THE INDIAN QUESTION.
REV. H. A. STIMSON, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
I stand before you to speak upon the Indian question with an inexpressible sadness. The hopelessness of securing justice or mercy for the Indian oppresses me. I seem to hear the cry of the Pilgrim’s saintly pastor, when the news came to him across the ocean of their first fight with the natives of New England, “I would that you had converted some before you killed any.” Our injustice and oppression of the Indian are not the slow growth of years, as they have been to-day shown to be in the case of the negro; they sprang into being full armed, bitter and destructive, like the spirits from Pandora’s box. As early as 1675 the devoted John Eliot wrote to Gov. Winthrop from the wigwams in which he was consecrating his culture and his life to their conversion: “I humbly request that one effect of this trouble may be to humble the English to do the Indians justice.” (Letter to Hon. Mr. Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut. Roxbury, this 24th of the fifth month, 1675.) The prayer has remained unanswered through the centuries.
I am oppressed with the necessity of arraigning my Government and my country of crime. It is but a short time since England was horrified with the account of the barbarous atrocities committed by an English governor upon the blacks of Jamaica. A committee was at once formed, as an expression of the best sentiment of England, for the purpose of bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. Reviewing the work of the Jamaica committee, of which he had been chairman, John Stuart Mill records its failure. It was defeated not by the law, but by the grand jury, the representatives of the people. “It was not a popular proceeding,” he writes, “in the eyes of the great middle classes of England to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against negroes.” (Autobiography, pp. 296-9.) It is as unpopular to arraign our Government for abuse of the Indian to-day. A single sentence, however, of Mr. Mill’s gives me courage to proceed. He says: “The Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s charge settled the law for the future.” It may be that some simple statements of fact may open the eyes of our people and prepare the way for redress.
Early in the century Sidney Smith said of the English nation, in reference to the possibility of converting the Hindoos to Christ: “We have exemplified in our public conduct every crime of which human nature is capable.” Those words stand to-day the terms of the indictment of the United States in her dealings with the Indians.
We have persistently broken faith with them. A volume of testimony might readily be produced; but Gen. Leake’s able setting forth of the history of our Indian treaties furnishes all the proof necessary. But as a single illustration, take this statement from a Government official. In seven of our most important treaties with as many different tribes we have bound ourselves to provide education for the children of those tribes. At a low estimate there are 33,000 children of schoolable age. The Government has provided accommodations for but 2,589. Add 5,082 as the number who may possibly be further accommodated in the miserable makeshifts of transient day schools, and you have but 7,671 as the total provision. (Letter of Acting Indian Commissioner Brooks, April 28, 1879.)
But why begin this story? We have made the name Modoc one to frighten children with for a generation; but the Modoc chief who killed the brave Gen. Canby had first been himself betrayed, and had his kindred killed under a U.S. flag of truce; and his women had been violated and burned to death. (Bishop Whipple’s letter to N. Y. Evening Post, Jan., 1879.) We fought the Nez Perces; and when that able and manly chief Joseph surrendered, he did it on conditions the flagrant violation of which on the part of our Government is known to every Indian on the plains. (Mr. Tibball’s letter of October 9, 1879, in N. Y. Tribune.) We have justified the sneers with which Sitting Bull dismissed Assistant Secretary Cowan in a council held before the outbreak of the last Sioux war: “Return to your own land, and when you have found a white man who does not lie, come back.” We furnished occasion for the sorrowful words of the old chief who, after the Custer massacre, came to the Whipple Commission on the Missouri and said: “Look out there. The prairie is wet with the blood of the white man. I hear the voices of beautiful women crying for their husbands, who will never return. It is not an Indian war. It is a white man’s war, for the white man has lied. Take this pipe to the great Father and tell him to smoke it, for it is the pipe of truth.”
What a parody is this on our national history! We boast of a father of his country who always told the truth. The Indian knows our Government by the name of “Washington,” and the Indian says “Washington always lies.” Gen. Stanley has said: “When I think of the way we have broken faith, I am ashamed to look an Indian in the face.” Gen. Harney said to the Sioux in 1868: “If my Government does not keep this agreement, I will come back and ask the first Indian I meet to shoot me.” (Bishop Whipple in Faribault Democrat, Jan. 5, 1877.) Gen. Harney does not revisit the Sioux.
