The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 2 of 2)

by Dean C. Worcester

This trail has since been widened. If formerly required nerve to ride a horse around the corner where the Igorot is standing.

All of the territory in Northern Mindanao east of Dapitan and north of the eighth parallel of latitude was at the outset divided between the provinces of Surigao and Misamis. It is generally conceded that these provinces had been worse governed under American rule by their Filipino officials than have any others, and it was to be anticipated that, under such circumstances, their very numerous non-Christian inhabitants would prove to have been very badly mistreated. Sinister rumours reached me from time to time as to what was occurring, but I had no competent persons whom I could send to make investigations on the ground, and intended to defer action until I could go myself.

Matters were finally brought to a crisis by reports from Catholic priests, school-teachers and other reliable persons setting forth a condition of affairs which seemed to demand immediate remedial action. The commission had previously made a liberal sum available for work among the Bukidnon people of Misamis, and I had endeavoured to bring about the prosecution of this work by the Filipino provincial officials, but my efforts had been fruitless. Not one centavo of the funds appropriated had ever been expended. No Filipino provincial official had so much as visited the main Bukidnon country, the borders of which were distant less than three hours’ ride from the provincial capital.

The Bukidnon people are industrious. They raise a large part of the coffee, hemp and cacao exported from Cagayan, the capital and the principal port of Misamis. They were being robbed when they sold their produce. A common procedure was to instruct them that they must sell to certain individuals at absurdly low prices, and if they did not promptly obey, to bring charges of sedition against them and throw them into jail. As a matter of fact, they hardly knew the meaning of the word sedition.

Depredations upon them were by no means confined to the town of Cagayan de Misamis. Filipinos from the coast invaded their territory, debauching them with vino and purchasing their property when they were drunk; getting them into crooked gambling games and cheating them, or swaggering around armed with revolvers and so terrorizing them that they surrendered their belongings. It was common for a Filipino to go into the Bukidnon country with nothing but the clothes on his back, and soon to return with three or four carabaos heavily laden with hemp, coffee, cacao, or gutta percha.

Although the provincial governor had appointed, in some instances, men whom he had never seen as presidentes of settlements, the settlements were in reality without government, and their discouraged and disgusted people were betaking themselves to the mountains whence they had been brought years before by Jesuit missionary priests. The wilder members of the Bukidnon tribe, and the Manobos in the southern part of the province, who had never abandoned their mountain homes, were preying upon their neighbours, and committing crimes of violence undisturbed.

In the Agusan River valley conditions were nearly as bad. The people along the main stream were for the most part broken-spirited Manobos. Their settlements had been parcelled out among the members of the municipal council of Butuan to be plundered. The activities of these “Christian” gentlemen had been such that a number of Manobo villages were already completely abandoned, while the people of others were gradually betaking themselves to secure hiding-places in the trackless forests which stretch east and west from the banks of the Agusan.

Both in the Bukidnon and in the Manobo country the trade in bad vino was being actively pushed. The principal business on the Agusan River at that time was shipping it up-stream. Opium was being imported in considerable quantities from Cebu. The use of this drug was already established among the people of Butuan, and was gradually spreading up the river. The wilder Manobos, who lived some distance back from the stream, and the Mandayas along its upper waters, were killing and plundering without let or hindrance.

These statements, coming as they did from absolutely reliable witnesses, convinced me that I had allowed work for non-Christians in other parts of the archipelago to interfere unduly with investigations which I should have made in this region. As the legislation under which we were working for the betterment of the wild people had now taken final form, all that was necessary in order to begin active operations looking to the correction of these untoward conditions was to cut off a province from Surigao and Misamis and organize it under the Special Provincial Government Act. In view of the relative unimportance of the Filipino population in Misamis and Surigao, and of the lamentable conditions which had arisen there under Filipino provincial officials elected in accordance with the provisions of the Provincial Government Act, I suggested that both provinces be reorganized under the Special Provincial Government Act. This would have had the effect of making their officials appointive. American governors who would have protected the non-Christian inhabitants could have been put in office. Unfortunately, the first session of the Philippine Legislature was about to be held, the assemblymen having already been elected. Every member of the commission present, American and Filipino, agreed with me that the course which I suggested would be in the interest of the inhabitants of these two provinces, but they all shied off when it came to taking the needed action because of the political hullabaloo which would most certainly have resulted. I was forced to accept the best compromise I could get, and a law was passed providing for the establishment of the province of Agusan with two sub-provinces to be known respectively as Butuan and Bukidnon. Butuan took in the whole Agusan River valley as far south as the eighth parallel of latitude, and east and west to the crests of the two watersheds. It also included some territory on the west coast of the northern peninsula of Mindanao. Bukidnon included all of the territory inhabited by the people of the same name, and that of some wild Manobos in central Mindanao.

Armed with the law creating the new province, I proceeded to investigate conditions on the ground, and actually to establish the provincial government. At the town of Butuan, situated about five miles up the Agusan River, and accessible to good-sized steamers, I was met by Frederick Johnson, a captain in the Philippine constabulary who had had wide experience in dealing with the non-Christian tribes of the Moro Province and had been very successful in this work. At my request he had been appointed governor of the Province of Agusan, of which the town of Butuan was the capital.