CHAPTER XXXIV. FOUR IMPORTANT BOOKS
As I write this page there lie before me four important Indian books, and I would that every reader possessed them in his library, for the very good reason that all of them treat of the Indian of today. Two of them are strictly historical, and the other two sufficiently accurate to be included in that category.
These books are: Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Century of Dishonor,” published in 1886; Seth K. Humphrey’s “The Indian Dispossessed,” published in 1906; Honorable Francis E. Leupp’s “The Indian and His Problem,” published in 1910; and Honorable James McLaughlin’s “My Friend the Indian,” 1910.
The authors of these books are all familiar with the Indian problem and Indian conditions, but approach the subject from somewhat different points of view.
Honorable F. E. Leupp was for years Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Major McLaughlin has served in the Indian Service forty-two years, and was on the frontier among the Sioux prior to that time. Helen Hunt Jackson was a noble woman who became interested, first in the Mission Indians of California, and afterwards in all Indians of the United States. She wrote her “Century of Dishonor” and lived to see its influence spread throughout the English-speaking world. A number of editions were published. S. K. Humphrey, Esq., a Bostonian, who has long been a staunch friend of Indians, presents in his book the legal point of view of the breaking of treaties and agreements, and the despoilation of the following tribes:—Mission Indians, Poncas, Nez Perces, Umatillas, etc. Each of these authors treats of the modern Indian, and I desire to call attention in my plea for him, to the testimony of these competent witnesses—“Lest we forget.”
Major McLaughlin has been United States Indian Inspector during more years than any other man in the inspection corps. He visited all the reservations in the United States, and he understands the Indian.
Beginning with the early days on the Plains, he relates his personal experiences, and gives sound advice in the handling of Indian affairs. From all I can gather from reading accounts of, or talking with frontiersmen, who fought against Indians; officers of our troops in Indian wars; former Indian Agents; and after study of Government and Missionary reports, I think McLaughlin is correct when he says concerning the Indians of forty years ago—
“And they were a very different body of men, physically, from the Indians of today. They wore an air of sturdy independence. They were equipped according to their natural requirements. Their minds were generally attuned to magnificent ideas of time and distance. They abhorred the limitations that the white man accepts as affecting his dwelling-place. They were foes to be reckoned with, or they might be converted into friends worth the having. It is a matter of profound regret that the Indian of that day could not have been advanced to his present knowledge of, and capacity for, civilized pursuits without being subjected to the debasing and degenerating physical and moral conditions that were inseparable from the process of transmutation.”
Major McLaughlin is perfectly correct in his chapter “Give the Red Man His Portion” when he states that the enormous sums of money, tribal and individual, now held by the United States should be divided among them. Otherwise, the swarm of shyster lawyers, feasting on Indian claims, will continue to increase. Congress should act immediately and provide for the division of this money, even though some of the Indians squander it. So long as fully $48,848,744 remains in the United States Treasury, just so long will we have this continual fight with “claim attorneys”, and the Indians will not work pending the distribution of this great wealth. The Scriptural quotation which was somewhat changed by one of the speakers at the Lake Mohonk Conference last year, expresses this view most admirably—“Where the Indian money lies, there will the grafters be gathered together.”
At the time of this writing Major McLaughlin is still a valued employee of the United States Indian Service. Undoubtedly he could have written a great deal stronger than he did. Reading between the lines of his book, I take it that the Major now realizes that the chief reason for the almost utter failure of our Indian policy is because of lack of proper protection of Indian property rights and health, and further, that the citizenship we handed the Indian, and of which our orators in Congress and in benevolent organizations had so much to say, has proved a hollow mockery and a sham.
I am not aware that Mr. Humphrey lays claim to legal training, but his book presents in a masterly fashion, exactly what has been done to the Indians who have accepted the pledged word of our civilized country. It is not a sentimental book, but a carefully prepared narrative drawn from official documents, and should have had an effect on our Congress and Interior Department long ago.
In the first chapter of “The Indian and His Problem”, Mr. Leupp pays the Indian a merited tribute and sets forth his independence, his many virtues and his character. He emphasizes a trait of the oldtime Indian not generally understood—his honesty.
“Old, experienced traders among the Indians have repeatedly informed me that they had lost less money on long-standing Indian accounts, aggregating large sums, than in their comparatively small dealings with the white people in their neighborhoods. One successful trader among the Sioux who, in the early nineties, lent some $30,000 to the Indians near him in anticipation of a payment they were soon to receive, said afterward: ‘I did not lose more than $150 on the whole transaction, and that I lost from a half-breed who did not live on the reservation.’ The same testimony is borne on all sides, and the universal comment is that, until they were taught how to cheat in a trade, very few of them ever thought of doing so. I have seen Indians at a Government pay-table, after receiving their annuities, walk up to the Agent or some employee with so many dollars held out in their palms, to repay a loan which the creditor had forgotten all about. These instances, I ought to add, were observed among Indians of a pretty backward class, who were acting simply in obedience to their natural impulses.”
