The only thing white about him was his name.  He was a Piute Indian, and Piutes are neither white nor pretty.  There is only one being in human shape uglier than a Piute “buck”—­and that is a Piute squaw.  One I saw at the Sink of the Humboldt haunts me yet.  Her hideous face, begrimed with dirt and smeared with yellow paint, bleared and leering eyes, and horrid long, flapping breasts—­ugh! it was a sight to make one feel sick.  A degraded woman is the saddest spectacle on earth.  Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he made the witches in Macbeth of the feminine gender.  But as you look at them you almost forget that these Piute hags are women—­they seem a cross between brute and devil.  The unity of the human race is a fact which I accept; but some of our brothers and sisters are far gone from original loveliness.  If Eve could see these Piute women, she would not be in a hurry to claim them as her daughters; and Adam would feel like disowning some of his sons.  As it appears to me, however, these repulsive savages furnish an argument in support of two fundamental facts of Christianity.  One fact is, God did indeed make of one blood all the nations of the earth; the other is the fact of the fall and depravity of the human race.  This unspeakable ugliness of these Indians is owing to their evil living.  Dirty as they are, the little Indian children are not at all repulsive in expression.  A boy of ten years, who stood half-naked, shivering in the wind, with his bow and arrows, had well-shaped features and a pleasant expression of countenance, with just a little of the look of animal cunning that belongs to all wild tribes.  The ugliness grows on these Indians fearfully fast when it sets in.  The brutalities of the lives they lead stamp themselves on their faces; and no other animal on earth equals in ugliness the animal called man, when he is nothing but an animal.

There was a mystery about Jack White’s early life.  He was born in the sagebrush desert beyond the Sierras, and, like all Indian babies, doubtless had a hard time at the outset.  A Christian’s pig or puppy is as well cared for as a Piute papoose.  Jack was found in a deserted Indian camp in the mountains.  He had been left to die, and was taken charge of by the kind hearted John M. White, who was then digging for gold in the Northern mines.  He and his good Christian wife had mercy on the little Indian boy that looked up at them so pitifully with his wondering black eyes.  At first he had the frightened and bewildered look of a captured wild creature, but he soon began to be more at ease.  He acquired the English language slowly, and never did lose the peculiar accent of his tribe.  The miners called him Jack White, not knowing any other name for him.