He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.
I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.
The Ute nation is divided into two sections—viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.
My policy—one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government—is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.
There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.
One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.
Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business, they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply because they were there first.