is too the east, the realm of primeval rocks above much cold and chilly damp to warrant any the region of pines, where only the scarlet successful picnicking and rambling, gossipy snow-plant blooms, and that, not until July. explorations. If you wish for blossoms, The orchardist on these lowland ranches you go out in adventurous mood: you return may stand in the midst of his pink-blossomed muddy-booted and moist. But April is apple-trees and watch the mountain rivers. quite another affair, and holds a sweeter fas- hurrying past his farm, wild torrents in the cination. If you know the right sort of peo-afternoon, but easy to cross at day-break. ple, and they are duly gracious, and if the California Aprils are crowded with such confates are kind—this being supposed to mean trasts. Farmers are sowing wheat and plantthe folks who put up lunches for the partying potatoes on moist lands. Not twenty you may, perhaps, find so much healthy happiness in a day under the redwoods or on the hills as to wish that life might flow on thus forever. April, in English poetry, is the changeful, coquettish month of earliest blossoms; but in California, it is the first sweet flush of roses, the farewell smile of lilacs and spireas. By this time the gates of the garden world are flung wide open. It is the season for wandering on the grass-green slopes, purple with dodecatheons, brown and golden with nodding violets, snow-white with earliest gillias, blue with the heavenly azure of the mountain children's pet nemophilas. It is the season for reawakening botanical ardors, and the commencement of many amateur collections of flowers, ferns, butterflies, and outdoor curiosities, whose gathering leads one into the fields and ravines, breaks the chains of habits and the bonds of dull routine, brings back the merry dreams of childhood, and gives to tired ones the sunlight's royal chrism, the day-break's virgin glow, and tints of opal, beryl, and amethyst, seen at sunset along the slopes of Tamalpais. miles distant are fields where the emerald barley heads are bursting their delicate sheaths, and spring-time birds have already built in the fragrant maples. In the northern coast region many roads are still muddy and hard to travel. Towards the south they were dusty long ago. Along the warmer belts of the foothills the charm of wild flowers is now at its prime. Higher up the ridges new grass blades begin to pierce the earth, and scarlet oak leaves unfold, and it is an Eastern April, that the modest mountain children, going by with their school books, can tell you about. And April days in California have other and not so pleasing aspects. To some of our rural friends they are apt to bring regrets, and even sorrow. Now is the time when the lazy man, who has planted no garden, and has neglected his peas without excuse, and has failed to sow his peppers and serenely tend his doubtfully fragrant tomatoes, begins to feel the stings of conscience and the premonitory pangs of retribution. It serves him right. Plenty of people warned him, months ago, that April OF TRY NIV was coming, and pea blossoms would swell to the pleasures and absurdities of April into fair, round pods, turnips wax large, beet picnicking, with a chosen few, on the slopes leaves grow purple, and the whole garden of San Mateo, Alameda, or Marin, each of become a dividend-paying institution. Un- these districts affording many delightful happy, gardenless, dilatory, and somewhat nooks from which to choose, and easy ways envious householder, go out and take note of reaching them. What if you chance to of these omissions. Make horticultural go where the signs of revel and former resolutions of scope and dignity for another lunches are found: a little further, and you season, buy your vegetables, haggle with the shall find untrampled grass and unroiled basket-laden Chinaman. Write your neigh-brooks, and silence that at your peril you bor down as wise in his generation, and break except with innocent mirth and right take what comfort you may from lawn and royal jubilance. Picnics are no places for flower garden. If therein are roses white, gossip nor petulance. Large-hearted symcreamy, pink, crimson, scarlet, in nameless pathies and placid unselfishness should reign combinations, all your vegetarian peccadil- supreme. For one day we are to live as loes are no more remembered. Willful, poetry would have us believe all humanity playful, happy-hearted April smiles, chides, did in Arcadian ages; before we start on our and forgives. But if you, sir, have a roof merry jaunt we are to steep ourselves in the to shelter you, a margin of land about it, a very spirit of the pastorals, gathering into pair of hands, and any daylight or moonlight our deepest natures the lovely sunshine and at your disposal, and yet cultivate no flow- unaffected melody of the Elizabethan outers; no sweet-brier by the door of your door verse. If one might in such mood cottage to give fragrant sprays for your approach these too brief hours of commubutton-hole, that all men many envy you with genial, generous envy; no passion vine to clamber up lattice and porch till its royal purples say good morning at your bedroom window, when the east begins to glow with rosy dawn; no loving forget-me-nots growing under leaves of lilies, freighted with sweetest meaning for lovers, and immemorial grace for friendsthen, indeed, you have no part in this royal April, and in none of your moods discover her guarded secrets. You build here in our beautiful blossom-land, but you are a stranger, and of alien spirit; you miss that fine charm which is not in food, nor raiment, nor glittering equipages; nion with the world of spring-time, they would assuredly prove of almost ideal beauty; therein, in those brimful moments of the luminous day, in the heart of sunny April, the glorious pulse of Lowell's gleaming lines would be distilled, as when for instance, he says: "The flush of life may well be seen Thrilling back over hills and valleys; The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice; "Now is the high-tide of the year, And whatever of life hath