We have stolen from the Indians; we are stealing from them all the time. I do not speak of the lordly robbery, in which the strong possesses himself of the lands, and if occasion serve, of the home of the weak, and justifies it by the right of the stronger. I speak of the petty stealing of the thief. Three years ago there came past my home a long procession of Indian ponies. Where did they come from? They were the property of the Sioux on the reservations west of us. In the face of the ordinance of 1789, which expressly declares that their lands and property shall never be taken, nor their liberties invaded, except in lawful wars authorized by Congress, in violation of the terms of their treaties, and in disregard of the express declaration of the President in response to the telegram of the agent, “Tell the friendly Indians that they shall be protected in their persons and property,” their ponies were gathered and driven off by officers of the army acting under orders. The Indians were left without their only means of transportation for fuel or food, and no redress has ever been secured. No inventory of individual personal property was kept, and the stolen ponies were scattered through Minnesota, and what were left sold for a song in St. Paul.
Gen. Crook has recently said that the Sioux of the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail bands have been robbed during the past winter and spring of over a thousand ponies, which robbery the army, under the new posse comitatus act, is powerless to prevent. (Letter of June 19, 1879, in New York Tribune.)
What I am saying must not be understood as an arraignment of the officers of the army, or indeed of the chief officials of the Government. The army officers have been almost without an exception the firm friends of the Indian, and none have borne more emphatic testimony to their bad treatment than such generals as Sherman, Harney, Stanley, Augur, Howard, Pope and Crook. The latter said the other day, in response to the remark that it was hard to be called to sacrifice life in settling quarrels brought about by thieving contractors, “I will tell you a harder thing. It is to be forced to fight and kill Indians when I know they are clearly in the right.” The responsibility is with the representatives of the people, with Congress.
But to return to the indictment. We have forced the Indians to break the law by placing them under conditions in which it was not possible for them to obey the law and live. This can be proven by the records of many of the Indian reservations when we have attempted to shut them in on lands where starvation was inevitable. Of my own knowledge I can speak of a reservation on which some 1,700 Indians were commanded to remain where there was barely food for a grasshopper, and where in the month of September the little children begged the passer for food, and the dogs were the picture of famine. We have debauched their women. Remember that an Indian has no standing in our courts, and it is easy to see what contact with the whites means to him and his family. He has no redress when his home is violated; and the knowledge of his helplessness makes him the prey of every libertine, until on the distant plains the proximity of a Government post is a sign of his misery. (General Carrington construed this remark to apply to army officers, and corrected it publicly. That was not its intent. The officers of the army are gentlemen. The fort brings into the neighborhood of the Indians and offers more or less of shelter to many men of a very different stamp.)
We have not stopped short of murder. The record is a long and bloody one. The details of the Custer massacre are still fresh in your minds. The nation stood still and lifted up its hands in horror at the disaster which in a moment had annihilated every man of a large detachment of U.S. troops, not sparing their noble and brilliant leader. But where was the real “Custer massacre”? Go back to 1868, to where, under the shadow of Fort Cobb, on land assigned to them by the United States, stood a small Indian village. Its chief was Black Kettle, a man whose name was a by-word among his fellows for cowardice, because he could not be induced to fight the whites—a man of whom Gen. Harney said, “I have worn the uniform of the United States for fifty-five years; I knew Black Kettle well; he was as good a friend of the white man as I am.”
He had been to the commandant of the post seeking protection for himself and his people, because troops were in the neighborhood. Four days afterwards Gen. Custer surrounded that village, and although the Indians fought with desperation, not a man, woman or child escaped alive. Gen. Custer doubtless believed he had fallen upon a hostile camp. Was the mistake any the less terrible? Was the butchery any the less shocking? The blood of innocent Indians on the Wischita cried unto God, and the answer came in the deluge of blood on the Rosebud. * * * *
But you ask, has this been the history of our other Indian wars?
