S’KOKOMISH RESERVATION.
REV. G. H. ATKINSON, D. D., PORTLAND, OREGON,
Superintendent A. H. M. S., for Oregon and Washington Territories.
The best way to study the Indian problem is to study the Indians themselves. The agents and employees on the reservations have all the means to test every element of this question.
Safety of Life and Property.
The agent, Edwin Eells, Esq., with wife and children, has lived among the Indians here seven years. The employees and their families have lived here from one to six years each, all without harm or fear. At any moment the Indians could have killed them, stolen their property, burnt the dwellings, and fled to the rugged hills and mountains. The agent has traversed the country occupied by his bands, alone, or with Indians, by day and by night, without injury or alarm, leaving his wife and little ones at their mercy. Whisky is excluded from the reservation, but outsiders have sold it to the Indians, and exposed him and his household and company to danger from them, when excited by it, and the more when arresting them and arraigning and convicting the sellers in the courts. But in no case has he or one of the whites received a blow, or a stab, or a shot, or a threat from an Indian during all these seven years.
Like facts can be put on record of the safety of agents and employees, and their families, on most, if not all the reservations in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
Their property has also been safe. Agent Eells affirms that clothes are left out day and night, tools are left in open sheds, doors are never locked, and yet they have never had an article stolen. He adds that they have had no occasion to use force, or show weapons, except in the arrest or retention of criminals. For this police service he commonly appoints Indian constables. What is true on these counts of the S’Kokomish Indians, is true of other bands or tribes placed on reservations in this region. Those who live near them, or who have observed them in all conditions, both off and on the reservations, for the last fifteen, and even for thirty years, can bear witness that they are usually quiet, peaceable hunters, fishermen, or workers on farms, or in mills, or lumber camps, or in kitchens and laundries for the whites, exciting no fear among families, and causing no danger to lone travellers on the prairies or in the forests.
The Nez Percé reservation has been traversed for thirty years by whites in safety. Prospectors have ranged alone among their mountains, and through the gulches in all directions, in search of gold and silver for twenty years, in entire safety. Miners have followed and pitched their camps in every sort of lonely spot, exposed to the attacks of these savages. Long caravans of goods, in mule or wagon trains, in the care of a few teamsters, have passed back and forth among these Indians, and most of the other tribes, transporting merchandise of all kinds during the last twenty years, unmolested by the Indians. Express-men have had no fear to go to any mining camp of the upper country in charge of millions of gold. The mail carriers, on horses, have crossed and recrossed the whole Indian country unharmed. Stages, loaded down with mails and passengers, have rolled along over many of the same routes, having no more fear of Indians than of the white settlers, for whose convenience the post routes were established by government. Flocks and herds, in care of a few scattered men, have multiplied in all those regions. The robberies and murders, as the records of the courts testify, have been committed by white men. Sheriffs trace nearly every crime and outrage to the white, not to the Indian race.
The charges of a thieving, savage, murderous spirit made against the Indian in the public press, on the street, in the halls of debate and legislation, are not borne out by the facts. It is like charging a whole community with the vices and outrages of a small number of its members. It is like putting the stigma upon the whole South for the atrocities of Libby prison and Andersonville. It is the charge of fraud upon the U. S. A. for the defalcations and embarrassments of a few of her citizens.
