This little agency demonstrates the fact, that the only sure way for Indians to secure attention is through blood. Our Government follows the example of the father of the Prodigal Son, with this remarkable difference, that it abuses its dutiful children, while it fawns upon and encourages the red-faced reprobates, by rewarding them for their rebellious deeds.
The department farm at Alsea was made by Government, on Indian land, ostensibly for the Indians’ benefit. It is located on a bleak plain, that stretches away from the ocean surf to the foot of the coast range mountains. It produces potatoes and oats. The mountains are high and rugged, and covered with dense forests of fir and cedar timber; much of the former has been “burnt.” A heavy undergrowth has become almost impenetrable except for wild animals or Indian hunters.
The cedar groves cover streams of water that will in time be of great value, when turned on to machinery with which to convert the cedars into merchandise for foreign markets. The streams are plentifully supplied with fish. No long list of employés answer to the command of an agent at Alsea. In some respects it is the better way, inasmuch as it is to the interest of the agent to teach his wards the more common arts of handiwork. In this way, the improvements have been made by Indian labor, under the direction of an
agent; and now, while I write, these people are coming slowly up towards the gate that should open to them a way to the brotherhood of man.
Efforts are being made to reduce the area of the Reservation, and, should they succeed, these people who have cost the Government so little of blood or treasure, will be compelled to yield; only repeating, “Might versus Right.” I am not opposed to reduction of the limits of the coast Reservation, if these people, who have already given up so much beautiful country, shall be provided with schools, churches, shops, and other means whereby they may be compensated, and, in the mean time, prepared by civilization for the new life that awaits the survivors, that, a few years hence, may be left to represent their people.
The Government owes to these humble Indians all I have suggested, and, in addition, a home marked out and allotted in severalty, made inalienable for one or two generations.
But, however deserving they may be, it is doubtful if they ever enjoy the boon they crave. Few in number, peaceable in disposition, unknown to the world by bloody deeds, the probabilities are that the white man will encroach on their lands, a few miles at a time, until at last, hemmed in by a civilization they cannot enjoy, they will gradually mix and mingle, becoming more licentious and corrupt by association with vicious white men, and in a generation or two will be known only by a few vagabonds, who will wander, gipsy-like, through the country, a poor, miserable fag-end of a race.
Perhaps a few may take humble positions as laborers,
and attain to a half-way station between savage and civilized life. Another few will become slaves to King Alcohol, and their chief men, lying around whiskey mills, drunken, debauched, despised, will drop back again to mother earth, mingling with the soil their fathers once owned.
Thus the people of Alsea will pass away. I pity you, humble, red-skinned children of the Pacific surf! You were happy once, and carelessly rode in your canoes over the shining sands of your native beach, or chased the game on the mountain side, little dreaming of the coming of a human tide which would swallow you and your sea-washed home, or carry both away out on the boundless expanse of a civilization whose other shores you could not see had sepulchres ready for your bones. You have spent your lives with your feet beating the paths your fathers made centuries ago; but your children shall follow newer trails, that lead to more dangerous jungles than those trod by your ancestors. Strange demons they will meet, before whom they will fall to rise no more.