Our first war with the Sioux was in 1852 to 1854. For thirty years it had been the boast of the Sioux that they had never killed a white man. How did the war begin? A Mormon emigrant train crossing the plains lost a cow, which a band of Sioux, who were living in the neighborhood in perfect peace, found and took. The Mormons discovering this, made complaint at Fort Laramie, and a lieutenant with a squad of soldiers was sent to recover the lost property. It could not be found. It was already assimilated into Indian. But the Indians offered to pay for it. This the lieutenant refused to accept, demanding the surrender of the man who had taken the cow for punishment. The Indians said he could not be found; whereupon—will it be believed?—the lieutenant ordered his troops to fire, and the Indian chief fell dead. Those troops never fired again; they were killed in their tracks; and this was the beginning of the great Sioux war which cost the Government forty millions of dollars and many lives. (Speech of President Seeley, of Massachusetts, in Congress, April 13, 1875.)
You know the story of the Sioux war in Minnesota—the withheld appropriations, the taunts and the starvation. We need not open that terrible chapter again.
We were at it again in 1866. In violation of the most explicit agreements we built Forts Phil Kearney, Reno and Smith, in their country; they flew to arms; the cost to the Government was a million dollars a month; and finally the forts were vacated.
We had a great war with the Cheyennes in 1864-5. It began in the most atrocious massacre that disgraces the annals of our country. It was at a time when settlers were pouring into Colorado. The buffalo had become scarce; the annuities for some reason had ceased; the Indians were sad and depressed. But they kept the peace. Black Kettle, of whom I have already spoken, was their chief. A white man made complaint to a United States officer that an Indian had stolen some of his horses. The officer did not know the man, nor whether or not he had owned any horses; but he fitted out an expedition to seize horses. Soon they ran across Indians and claimed their stock, though the Indians protested that they had only ponies and no American horses. A fight ensued and some Indians were killed. Black Kettle knew his danger. He rushed at once to the Governor of Colorado, seeking protection. It was refused. Col. Boone, an old resident of the Territory, told Bishop Whipple that it was the saddest company he had even seen when they stopped at his house on their way back. He offered them food, but they said: “Our hearts are sick; we cannot eat.”
Soon after troops appeared upon the horizon. Black Kettle and his two brothers went out with a white flag to meet them. They fired on the flag and the two brothers fell dead. Black Kettle returned to his camp. Three men in the United States uniform were in his tepee. He said; “I believe you are spies; it shall never be said that a man ate Black Kettle’s bread and came to harm in his tent. Go to your people before the fight begins.” He gathered his men and they fought for their lives. A few escaped; but men, women and children were massacred in a butchery too horrible to relate, Women were ripped open and babes were scalped; and the Sand Creek massacre has gone upon record, by testimony that cannot be impeached, as a “butchery that would have disgraced the tribes of Central Africa.” (Bishop Whipple’s letter to Evening Post, January, 1879; and the report of the Doolittle Commission.)
But we fought the Cheyennes again in 1867. What occasioned that war? Gen. Hancock, “without any known provocation,” as says the report to Congress of the Indian Bureau, in July, 1867, surrounded a village of Cheyennes who had been at peace since the signing of the treaty of 1865, and were quietly occupying the grounds assigned to them by the treaty, burned down the homes of three hundred lodges, destroyed all their provisions, clothing, utensils and property of every description, to the value of $100,000. This led to a war that extended over three years, and cost us $40,000,000 and three hundred men. (President Seeley’s speech.)
We have just fought the Bannocks and Shoshones. In November, 1878, Gen. Crook wrote to the Government: “With the Bannocks and Shoshones our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of war-path or starvation; and being human, many of them will choose the former, in which death shall at least be glorious.” Is it necessary to say anything more of that war? Why pursue the story? The late Congressman (now President) Seeley, of Amherst College, says: “There has not been an Indian war for the past fifty years in which the whites have not been the aggressors.”
What, then, is to be done? I press upon you the importance of these resolutions. Standing in the courts, the recognition of the Indian as a person with rights, inalienable as yours and mine, to life, to justice, to property, this is the first, the absolute essential. As long ago as 1807, Governor (afterwards President) Harrison said: “The utmost efforts to induce the Indians to take up arms would be unavailing if one only of the many persons who have committed murder upon their people could be brought to punishment.” Generals Harney and Pope have testified of late that this is as true now as then.
In 1802 President Jefferson wrote to a friend that he had heard that there was one man left of the Peorias, and said “If there is only one, justice demands that his rights shall be respected.” Reviewing subsequent history we may well repeat Jefferson’s solemn words, “I tremble for my country when I know that God is just!”
