The Indian Question

by Francis Amasa Walker

The features of this policy were first, the removal of the tribes beyond the limits of settlement; second, the assignment to them in perpetuity, under solemn treaty sanctions, of land sufficient to enable them to subsist by fishing and hunting, by stock-raising, or by agriculture, according to their habits and proclivities; third, their seclusion from the whites by stringent laws forbidding intercourse; fourth, the government of the Indians through their own tribal organizations, and according to their own customs and laws.

This policy, the character and relations of the two races being taken into account, we must pronounce one of sound and far-reaching statesmanship, notwithstanding that an advance of population altogether unprecedented in history has already made much of it obsolete, and rendered necessary a general re-adjustment of its details.

The first event which impaired the integrity of the scheme of President Monroe was the flight of the Mormons, under the pressure of social persecution, across the Plains in 1847. The success of this people in treating with the Indians has often been noted, and has been made the occasion of many unjust reflections upon the United States, as if a popular government, giving, both of necessity and of choice, the largest liberty to pioneer enterprise, could be reasonably expected to preserve peaceful relations with remote bands of savages as effectively as a political and religious despotism, keeping its membership compact and close in hand. But, while the Mormons have certainly been successful in maintaining good terms with the natives of the plains, it is not so certain that their influence upon the Indians has been advantageous to the government, or to the white settlers not of the church. It clearly has been for their interest to attach the natives to themselves rather than to the government; it clearly has been in their power to direct a great many agencies to that end; and it will probably require more faith in Mormon virtue than the majority of us possess to keep alive much of a doubt that they have actually done so. We certainly have the opinion of many persons well informed that it has been the constant policy of the Latter-Day Saints to teach the Indians to look to them rather than to the government as their benefactors and their protectors; to represent, as far as possible through agents and interpreters in their interest, the goods and supplies received from the United States as derived from the bounty of the church; to stir up, for special purposes or for general ends, troubles between the natives and the encroaching whites, east, west, and south; and, finally, so to alienate from the government and attach to themselves the Utes, Shoshones and Bannocks, as to assure themselves of their aid in the not improbable event of a last desperate struggle for life with the power of the United States.

The next event historically which tended to the disruption of the policy of seclusion was the discovery of gold upon the Pacific slope, which in three years replaced the few insinuating priests and indolent rancheros, who had previously formed the white population of the coast, with a hundred thousand eager gold-hunters. That the access of such a population—bold, adventurous, prompt to violence, reckless, and too often wantonly unjust and cruel—should stir up trouble and strife with the sixty thousand natives, upon whom they pressed at every point in their eager search for the precious metals, was a thing of course. The Oregon War followed, and occasional affairs like that at Ben Wright's Cave, leaving a heritage of hate from which such fruits as the recent Modoc War are not inaptly gathered.

In 1855-6 occurred the great movement, mainly under a political impulse, which carried population beyond the Missouri. In two or three years the tribes and bands which were native to Kansas and Nebraska, as well as those which had been removed from States east of the Mississippi, were suffering the worst effects of white intrusion. Of the Free-State party, not a few zealous members seemed disposed to compensate themselves for their benevolent efforts on behalf of the negro by crowding the Indian to the wall; while the slavery propagandists steadily maintained their consistency by impartially persecuting the members of both the inferior races.

Thus far we have shown how, instead of the natural boundary between the races which was contemplated in the establishment of the Indian policy of the government under Pres. Monroe, two lines of settlement had, prior to 1860, been pushed against the Indians,—one eastward from the Pacific, one westward from the Missouri, driving the natives in many cases from the soil guaranteed to them by treaty, and otherwise leaving them at a hundred points in dangerous contact with a border population not apt to be nice in its sense of justice, or slow to retaliate real or fancied injuries; while, during the same period, a colony of religious fanatics, foreign to the faith, and very largely also to the blood, of our people, was planted in the very heart of the Indian country, with passions strongly aroused against the government, and with interests opposed to the peace and security of the frontier.

But it was not until after the Civil War that the progress of events dealt its heaviest blow at the policy of Indian seclusion. In 1867-8 the great plough of industrial civilization drew its deep furrow across the continent, from the Missouri to the Pacific, as a sign of dissolution to the immemorial possessors of the soil. Already the Pacific Railroad has brought changes which, without it, might have been delayed for half a century. Not only has the line of settlement been made continuous from Omaha to Sacramento, so far as the character of the soil will permit; but from a score of points upon the railroad population has gone north and gone south, following up the courses of the streams, and searching out every trace of gold upon the mountains, till recesses have been penetrated which five years ago were scarcely known to trappers and guides, and lodgement has been effected upon many even of the more remote reservations. The natural effects of this introduction by the railroad of white population into the Indian country have not yet been wholly wrought. There are still reservations where the seclusion of the Indians is practically maintained by the ill-repressed hostility of tribes; some, where the same result is secured by the barrenness or inaccessibility of the regions in which they are situated; but it is evident that the lapse of another such five years will find every reservation between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains surrounded, and to a degree penetrated, by prospectors and pioneers, miners, ranchmen, or traders. Against the intrusion of these classes, in the numbers in which they are now appearing in the Indian country, the Intercourse Act of 1834 is wholly ineffective. It was an admirable weapon against the single intruder: it avails nothing against the lawless combinations of squatter territories.

While the movements of population have thus in great part destroyed, and threaten soon utterly to destroy, at once the seclusion in which it was hoped the native tribes might find opportunity for the development of their better qualities, and the natural resources to which, in the long interval that must precede the achievement of true industrial independence by a people taught through centuries of barbarous traditions to despise labor, the Indian might look for subsistence, Congress in 1871 struck the severest blow that remained to be given to the Indian policy, in its fourth great feature,—that of the self-government of tribes according to their own laws and customs,—by declaring that "Hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty."

In the face of three hundred and eighty-two treaties with Indian tribes, ratified by the Senate as are treaties with foreign powers, this may perhaps be accepted as quite the most conspicuous illustration in history of the adage, "Circumstances alter cases."[L] Since Anthony Wayne received the cession of pretty much the whole State of Ohio from the Wyandots, Delawares, and Shawnees, times have indeed changed; and it is fitting that we should change with them. The declaration of Congress is well enough on grounds of justice and national honor; but it none the less aims a deadly blow at the tribal autonomy which was made a vital part of the original scheme of Indian control. The declaration cited does not in terms deny the self-sufficiency of the tribe for the purposes of internal self-government; but the immediate necessary effect of it is further to weaken the already waning power of the chiefs, while Congress yet fails to furnish any substitute for their authority, either by providing for the organization of the tribes on more democratic principles, with direct responsibility to the government, or by arming the Indian agents with magisterial powers adequate to the exigency.

Under the traditional policy of the United States, the Indian agent was a minister resident to a "domestic dependent nation." The Act of March 3, 1871, destroys the nationality, and leaves the agent in the anomalous position of finding no authority within the tribe to which he can address himself, yet having in himself no legal authority over the tribe or the members of it. It is true, that, as matter of fact, agents, some in greater and some in less degree, continue to exercise control after a fashion over the movements of tribes and bands. This is partly due to the force of habit, partly to superior intelligence, partly to the discretion which the agent exercises in the distribution of the government's bounty; but every year the control becomes less effectual, and agents and chiefs complain more and more that they cannot hold the young braves in check.