Mr. Leupp states frankly in his preface:—
“The Indian problem has now reached a stage where its solution is almost wholly a matter of administration.”
Because he served in various Indian capacities for almost twenty-five years with organizations as well as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and as in that latter office it was his duty and privilege to regard the subject in its broad aspect, an extended review of his book is entirely proper.
Under Chapter II, “What Happened to the Indian,” he discusses what we all know, the end of the “buffalo days”, and the beginning of the ration system. He maintains that this encouraged idleness. Along with the ration and reservations systems sprang up the educational plan for the benefit of Indians. At first there were few government schools, and many denominational. The Government increased its appropriations to support these sectarian schools until in 1870 it was $100,000, and later the amounts were much larger. This brought about an unfortunate and unnecessary dispute between the denominations, the Protestant and the Catholic. Hard feelings were engendered, and instead of working together in amity to Christianize and educate the Indians, all these worthy people were engaged in a dispute as to who should receive the most money from the United States Treasury! We may imagine the feelings and opinions of the brighter Indians as they viewed this unchristian and uncharitable dispute. The Government had to withdraw support from all denominational schools and as a result many closed their doors while others struggled along. Comparing the Government school system and the denominational, Leupp says:—
A FULL-BLOOD SIOUX GIRL, 1888
“In dimensions, in scholastic scope, and in material equipment, the Government school system as it stands today is an enormous advance on the old mission school system; but in real accomplishment as proportioned to outlay it does not begin to equal the latter, and in vital energy it must always be lacking. The reason for these differences is not far to seek. At the base of everything lies the fact that, except in magnificence, no governmental enterprise can compare with the same thing in private hands. The Government’s methods are ponderous, as must always be the movements of so gigantic a machine. Its expenditures are from money belonging to the public, and therefore demand a more elaborate arrangement of checks and balances and final accounting than expenditures made from the funds of voluntary contributors. In spite of the now universal application of civil service rules, the whole business is under political control in the sense that the appropriations and the laws governing their use must be obtained from Congress, and that the school system is only a branch of one of the executive departments. This circumstance, while not necessitating the intrusion of partisan considerations into the settlement of any vexed question, does militate against the highest efficiency, because it requires that a great deal of ground shall be traversed two, three or a dozen times on the way to a clearly visible conclusion, involves harassing delays and temporary discouragements, calls for tedious consultations over petty details which one mind could dispose of more satisfactorily, and keeps the administrative staff always in a state of preparation to repel gratuitous interference.”
Of the four books, the one that appeals to me most of all is that written by Helen Hunt Jackson. Bishop Whipple, long a friend of the Indian, wrote the preface to the edition of 1880. Page [7] is worthy of preservation.
“All this while Canada has had no Indian wars. Our Government has expended for the Indians a hundred dollars to their one. They recognize, as we do, that the Indian has a possessory right to the soil. They purchase this right, as we do, by treaty; but their treaties are made with the Indian subjects of Her Majesty. They set apart a permanent reservation for them; they seldom remove Indians; they select Agents of high character, who receive their appointments for life; they make fewer promises, but they fulfil them; they give the Indians Christian missions, which have the hearty support of Christian people, and all their efforts are toward self-help and civilization. An incident will illustrate the two systems. The officer of the United States Army who was sent to receive Alaska from the Russian Government stopped in British Columbia. Governor Douglas had heard that an Indian had been murdered by another Indian. He visited the Indian tribe; he explained to them that the murdered man was a subject of Her Majesty; he demanded the culprit. The murderer was surrendered, was tried, was found guilty, and was hanged. On reaching Alaska the officer happened to enter the Greek church, and saw on the altar a beautiful copy of the Gospels in a costly binding studded with jewels. He called upon the Greek bishop, and said, ‘Your Grace, I called to say you had better remove that copy of the Gospels from the church, for it may be stolen.’ The bishop replied, ‘Why should I remove it? It was the gift of the mother of the Emperor, and has lain on the altar seventy years.’ The officer blushed, and said, ‘There is no law in the Indian country, and I was afraid it might be stolen.’ The bishop said, ‘The book is in God’s house, and it is His book, and I shall not take it away.’ The book remained. The country became ours, and the next day the Gospel was stolen.”
