CHAPTER XLVIII.
THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE WEST.
Before going to Minnesota, I had the common Cooper idea of the dignity and glory of the noble red man of the forest; and was especially impressed by his unexampled faithfulness to those pale-faces who had ever been so fortunate as to eat salt with him. In planning my hermitage, I had pictured the most amicable relations with those unsophisticated children of nature, who should never want for salt while there was a spoonful in my barrel. I should win them to friendships as I had done railroad laborers, by caring for their sick children, and aiding their wives. Indeed, I think the Indians formed a large part of the attractions of my cabin by the lakes; and it required considerable time and experience to bring me to any true knowledge of the situation, which was, and is, this:
Between the Indian and white settler, rages the world-old, world-wide war of hereditary land-ownership against those who beg their brother man for leave to live and toil. William Penn disclaimed the right of conquest as a land title, while he himself held an English estate based on that title, and while every acre of land on the globe was held by it. He could not recognize that title in English hands, but did in the hands of Indians, and while pretending to purchase of them a conquest title, perpetrated one of the greatest swindles on record since that by which Jacob won the birthright of his starving brother.
This Penn swindle has been so carefully cloaked that it has become the basis of our whole Indian policy, the legitimate parent of a system never equalled on earth for crime committed with the best intentions. It intends to be especially just, by holding that the Creator made North America for the exclusive use of savages, and that civilization can only exist here by sufferance of the proprietors. This sufferance it tries to purchase by engaging to support these proprietors in absolute idleness, from the proceeds of the toil they license, even as kings and other landed aristocrats are supported by the labor of their subjects and tenants.
As the successors of the tent-maker of Tarsus have for thirteen centuries been found on the side of aristocrats in every contest with plebians, so the piety of the East, controlled by men who live without labor, was and is on the side of the royal red man, who has a most royal contempt for plows, hoes and all other degrading implements.
The same community of interests which arrayed the mass of the clergy on the side of Southern slaveholders, arrayed that same clergy on the side of the Western slave holder, and against the men who seek, with plows and hoes, to get a living out of the ground. Under this arrangement we have the spectacle of a Christian people arrayed in open hostility to those who plant Christian churches, schools and libraries on the lair of the wolf; and in alliance with the savage who coolly unjoints the feet and hands of little children, puts them in his hunting pouch as evidence of his valor, and leaves the victim to die at leisure; of those who thrust Christian babies into ovens, and deliberately roast them to death; of those who bind infants, two by two, by one wrist, and throw them across a fence to die; of those who collect little children in groups and lock them up in a room, to wail out their little lives; of those who commit outrages on innocent men and women who the pen must forever refuse to record. The apology with which piety converts the crimes of its pets into virtues, is that its own agents have failed to carry out its own contract with its own friends.
The men and women who take their lives in their hands to lead the westward march of civilization, are held as foes by the main body of the army, who conspire with the enemy, and hand them over as scapegoats whose tortures and death are to appease divine wrath for the crimes which this same main body say it has itself committed against Indians.
No one pretends that Western settlers have injured Indians, but Eastern philanthropists, through the government they control, have, according to their own showing, been guilty of no end of frauds; and as they do not, and cannot, stop the stealing, they pay their debts to the noble red man by licensing him to outrage women, torture infants and burn homes. When gold is scarce in the East, they substitute scalps and furnish Indians with scalping-knives by the thousand, that they may collect their dues at their own convenience.
This may seem to-day a bitter partisan accusation, but it must be the calm verdict of history when this comes to be written by impartial pens.
Under the pretense that America belonged, in fee simple, and by special divine right, to that particular hoard of savages, who, by killing off some other hoard of savages, were in possession when Columbus first saw the Great West, the Eastern States, which had already secured their land by conquest, have become more implacable foes to civilization than the savages themselves.
The Quaker would form no alliance with Southern slave-holders. He recoiled from the sale of women and children in South Carolina, but covered with his gray mantle of charity the slave trade in Minnesota. When a settler refused to exchange his wife or daughter with an Indian for a pony, and that Indian massacred the whole family to repair his wrongs, his Quaker lawyer justified the act on the score of extreme provocation, and won triumphal acquittal from the jury of the world.
When the Sioux, after the Bull Run disaster, arose as the allies of the South, and butchered one thousand men, women and children in Minnesota, the Quakers and other good people flew to arms in their defense, and carried public sentiment in their favor. The agents of the Eastern people had delayed the payment of annuity three weeks, and then insulted Mr. Lo by tendering him one-half his money in government bonds, and for this great wrong the peaceable Quaker, the humanitarian Unitarian, the orthodox Congregationalist and Presbyterian, the enthusiastic Methodist and staid Baptist, felt it but right Mr. Lo should have his revenge.
Most Eastern Christians are opposed to polygamy in Utah, and Fourierism in France, but in Minnesota among Indians these institutions are sacred. They demanded that England should by law prohibit widow-burning and other heathen customs in India, but nothing so rude as statutes must interfere with the royal privileges of these Western landlords. If by gentle means Mr. Lo can be persuaded to stop taking all the wives he can get, extorting their labor by the cudgel, and selling them and their children at will, all well and good! Millions are expended on the persuading business, and prayer poured out like the rains in Noah's flood, without any perceptible effect; but still they keep on paying and praying, and carefully abstain from all means at all likely to accomplish the desired result. All the property of every tribe must be held in common, so that there can possibly be no incentive to industry and economy; but if the Indian refuse to be civilized on that plan, he must go on taking scalps and being excused, until extermination solve the problem.
Long before I saw an Indian on his native soil, the U.S. Government had spent millions in carrying out this Penn policy. For long years, Indians had sat like crows, watching the white farmers and artisans sent to teach them industry, and had grunted their honest contempt. They watched the potato planting, that they might pick out the seed for present use. They pulled down fences, and turned their ponies into the growing crops, used the rails for fire wood, burned mills and houses built for them, rolled barrels of flour up steep acclivities, started them down and shouted to see them leap and the flour spurt through the staves; knocked the heads out of other barrels, and let the ponies eat the flour; poured bags of corn on the ground when they wanted the bag, and in every way showed their contempt for the government, whose policy they believed to be the result of cowardice. Thousands of dollars' worth of agricultural machinery lay "rotting in the sun" while the noble red aristocrat played poker in the shade; his original contempt for labor intensified by his power to extract a living from laborers, through their fear of his scalping knife.
Hole-in-the-day, the Chippewa chief, had been educated by Baptist missionaries, and was a good English scholar, but would not condescend to speak to the government except through an interpreter. For him six hundred acres of land had been fenced, and a large frame cottage built and painted white. In this he lived with six wives, and a United States salary of two thousand a year and his traveling expenses. He dressed like a white man, dined with State officers in St. Paul, went to church with a lady on his arm, sat in a front pew, and was a highly distinguished gentleman of the scalping school.