I have camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast.

I would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.
"But I am growing unreliable." With all due deference to the wisdom--as well as the humor--of Mark Twain as applied to Lake Tahoe, I emphatically disagree with him as to the Indians of the Tahoe region, and also as to the name of the Lake.
Tahoe is quite as good-sounding a name as Como, Lucerne, Katrine or Lomond.

A name, so long as it is euphonious, is pleasing or not, more because of its associations than anything else.

The genuine Indian, as he was prior to the coming of the white man, was uncorrupted, uncivilized, unvitiated, undemoralized, undiseased in body, mind and soul, a nature-observer, nature-lover and nature-worshiper.

He was full of poetic conceptions and fired with a vivid imagination that created stories to account for the existence of unusual, peculiar or exceptional natural objects, that, in brilliancy of conception, daring invention, striking ingenuity and vigor of detail _surpass_, or at least equal, the best imaginative work of Kipling or _Mark Twain himself_.