ebbed away Into every bare inlet and creek and bay: This was written for New England's June, the shadows lengthen, and the zest has gone from your life. Ah! if you could but learn a wiser lesson, and make, as it were, a lyric-like poem of a garden about your home, to fold it in, as the glorious Easter lilies border the sacred but fits marvelously the ways of California texts on the pages of ancient missals, Aprils, when balm and spice of redwood whose richly illuminated leaves are the re-boughs begin their wooing, and maple buds sults of painstaking labor and beautiful open, and the first columbine nods its codevotion. Yet even the gardenless man might well forget his misery if he could yield himself quettish blossoms in gay defiance. Ah! pluck them not; bring all your merry group of youths and maidens about the woodland shrine, in the sloping glade, to admire the saucy scarlet clusters, but let the moonlight fairies have their summoning trumpet still. May be, too, if you take some unfrequented path of winding and sweetly inconsequential caprices you will find stems of fritillaria, with their freckled green and gold. But through all this woodland search kindly human sympathies should run. Who would sit lonely, on the top of a wind-blown, wide-armed oak, even in leaf-month April, though a wilderness of blackbirds throbbed jubilance from the hazel bushes on the brow of the hill, and though the sky was clear azure, the waters of the bay sapphire and amethyst? But suppose that in such a tree a dozen of the smiling picnickers should climb, to carve names and plan for future expeditions, to look down on valleys and farms, to fling back snatches of song at the swinging black birds, and so to pass happy moments in CHARLES H. SHINN. AN INTERNATIONAL TREATY. In the western part of the great Indian | desert plains extend to the base of the Rocky Territory there is a low mountain range, Mountains. The bones of the strange birds known at its southern extremity as the Wichita and monsters of an ancient ultra-tropical type Mountains, and in its northern portion as the are often dug out of these deserts. This Red Hills. This range is composed of vast, heart of the American continent had once the square-shouldered buttes of crumbling red gross, fervid life of the upper Nile and Zamclay, interstratified with thin seams of gyp- beze. What strange atrophy, what wasting sum and sandstone. Through this decay- marasmus, has smitten and withered it? ing wall flow the Salt Fork, Cimarron, and In the winter of 1872-73 this landscape Canadian-mere spectral ghosts of dead was not so lifeless as it is to-day. The last rivers each being but a channel, floored of the great southern herds of buffalo was that with drifts of white sand, through which winter slaughtered by the Indians on the scanty rivulets of brackish water are winding. margin of these salt plains. In the sheltered A few half-dead trees fringe the banks. valley of a little stream called Kaheka HuHigher up in the cañons thickets of elm and ela, or Eagle Chief, three Indian camps were red cedar still linger. At the eastern base clustered together. There was a little band of the range lie the Great Salt Plains, every- of Lipans from the west side of the Rio where traversed by trickling rills of brine, or Grande, and a larger group of Apaches from frosted by saline crystals. In some places New Mexico. Strangely contrasting with the there are solid strata of rock-salt, looking dainty little conical tents of these human like white marble. Vegetation hardly exists panthers, stood the shapeless lodges of the here; the earth seems dead and leprous. large encampment of the Black Dog band of On the western side of the range the dry, | Osages. These giant dandies from beyond VOL. V-24. the Arkansas had made a temporary truce | course; our food was gone, and no fire was with the long-haired Bedouins of the south- possible. Staggering on in desperate fashion, west, and all were amicably hunting, smok- we at last found ourselves upon the Great ing, and dressing their buffalo robes together. Salt Plain. The sun was hidden, and all In a sort of neutral ground between the three sense of direction had been lost through the groups was a large, rude tent of skins, which shiftings of the cyclone. At last our exI was occupying for the winter. Not a soul hausted beasts would advance not another that spoke English could be found within a step. "You may as well stop here,” said day's journey, but I had learned somewhat View-the-Land, in his Osage language; "we of the ways of the wild men, and felt safe, shall all die to-night." even in my loneliness. My tent was full of furs and Indian goods, but there was around me an armor of mutual confidence and goodfellowship which cast out fear. On the 24th of January my eyes were gladdened by the sight of a white face. Two wagons, loaded with merchandise and escorted by an Osage guide, came into my camp with intelligence which made it necessary for me to put my business in the charge of my old friend Shontah Sahpay, the Black Dog, for a few days, and take a journey to the camp of the Big Hill band on the Salt Fork, some fifty miles to the northward. We started on the 25th. It was a clear, sunshiny day, but a recent snow-fall lay in little patches. We drove all day toward the north, across the gently undulating plains, and lay down at last under a brilliant starlight. My Osage guide, whose name was "Mozhun-Tumpe," or "View-the-Land," seemed restless and ill at ease, but I saw no cause for anxiety. However, a little after midnight he wakened me hastily. A faint mist was stealing across the stars from the north-west. With much excitement, he told us to start at once, as a storm was coming. Our little train was speedily in motion, but the sky was soon shrouded, and we could not follow the trail. View-the-Land told us to drive straight into the wind, and we aimed to follow his direction; but the darkness interfered, and we were soon compelled to pause and wait for daylight. By the time that a dim, gray dawn began to reveal the outlines of the plains, a furious Arctic norther was sweeping