POSTSCRIPT.
Here ends the article I prepared for the “Christian Union,” but which, proving too long for a newspaper, you have advised me to print in a pamphlet; and I conclude to make it an appeal to the UNOFFICIAL people of the United States, instead of to the Government, as I first thought of doing.
For, notwithstanding the good intentions of the new administration, I see it is effectually hindered (how, it does not itself realize) from doing justice to the Indian, as its first act with respect to the Crow Creek tribe promised would be its policy.
I mentioned that the satisfactory testimony respecting the character of Sarah Winnemucca’s school, with which I closed the above report of it, was extracted from “voluminous letters,” overflowing with details of the innumerable difficulties Sarah had to contend with, of which some idea may be obtained from the following extract of a letter which my correspondent addressed at the same date to an Indianapolis newspaper:—
“Natches wanted land of his own; and for a wonder, he got it. Senator Stanford gave him one hundred and sixty acres. Where cattle range, land must be fenced. Lumber is very high, as it comes from a distance. Miss Peabody sent him $200 to fence it. Water comes next. Nevada is a desert without irrigation. By agreeing to pay them out of his crop, Natches furnished thirteen men (Indians and himself) one month, to work on the dam and ditches, to pay for his water, but gets no paper to show how long. Eastern people help him to a wagon, plough, spade, hoe, and axe. He already has horses, and he gets in sixty-eight acres of nice wheat. As the wheat grows and tempts the cattle, the water-power people tell him he must leave the gate open so they can get to their ditches, some of which they put on his land without permission. The white men on each side of him have gates, and keep them shut, although their land is used only for grazing. I go to town, find they have no right to say anything about it, and the gate is put up, and the old uncle who has camped by it to keep out the cows and save the wheat can do something else. The wheat gets ripe; he can hire a machine to cut it at $1.75 per acre, cash. He has no cash; he must hire Indian women at $5 per acre, and pay in wheat.
“The next time I go to town, I am told that the water company has decided not to let Natches have any more water, because ‘Indians are so lazy, they don’t want them around,’ and, for illustration, point to that old man who sat all day by the hole in Natches fence. I tried to explain; but it is not permitted to explain things here.
“At all the railway stations along the road, one sees Indians sitting on the shady side of the house or walking along the track, sometimes begging. I talked with one of them of the loafing and card-playing that is so common. She admitted and regretted it, and added: ‘Let me disguise you as an Indian, and go to the reservation where all these Indians have been trained. Stay a few weeks as an Indian, and learn to enjoy work as we have to do it, and see if you think our young men can see any good in it, or have any motive for doing it. You know children,—see what you think the same training would do for a white child.’”
It is plain that jealousy and opposition were excited to madness by the very success of Sarah’s unexampled enterprise, which has also aroused the attention of Agent Gibson, whose intrigues form the subjects of other letters.
The week before she arrived, an official from Washington, who was an intimate friend of Gibson, had appeared, and told Sarah that unless Natches would surrender his independent possession of the land, and she the direction of her school, to the authorized agent of Pyramid Lake, no aid would be given to the boarding-school from the reserved fund for Indian Education. Sarah, however, had indignantly refused to accept any aid on such destructive conditions.
I must confess I was not surprised or very sorry for this final demonstration that the only effectual thing to be done to help the Indian to come up from himself (to use a happy expression of Mr. Dawes’, that exactly describes what Sarah is intent upon doing), is to ABOLISH THE PRESENT AGENCY SYSTEM ALTOGETHER, as I am glad to see was proposed by Mr. Painter, at the late Mohunk Conference; for it is the most effectual instrumentality of a formidable Ring, composed of the still unreformed civil service on the frontiers, and of the majority of the frontier population, who deprecate Indian civilization, and work against it with an immense mercantile interest scattered all over the Union, that fattens on the CONTRACTS FOR SUPPLIES, which is the breath of life to this well-named “Hidden Power.”