A head level with the mule
Joseph Christmas Ives measured Cairook against the animal he was sitting on. Irataba, spelled three ways in the government reports, is the guide who later went east.
By C. V. Wooster · October 6, 2026 · A history essay. The novel is a separate thing, and this page says so where the two meet.
On the morning the land party left the river, Cairook came to say goodbye. Ives was on a mule. He wrote that he had never been so struck by the man's appearance. When they shook hands, Cairook's head was almost level with his. Cairook wished the trip well, then stood and watched the train until it was out of sight, waving. Ives's sentence is the one people quote: he had proved himself a staunch friend. The measuring is more useful than the adjective. Ives is telling you a height by putting it next to a mounted officer. He is also telling you that the friendship, in his mind, had been proved by guiding, not by a treaty.
Four years earlier the same two men had taken Whipple west. In the preliminary report printed with the Pacific Railroad surveys, Whipple says that as the party approached the villages, five principal chiefs, each with his band, met them in state. Told the object of the visit, they were pleased, met in council, and determined to help the survey. They sent two guides, whose names he prints "Ir-i-te-ba" and "Cai-rook," to the intersection of the Salt Lake road with the Mojave River. Bean and Vane, citing Sherer, date the meeting February 23, 1854, about eleven or twelve miles up the valley from where the expedition struck the river, and the departure from Mojave country March 2. Their reading of the council, drawn from Sherer, is more specific than Whipple's extract: the chiefs approved a road for travel and trade, decided to show a trail to the ocean where there was water and grass, and chose a high-ranking Mojave to guide the party. Whipple's own sentences give you the five chiefs and the two names. Sherer's reconstruction, through the overview, gives you the three decisions. Use them as a pair, not as one document.
A name Ives could not get recognized
Ives came up the river in the winter of 1858 already looking for both men. He had Whipple's report. At the head of the Mojave Valley he wrote that one of the five chiefs, Cairook, and a sub-chief called Ireteba had gone with Whipple as far as the Mormon road to Los Angeles, that they had been "noble specimens of their race," and that he hoped to meet them again. Cairook, he was told, still lived and still held authority. "The name of Ireteba the Indians do not recognize, and it is probable that some mistake was made about his appellation."
That sentence is easy to skip, because the rest of the book is full of Ireteba. It matters. Ives did not walk into the valley already certain of the second name. He thought Whipple might have misheard it. Later chapters show him traveling with the man. The recognition came on the river, not in Washington. Spellings in the two reports are Ir-i-te-ba, Ireteba, and, in Bean and Vane's Mojave citations, Aratêve. This site also uses Irataba and Yara tav. They are one person in the scholarship. They are not one spelling in the sources, and an essay that silently picks a single form hides the trail.
Cairook's arrival in Ives's camp is a small scene with a political point. A crowd on the opposite bank marked him. A messenger swam over and asked for a boat. The skiff was under repair and there was no steam, so Ives said Cairook would have to furnish his own crossing. Ives writes that the river was deep and that it was inconsistent with Cairook's dignity to enter camp dripping. After delay, a raft was provided. The custom Ives records in the same stretch of the narrative is bleaker than the raft. When Cairook and Ireteba had left Whipple they were loaded with presents. Mojave custom, Ives says, was to burn property when a relation died, "to whose memory they wish to pay especial honor, so that wealth is held by as uncertain a tenure as life." He is explaining why the gifts had not made the two men rich. He is also recording a practice. He is not recording a price list.
What Ives thought of the people who fed him
The valley chapters are generous about food and ugly about character, and both tones are his. At every stop the Mojave brought beans and corn to trade. Wheat was scarce. A little flour mixed with corn meal made, he says, excellent bread. He put Cairook and Cairook's wife on the upper deck for two days, a privilege he says he gave no other Indians, and he then spends a paragraph on the wife's pride that is pure ship's gossip. He also writes, in a string, that the Mojave are lazy, cruel, selfish, disgusting in their habits, and inveterate beggars, and that even Cairook begs, though usually for other people. Ireteba, he says, is the only one he never knew to beg. Those adjectives are Ives's judgment, offered to the War Department in 1861. They are not a description this site adopts. They sit next to his own record that the same people fulfilled agreements exactly, traded him the food that replaced his rations, and guided him off the river. A reader who wants the "staunch friend" sentence has to keep the insult paragraph. He wrote both.
He also writes that the Mojave had lost one of their five chiefs and many of their best warriors the previous September, allied with the Yuma against the Pima and Maricopa. The footnote that tells that battle misprints a year in the digital text. The battle paragraph itself says September 1857. Do not carry the garbled year forward. Ives's count of the war party is between one hundred and one hundred and fifty, of whom only three or four escaped. That is his footnote, not a Mojave muster roll.
The trip east, and a year of death nobody agrees on
Ives's farewell is not the end of Irataba in the American record. Dickinson College's House Divided project, citing Harper's Weekly for February 13, 1864, page 109, states that a party of California Native leaders led by Irataba left San Francisco, met President Lincoln, who presented him with a silver-headed cane, and also visited New York and Philadelphia. Dickinson dates the departure January 24, 1864, and calls the date exact. The Harper's page was not opened for this essay, so the cane and the White House meeting rest on that citation, plus this site's short history, which states the meeting as fact. A tribal newsletter has said the same. What can be said without stretching is that contemporary press and later historical accounts, including the short history on this site, place Irataba in the East in the winter of 1864 and place a meeting with Lincoln on that trip. Details that float around the story in retellings, a uniform, a conversation with Olive Oatman, a particular railroad car, are not in the pages opened here. They stay out.
The year he died is a split, and it should stay a split. Bean and Vane, citing Smith (1977), say Aratêve died in 1874, and they treat that death as compounding the trouble of the people who had gone down to the Colorado River reservation. Dickinson, citing Rickey, says he died in 1878, no longer a chief. This essay does not pick. A novelist may have to. A history page does not.
The kinship the novel adds
The novel makes Irataba Cairook's brother. The records opened here do not. Ives calls Ireteba Cairook's faithful follower and says Cairook detailed him, with two other Mojave, to guide the land party. Whipple lists them as two guides. Sherer's hostage list, via Bean and Vane, makes Cairook the chief who gave himself up, and the other hostages sons, brothers, and nephews of chiefs, without placing Irataba in that kin list. "Brother" is a relation the book needs. It is not a relation these documents establish. The Author's Note is where the novel says so. This page says it again because the two names are so often paired that a reader can start to hear a family the sources never quite draw.
Sources
These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.
- A. W. Whipple, extracts from the preliminary report, Pacific Railroad Surveys, vol. 3, read from the Internet Archive text of Reports of Explorations and Surveys, vol. 3. The passage on the five chiefs and the guides "Ir-i-te-ba" and "Cai-rook" is in the preliminary-report extract.
- Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1861), especially the Mojave Valley chapters and the footnote on Cairook's death. Read from the Internet Archive text of reportuponcolor00ivesgoog.
- Bean and Vane (2002), Mojave chapter, citing Sherer, Bitterness Road (1994), pp. 54 and 95-96, for the 1854 council and for Cairook giving himself up. NPS history copy.
- Dickinson College, House Divided, record for January 24, 1864, citing "Indian Chieftains From the Far West," Harper's Weekly, February 13, 1864, p. 109, and Donald B. Rickey, ed., Indians of Arizona: Past and Present (Somerset, 1999), pp. 100-101. House Divided. The Harper's page itself was not opened for this essay. Bean and Vane, citing Smith (1977), give Irataba's death as 1874. Dickinson, citing Rickey, gives 1878.