In the Land of the Grasshopper Song
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by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed
Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908 - 1909...
In 1908 two young women - the authors of this book - accepted Indian Service appointments as field matrons for the Karok Indians in the Klamath and Salmon River country of northern California. Although the area had been the scene of a gold rush some fifty years earlier, they write in he foreword, “the social life of the Indians - what he believed and the way he felt about things - was very little affected by white influence. The older Indians still had the spaced tattoo marks on their forearms, by which they could measure the length of the string of wampum required to buy a wife...The white men we knew on the Rivers were pioneers of the Old West...All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and six-shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages in not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier of an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not engaged in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also the account of our own two years in Indian country, where, in the sixty-mile stretch between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody.”
Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, who had met as children, were an adventurous and devoted twosome for nearly seventy years. Most of their papers from which this work was drawn are located at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908 - 1909...
In 1908 two young women - the authors of this book - accepted Indian Service appointments as field matrons for the Karok Indians in the Klamath and Salmon River country of northern California. Although the area had been the scene of a gold rush some fifty years earlier, they write in he foreword, “the social life of the Indians - what he believed and the way he felt about things - was very little affected by white influence. The older Indians still had the spaced tattoo marks on their forearms, by which they could measure the length of the string of wampum required to buy a wife...The white men we knew on the Rivers were pioneers of the Old West...All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and six-shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages in not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier of an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not engaged in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also the account of our own two years in Indian country, where, in the sixty-mile stretch between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody.”
Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, who had met as children, were an adventurous and devoted twosome for nearly seventy years. Most of their papers from which this work was drawn are located at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