Mrs. Jackson takes up in detail the despoiling of the Indians even more thoroughly than Mr. Humphrey. She treats of the Delawares, Cheyennes, Nez Perces, Sioux, Poncas, Winnebagoes, Cherokees, California Indians, etc. She devotes a gruesome chapter to the massacre of Indians by white people. She devotes an appendix of 171 pages (small type), to a narration of outrages perpetrated by white people on Indians, broken treaties, and outrageous treatment of Indians by Whites. The appendix includes a spirited correspondence with Secretary of the Interior, Hon. Carl Schurz. There are also several letters to the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver paper, edited by Mr. W. N. Byers. The letters were written in 1880. Schurz was Secretary, it should be remembered, when the famous Ponca case occurred. A tribe of Indians had been forcibly taken from their homes. Through friends in Boston and Philadelphia, who had their case brought before the courts and were sustained in their contentions, these Poncas were returned to their reservation. As to the Byers correspondence, the citizens of Denver had attacked and killed a large number of Indian men, women and children located in a village on Sand Creek, some distance from the mining camps. Mrs. Jackson clearly has the better of both arguments.
It is unfortunate that the present condition of some of the Indian bands does not arouse the same interest as did the case of the Poncas. The Chippewas of Minnesota suffered far greater wrongs than fell to the lot of the Poncas, and yet there has been no outburst of righteous indignation because of what happened to them.
In 1871, near Camp Grant, Arizona Territory, there were a number of Apaches encamped under the jurisdiction of the United States authorities and these Indians did not wish to join Geronimo and others in their raids in the Southwest and Old Mexico. By the 11th of March, 1871, there were over 300 Indians assembled near the camp. They had brought in, in a short time, more than 300,000 pounds of hay which the officer in command purchased. In view of the hostility of Geronimo and his band, that the Apaches should desire peace, and be willing to work, seemed incomprehensible in the Southwest. The frontier element—always hostile to Indians—resented their presence. The Indians continued to come in and presently there were 510 in the camp.
The 30th of April, these Indians were attacked by a large force of white men from Tucson, Arizona. The gentleman who furnished Mrs. Jackson with the information was C. B. Brierley, Acting Assistant Surgeon, United States Army. Mrs. Jackson presents Surgeon Brierley’s report in detail. We need not present particulars, save to say that a large number of the Indians were surprised and killed while in camp and that the white people of Tucson, not satisfied with killing the men, mutilated the dead bodies of women and children.
A Mr. J. H. Lyman of Northampton, Mass., was a pioneer in Arizona in 1810 and 1841. He made a report to the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1871 which explains the hostility in later years of the Apaches toward the white people, as to how one Johnson agreed with the Governor of Senora to procure Indian scalps at an ounce of gold each. Johnson killed large numbers of women and children—and a few warriors. Mrs. Jackson reprints most of his report.
Mrs. Jackson’s book, as I have previously stated, created a profound impression in this country and in England. None of the hundreds of facts and incidents contained in her “Century of Dishonor” were ever successfully denied. Many of the recommendations offered by her are sound and could be applied with profit at the present time, although thirty years have elapsed since she laid down her pen.
Mr. Humphrey may be said to have carried her work down to present times (1906), although there is much to our discredit since he wrote.
As to the irrigation problems, he says:—
“Whether he were the defenseless beginner of the Northwest, or the skilful agriculturalist of the Southwest desert with ancient systems of irrigation, the Indian was never regarded as a man. The forceful settler dispossessed the irrigating Indian with even less than usual formality because his highly-cultivated lands were the more valuable,—either by driving him into the desert and pre-empting his land, or by diverting his water, thus making his land a desert. Typical of these Indians were the four thousand Pimas of Arizona. They had practised agriculture by irrigation along the Gila River for more than three centuries. In the language of the early records, ‘they are farmers and live wholly by tilling the soil, and in the earlier days of the American history of the territory they were the chief support of both the civil and military elements of this section of the country.’
SEMINOLE INDIAN HOUSES AND CYCLONE CELLAR. WEWOKA, OKLAHOMA, 1913
“In 1886 the Whites began to divert the waters of the Gila River. A suit in the federal court was talked of to maintain the clear rights of the Indians, but never pressed. No district attorney who would prosecute such a case against voting white men could expect to live politically. Within seven years the Pimas were reduced from independence to the humiliation of calling for rations, while the white settlers used the Indians water undisturbed.
“‘Enough has been written about the need of water for the starving Indians to fill a volume,’ wrote the discouraged Agent, after ten years. ‘It has been urgently presented to your honorable office time and again, and yet the need of water is just as great and the supply no greater.’ So the years went on. In 1900 came the cry from the desert, ‘This water, their one resource, their very life, has been taken from them, and they are, perforce, lapsing into indolence, misery, and vice.’ Thirty thousand dollars was appropriated for more rations.