over them, filling our path with snow. We attempted to face the storm, but the cold grew more intense, and the hurricane more irresistible. We soon lost the We fastened our mules to the leeward side of our wagons, wrapped them in all of our blankets, crept into the furs inside, and fought for life till another day dawned. It was a night of hopelessness; of intense darkness, blinding snow, and raving wind; of bitter, deadly cold, slowly drawing nearer to the centers of life. Only one picture was before my mind that night; the vision of a little cottage hundreds of miles across the north-eastern plains, of curly baby heads in unconscious slumber, of a wife looking out anxiously upon the midnight tempest. Once again the day dawned. We were starving and freezing, and the snow was deeply drifted over the plains, but we made one more struggle for life. By ten o'clock the air had cleared, but the north wind, as we breathed it, pierced us like stinging needles. But away to the north-west we saw crest of leafless trees above the horizon, and knew that human help was only fifteen miles distant. That day several hunters perished upon the plains not far to the northward; but somehow we won the fight. At four that afternoon we drove into the Osage camp, which was the goal of our journey, sheltered in thickets of dwarf elm and cotton-wood, and hospitable with roaring fires and soup-kettles. I bade good by to boots, and limped for months upon sloughing and clouted feet, but was happy, nevertheless. I found the camp crowded by a strange company. The Pawnees have always been known to be the most adroit horse-thieves of the plains, and the southern tribes had a custom of always shooting a Pawnee on sight; but on this occasion the biter had been bitten, and the Pawnee thieves robbed. While hunting on the plains of western nevertheless. An Osage interpreter repeated Kansas, they had been assailed by a party it in equally doubtful Pawnee, and all the of Cheyennes, and all their horses had been assembled diplomats pronounced it good. stampeded and driven away. They lost Each in turn laid his finger upon the tip of some fifteen hundred at one blow; and now the pen while I wrote his name as nearly as their delegates were come to make a treaty, the Roman letters would express the Indian and endeavor, by diplomacy, to recover the gutturals. The names, translated, would stolen property. Some forty-five of their have formed a grisly menagerie of bears, chiefs and young warriors were in the party. dogs, wolves, and buffaloes. The afternoon They had walked all the way from their was spent in singing and feasting, and the Nebraska reservation, and had reached the following morning the Panwees started with Osage camp on the preceding day. After the dawn toward the camps of the tribes to much talk, the preliminaries of a treaty the southward. were agreed upon. That day Leotasa died. She was the wife of my particular Indian "guide, philosopher, and friend,” Ah Humkemi, the sentinel. She had been educated at the Mission, and was always sweet-voiced, refined, and gentle. I cannot well recite the particulars of her death; she was murdered by the malpractice of two horrible hags who professed to act as her nurses and physicians. A dead babe, newly Being the only white man within a great distance, I was called in to frame the wonderful instrument. I was naturally somewhat embarrassed; my recollections of Vattel were rather misty, and I doubted if even that renowned essayist upon international law had prepared a form exactly suited to my needs. However, I forgot my frozen feet for a while, and produced an Interna- born, was laid on the breast of the dead tional Treaty: certainly my first, and probably my last. Its tenor was as follows: Know all men by these presents, that we, the chiefs and counselors of the Osage and Pawnee nations, in joint convention assembled, do hereby, in behalf of our respective nations, make, confirm, and ratify forever the following Treaty of Peace: "We acknowledge that at various times we have committed many depredations and crimes against each other; and we hereby pledge our mutual forgiveness of all that we have suffered in the past. "Furthermore, we agree to refrain from all such acts in the future, to seek each other's peace and happiness in all things, and to live henceforth as loving brothers, in good-will and harmony. "It is hereby ordered that two copies of this Treaty be prepared, to be deposited in the archives of the Osage and Pawnee nations, for the perpetual guidance of ourselves and our children. "In token whereof, and in order that our respective nations may be fully bound by our action, we have set hereto our hands and seals on this twentyseventh day of January, in the year of our Lord 1873, at this camp of the Big Hill Osages, by the Salt Plains." This, for a first effort, seemed to me eminently satisfactory. I took it into the council, and translated it into what I fear was rather bad Osage, but quite intelligible, mother. This domestic tragedy was the pivot upon which a darker tragedy turned. It was the strange and terrible yet immemorial custom of this tribe always to send out a war party one month after each funeral -a band of lurking Thugs, who went forth to murder some wayfarer, either a white man or a member of another tribe, in order that the dead might be duly honored by a fresh scalp hanging over the grave. This custom is not without its parallels in the records of the Heroic Age; but the scalp of some lonely and unknown pioneer of the border seems an ignoble and murderous offering, compared with a Hector, sacrified in order that the shade of Patroclus might sleep. The motive in the two cases is not dissimilar. The Indian ghost haunts the living unless the dead is duly honored. When the Pawnees started southward that morning they told the Osages that one of their own number had been left behind hunting; that he had strayed from the main body, was doubtless camped in some sheltered place, and would follow their trail into camp. as soon as the tempest abated. They asked that he be kindly treated, and sent on to |