MOSS' JOKE.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 96, 19 June 1877, Page 3

MOSS' JOKE.

HOW HE SHOWED AN INDIAN THE SIZE OF NEW YORK. ' t New York World, April 1. Captain John Moss has a wonderful history especially when he is permitted to relate it himself. Moss has lived alternately among the Indians and whites for over thirty years. He is not lawless, unless lying is lawless, and nobody ever accused him of lying with malic aforethought. He spins big yarns just for the fun of it. Most of Moss' time has been spent in prospecting for gold. Along" about 1862, just at the time when there was such a furor on the Pacific coast over the mineral discoveries in Arizona, he struck" "some greenhorns whom he induced to shell out £120,000 for a half interest in a mine which he had ►opened up on the Colorado river. When he had got the cash for his mine he ! started on an Eastern tour, taking along with him his friend and traveling companion Irataba, a chieftain of the Mojave tribe, who had great influence among his people. The Indian had never seen more than a few hundred white men together at a time, and his notions of Eastern civilization were very crude. Moss and his companion went from Lower California.: TO SAN FENCISCO i On a steamer, and when the city and I its shipping opened before. Irataba's vision he became unmanageable from amazement and excitement,, and attempted to jump overboard. When they boarded a train of care east of the Rockies, and the thing was getting down to thirty or forty miles an hour, the old chief tried to throw himself out of the window, and during the remainder of the first day of their journey by rail it took two men to prevent him from freaking his neck. He got used to railroad' travel, however, and liked it toward the last; but the more he saw of city life the greater his amazement grew. .Moss and his friend lived at the best New York hotels for a week, faring sumptuousiy, and when he got ready to visit Washington and Baltimore they took the train from Jersey City in the evening, engaging berths in a sleepingcar. During the night run, Whenever the train halted at a town. Moss made Irataba get up and look out at the gaslights. The object of this was to make the Indian think he was riding through New York. They arrived in Philadelpha before daybreak and remained there until night, when the journey was resumed to Baltimore, Moss still practicing his deception on the Indian by waking him up at every town to him that they were still riding under.

THE GAS LIGHT OF NEW YORK. ' The game was played upon the unsuspecting and bewildered aborigine until the trip ended in Washington. When they returned to the wilds of Arizona old Irataba feared to relate his experience, for he knew that his people would think he was lying, or that he had been bribed to deceive them. Finally he consented to tell his story, and on a certain .day the whole tribe assembled to hear it. When he described his journey by rail, and told about riding two whole nights under the gas lights of one city, the untraveled Mojaves denounced his narrative as a motstrous" stiff." and they nearly mobbed the old chief then and there. A council was held, and it was decided to banish Irataba from the tribe as a chronic old liar, and he was accordingly stripped of his Eastern made

clothes and abondoned on" an uninhabited island in the Colorado river, from which he was afterwards rescured by his old friends Moss. Last Fall Moss took up his residence in the San Juan country of Colorado. He lived in a country which is nearly as large as the State of Illinois hundred. Moss was elected to the Legislature, and after taking his seat and attending one or to days went off to San Francisco, were he has remained ever since, leaving his isolated constituents to take care of their own interests.