“Finally, after eighteen years, the suit to recover the Indians’ rights received its final quietus. The district attorney reported in 1904: ‘There is no doubt but that the case could be taken up and prosecuted to a favorable ending, but ... it would be impossible for the court to enforce its decree, and the expense of prosecuting such suit would cost between twenty and thirty thousand dollars.’
“This Government long ago lost the right to say that it could not enforce a federal law against less than a thousand of its agricultural citizens. Its officials would not disturb the political balance of Arizona.”
As to the opposing forces—the uplift, and its antithesis—he writes:—
“But there is another side to this picture. During all these years of trouble, the Indian was faithfully attended by a great Unselfishness, always striving to re-establish him, to educate and enlighten him. The Government met with no opposition in administering this portion of its trust, and the workers were granted its most generous and intelligent support; for the high ideals of the people have always been the Government’s inspiration, even though it be often led to action by a selfish few.
“It is not within the scope of this book to recount the great good that has come to the Indian through this branch of the Indian Service, save to make full acknowledgment here of its greatness. It has done much more than attend the Indian’s education. Many a tribe, and many individual Indians have had saved to them tracts of good land, upon which they have worked their way toward civilization. Indeed, had it not been for the constant presence of these among the Indians who labored for their good, little good land would have been left to any Indians.
“These are the two great influences which have shaped the Indian’s destiny; one, steadily hewing away the foundation—his land; the other, faithfully moulding the superstructure—his education; both generously supported by a vote-seeking Congress.
“Where the first has failed, the Indian is coming into full citizenship through agriculture, education, and Christian teaching. Where both have succeeded in their opposing efforts, we find the Indian figuratively, and often literally, on the rocks; educated, saved, and forlorn,—amiable, but aimless, in his arrested development. He has missed the fundamental lesson of mankind.”
Mr. Humphrey’s conclusions may here be reproduced in part.
“When we hear of dark injustice among the natives of Africa, or in Russia’s Siberian wastes, we turn in horror from the oppressed to vent indignation upon the oppressor. But when the tale of our own Poor Lot is told, we lift our eyes to Heaven—not being so well able to see ourselves as to see others—and murmur, reverently, ‘’Tis the Survival of the Fittest!’ Those who think lightly are wont to exclaim impatiently, that the Indian’s story is a closed book. It is—nearly so; but the book of history is never closed except by those who think lightly. * * * * *
INDIANS’ COMMERCIAL DEPARTMENT. HASKELL INSTITUTE
“Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, who gave the best part of his life to the Indian cause, declared, after recounting the acts of broken faith which led up to the great Sioux massacre of 1863, ‘I submit to every man the question whether the time has not come for a nation to hear the cry of wrong, if not for the sake of the heathen, for the sake of the memory of our friends whose bones are bleaching on our prairies.’ This bookful of wrongs, and volumes more, have been perpetrated since. * * * *
“Col. Richard I. Dodge, after thirty-three years on the Plains as Indian fighter, displays in his ‘A Living Issue,’ this same confiding hope: ‘It is too much to expect any one of these (politicians) to risk the loss of votes and thus jeopardize his future career for a miserable savage. Politicians will do nothing unless forced to it by the great, brave, honest, human heart of the American people. To that I appeal! To the press; to the pulpit; to every voter in the land; to every lover of mankind. For the honor of our common country; for the sake of suffering humanity; force your representative to meet this issue’.” * * * * *
“Thirty years ago a Commissioner of Indian Affairs delivered himself of a fervent opinion which should become classic. The miserable story of the California Indians had dragged itself through twenty-five years; every measure of relief had been blocked in Congress by the interested few—the Vociferous Few in the Indian country. ‘This class of Indians,’ concludes the Commissioner, ‘seems forcibly to illustrate the truth that no man has a place or a fair chance to exist under the Government of the United States who has not a part in it.’ A more illuminating commentary on the Indian’s unhappy status in the land of the Free can hardly be written in one sentence. The Indian’s story does not argue that the Indian should have been at any time given the protection of the franchise; but it does argue that in a loose-jointed republic where national legislation is at the beck and call of every little coterie of irresponsible voters, the Indian has been subjected to more devilish variations of human caprice than if he were at the mercy of an openly oppressive, but more consistent and centralized style of government. There is no despotism more whimsically cruel than that of men unused to power, who suddenly find themselves in absolute control of a people whose one vital interest—an advantageous foothold on good land—is in continual conflict with their own chief desire—the possession of that same good land.”
I have reprinted from these books for a definite purpose. All four authors had practical experience with Indian affairs; all knew their subjects—not one was visionary. Our historians and public officials have denied none of the statements contained in these books. Since the abuses continue, and we have forgotten the lessons of the past, it now remains for us to change our Indian policy—to do so absolutely. We have been repeatedly warned, we cannot escape our responsibility.