We can make no more treaties with the Indians. The act of 1871 put an end to that dreadful farce. There have been nearly 900 treaties since 1785. They have been the loaded dice with which we have always won and the Indian always lost. We have hoodwinked ourselves by them to a perpetual fraud and deception. They have been to the Indian a veritable compact of death. Relying on them he has sooner or later found himself held by the throat by the wolf starvation, or impaled on the bayonet of the soldier; crowded to the wall by the encroaching settler, or removed to the wilderness by the Government as soon as he had begun to make for himself a home. The Stockbridges have been thus removed four times in a hundred years, and are now on a reservation where it is impossible to get a living. The Poncas are the latest instance.
Treaties must give place to personal rights. We must provide something better for him than a reservation; that is, life in a community for which we have provided no law, no courts, no police, no officer other than an anomalous “agent,” no ownership of land—nothing, in short, that all civilized people regard as the first element of civilized life, and without which the congregate life of bodies of men is impossible. We say to him, Cease to be a savage, hungry but free, and come and be a pauper, dependent on the will of others, without law, and still hungry. As one of the agents wrote in 1875: “It is a condition of things that would turn a white community into chaos in twelve months.” It behooves every honest man, every man who loves his country, to see that the day of equal personal rights for the Indian, the only man on the broad earth who has none, shall at once dawn.
But I remember that I am speaking to a company of Christians. Religion before all else can prepare the Indian to make the most of his citizenship. Look at this picture. Here is a wigwam in the pine forest. Before it is a tall pole, from the top of which hangs a dried bladder containing a few rattling shells and stones. It is the wigwam of Shaydayence, or Little Pelican, chief medicine man of the Gull Lakers. He is the incarnation of the devil in that tribe. He holds the tribe in his hand, and represents their idolatry and their bloodthirstiness. It is due to him that the missionary has been driven away. More than that, he is an inveterate drunkard. He has been rescued from freezing to death, drunk in the woods, by a chance lumberman finding him and thawing him out before an extemporized fire.
The scene changes. There is again a wigwam. Lift the blanket door and enter. Three old women are warming themselves by the fire in the centre. A young man lies upon the ground singing aloud from an Ojibway hymn-book, which he reads by the fire-light. An old man rises to greet you, asks you to sit down, and proceeds to talk about Jesus Christ. It is the same Shaydayence. He is known now as the leader of the singing band of the Chippewas, who goes from house to house with a few young men to plead with his countrymen to love Christ. A little later you find him living in a log house with table and chairs and stove, a white man’s home, cultivating also his garden. What wrought the change? He had a friend, Nayboneshkong, who was sick and dying. He went to see him. The sick man had long been a Christian, and now rallied himself to speak for the last time. Hour after hour he expostulated and pleaded. He rose from his bed with preternatural strength. He walked the floor, still talking and praying. Morning came, Nayboneshkong was dead, and Shaydayence went to his wigwam to begin the new life of a Christian man. Observe that he was a savage, a medicine man and a drunkard. What other influence could have saved him? Would education, or citizenship, or civilization, or legal standing, or property rights? Nothing; nothing but the personal power of Jesus Christ; and that did.
The story goes that once there appeared at the cave of a hermit a little child, naked and cold and hungry. The good man eagerly took him in, and from his own scanty store clothed and fed and warmed him. He set his heart upon him as upon his own son. The next day the hermit was gone. It was Jesus who had come thus needy to his door, and proving his love, had in return taken him to himself, and like Enoch, the hermit was not. The child, naked and hungry and cold at our door, is the Indian. I hear the voice of the Lord himself saying, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”
You have pointed out the large part which in the providence of God may yet be appointed to the negro race to play in doing God’s work in the world.
I know nothing of the future of the Indian in this direction. He may have no “genius for religion,” no “peculiar talent of faith,” no “wonderful power in song.” That he has talents which are respectable, none who know him can doubt. But be that as it may, before all other men he stands to-day the living witness of the promise of the Scripture, that Christ “is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him.” He, brethren, is the “uttermost” man—the sinner who, abused, outcast and despised, is, at least in your eyes, the furthest of all men from hope and from Christ. Have you religion enough to try to save him? If so, begin by showing him justice.