pp. 256 - 57,
When the Modoc has led his last warrior to battle up yonder in his rocky fortress, fired his last shot, and the grass is growing in the last war-path of those people, then, and not till then, I may go up where the solemn trees with their dead branches stand around, making faces at something in the centre, pitch a tent there, and go down in the cañon with men, and picks and shovels, and bars of steel and iron.
At the same time, I am trying to bring myself up to the conviction of the truth, that a great deal of gold is rather to be avoided than sought after. Every day I look around, and see how many thousands there are who have gold and nothing else; I see the sin there is in it and the getting of it. The ten thousand temptations it brings a man, tied up in the bags along with it, and let out when it is let out, inseparable from it. I see that it is sinking my country, morally, every day; and yet with this steady drift of all things toward the one goal, this sailing of every ship in life for the one Golden Gate, barren as it is, forgetting the green isles of palm and the warm winds there; I say, with all this, it is hard to stand up tall and despise it.
Save money for the children? Bosh! Are you afraid to put them down on the track of life, to take a fair and even start with the rest? Do you want to start them ahead of nine-tenths of those who have to run the race of life? Do you think they have not the brains or backbone enough to make their way with the rest? How many of all the millions can start with a fortune?
No. Put them out on the track, well trained and strong, and let them run the race fairly and squarely with the humblest there, and if they win they win like men. Must have money to appear well! Fiddle-sticks! To buy a new coat and furniture, so as to receive your friends. My dear sir, friends never yet came to see a man's new coat or his nice house; never! If your friends want to see new coats, they can go to the clothing stores and see a thousand every day for nothing.
No, we do not hoard up money altogether for the children, or for friends to look upon, but we heap it up because we are selfish cowards! Because we have not nerve enough to stand on our own merit, or having so little merit and so much money, we prefer to trust the latter for a place in the eyes of the world. And then there is the low, contemptible fear that we will come to want, and so toil and toil and build a barricade of gold about us, and die at last in fear, pinched to death between twenty-dollar pieces, that the starved and hungry soul has crept between, with the last bit of young strong manhood that we were born with crushed utterly out of us.
From the introduction to the 1972 Orion Press edition, by A. H. Rosenus
We are reminded by Miller's book that the men who lived in the woods were in the presence of a deity, and that the continent in its natural state once completely satisfied the red man. But to the white settlers -- even before they staked their claims -- it symbolized an agreement with evil: we will do no more evil after we have taken the land for ourselves, that will end our questing and murdering and our religious fanaticism for good. But they were subject to a tradition of change and watched while a succession of inventions inevitably replaced them and their equipment with better possessors. The victors never enjoyed the satisfaction known to the Indian.