The Indian To-day: The Past and Future of the First American

The American Books are designed as a series of authoritative manuals, discussing problems of interest in America to-day.
( For more extended notice of the series, see the last pages of this book. )
Copyright, 1915, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
The author of this book was born in a teepee of buffalo hide near Redwood Falls, Minn., during the winter of 1858. His father was a full-blooded Sioux called Many Lightnings, (Tawakanhdeota). His mother, the granddaughter of Chief Cloud Man of the Sioux and daughter of a well-known army officer, died shortly after his birth. He was named Ohiyesa (The Winner).
The baby was reared to boyhood by the care of his grandmother. When he was four years old, the so-called Minnesota massacre of 1862 separated him from his father and elder brothers and only sister, and drove him with a remnant of the eastern Sioux into exile in Manitoba. There for over ten years he lived the original nomadic life of his people in the family of an uncle, from whom he received the Spartan training of an Indian youth of that day. The knowledge thus gained of life's realities and the secrets of nature, as well as of the idealistic philosophy of the Indian, he has always regarded as a most valuable part of his education.
When Ohiyesa had reached the age of fifteen years, and had been presented with a flint-lock musket in token of his arrival at the estate of young manhood, he was astonished by the reappearance of the father whose supposed death at the hands of white men he had been taught that he must some day avenge. He learned that this father had adopted the religion and customs of the hated race, and was come to take home his youngest son.
Ohiyesa's new home was a pioneer log cabin on a farm at Flandreau, Dakota Territory, where a small group of progressive Indians had taken up homesteads like white men and were earning an independent livelihood. His long hair was cropped, he was put into a suit of citizen's clothing and sent off to a mission day school. At first reluctant, he soon became interested, and two years later voluntarily walked 150 miles to attend a larger and better school at Santee, Neb., where he made rapid progress under the veteran missionary educator, Dr. Alfred L. Riggs, and was soon advanced to the preparatory department of Beloit College, Wisconsin. His father had adopted his wife's English name of Eastman, and the boy named himself Charles Alexander.