In war or peace the Indian is cruel in revenge; but we cannot forget the massacres of Memphis. The victim in his grasp is tortured; but we remember the Chisholm and Hamburg horrors, and those in the negro parishes outside of New Orleans. He destroys without mercy, and devastates without remorse; but the Pittsburgh riots, the New York mobs, and the Commune of San Francisco, belong to the white race. He has burnt a few of our hamlets and settlers’ cabins. We have swept him and his household and his camps,—the only houses and cities that he can call his own—with canister and grape, the hail of iron and lead and fire. Having no commissariat, he has starved his prisoners. Without transportation or fortress for their safe keeping, he often raises the black flag and slays them at sight. But again and again, at the outset of battle, the order has moved along our line, “Take no prisoners!” Cold as steel, we have made a jest of his life, and hailed him good only when dead. We have steadily driven him from one hunting ground to another, over the rivers and beyond the lakes, hemmed him in from the gulfs and the oceans, crowded him off the prairies into rugged mountains, compelled him to sell his native lands, and have let loose the dogs of war upon him, because, forsooth, he has had the manhood to resist our march of doom against his race. If he has counted us the aggressors and the outlaws, we have hurled back upon him the fiercest invective known to human speech. If he, in the wild delirium of madness, has outraged and mutilated his captive, we have, in fiercer and more fiery passion, counselled, if not plotted, his extermination.
Progress in Civilization.
Proofs press upon the eye and ear of agents and employees that he does more and better with the means in his hand for the support of himself and family than other men would. I visited ten Indian families at their homes on the S’Kokomish reservation, on the 15th of August, and saw twenty more of their frame-boarded houses enclosed within their small claims. About thirty of the Indians, having finished haying, were away from home, most of them hunting in the mountains, or fishing at the weirs. Those at home had neat, well swept rooms, usually a sitting-room, bed-room and kitchen. Almost every one had a cooking stove, with its furniture, and crockery on the table, or in the cupboard a few chairs or benches, a clock in every house (often two), occasionally a rocking-chair and bureau, always one or two bedsteads, with beds and blankets, and often covered with a neat quilt of the wife’s taste and make. Cards and pictures were hung on the walls, and some of their photographs, also. They were dressed in comfortable clothes, and were glad of a call and a kindly greeting. They are adopting the manners of their white teachers.
The school, in charge of Deacon G. A Boynton, has a list of thirty-one pupils, twenty-four of them pure Indians, six half-breeds, and one little white girl. In dress, order and studiousness, they rank with many of our common-schools. In reading, singing, writing, at the blackboard, or in mental arithmetic, they evince ability to learn what white children learn. It is done more slowly, partly because while reciting in English they probably think in their own more familiar language, or in the jargon, and thus fail to get or convey the meaning of words quickly, and probably from lack of such mental training in their parents. The laws of heredity hold in them as in other people. Better shaped heads and finer brain power may be expected of their children.
In church and Sabbath-school, Indian parents and children meet with white parents and children, join in singing, listen to a sermon in the morning, translated by the interpreter into the Twana Indian language, and in the evening, to one in English. They exhibit a desire to learn the word of truth, and are profiting by their instructions. Several of the pupils in the school have become Christians and united with the church.
The testimony of the agent, the missionary, the teacher, the physician, the farmer and the carpenter, is uniform as to their capacity, and desire to improve and live like the whites, and of their real progress in industry and manner of living. They are trusted more and more, and they honor the trust.
It is cowardly to despise them and cast them out like dogs. It is noble to respect them as men and women, who have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They have claims on us for sympathy and help to secure these things. It is a credit to lift up the lowest, if we count them so. Those who know them best have most hope of them, if given a fair chance.
A Neglected Treaty.
No man will clear land and make a farm unless he owns it, or has a lien upon it. The treaty pledges them an allotment for a homestead on the reservation. It was made by Gov. Stevens, in Jane 1855, at Point-no-Point, and ratified by the government in 1859. In private and public speeches, with one voice, they plead for their titles. They want the patents promised in the bond nineteen years ago. With these in hand, they will improve their homes still more. It is a reasonable demand. The plan to remove them from these lands, where they were born, excites their fears and their rebellion. We cannot expect them to rest in quiet and work with energy until we give them the motive of ownership in the soil they till and the timber they cut. This is the question of the hour for the Indian. Shall he own in law his garden and his field and his house, or hold it as a tenant at the will of another, liable to ejectment? If government grant the former, as it has promised, the largest factor of the problem will be found that will solve the rest of it.