William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

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Chapter 18: bucks and squaws.

More than the White women gain, their Red sisters lose by this unnatural disparity of the male and female sexes. In the Indian lodges, there are more females than males, and in these lodges the females are bought and sold like cows and slaves.

Rounding Cape Horn and passing the summit near Truckee, three or four miles from Donner Lake, the scene of a wild winter legend, we dip into the valley of Humboldt River, a valley rising higher than the top of Snowdon; and are now among the savage mountain tribes-Utes and Shoshones-horse Indians, they are called, in contrast with the tamer savages of the Pacific Slope.

At Winnemucca, called after a stout Pah-Ute war chief, we observe an Indian of another branch of the Ute family, wrapped in a thick blanket, leaning