The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

The vexed question of civilian or military control had reached the bitterest stage of its discussion when Grant became President. For five years there had been general wars in which both departments seemed to be badly involved and for which responsibility was hard to place. There were many things to be said in favor of either method of control. Beginning with the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1832, the office had been run by the War Department for seventeen years. In this period the idea of a permanent Indian Country had been carried out; the frontier had been established in an unbroken line of reserves from Texas to Green Bay; and the migration across the plains had begun. But with the creation of the Interior Department in 1849 the Indian Bureau had been transferred to civilian hands. As yet the Indian war was so exceptional that it was easy to see the arguments in favor of a peace policy. It was desired, and honestly too, though the results make this conviction hard to hold, to treat the Indian well, to keep the peace, and to elevate the savages as rapidly as they would permit it. However the government failed in practice and in controlling the men of the frontier, there is no doubt about the sincerity of its general intent. Had there been no Oregon and no California, no mines and no railways, and no mixture of slavery and politics, the hope might not have failed of realization. Even as it was, the civilian bureau had little trouble with its charges for nearly fifteen years after its organization. In general the military power was called upon when disorder passed beyond the control of the agent; short of that time the agent remained in authority.

As a means of introducing civilization among the tribes the agents were more effective than army officers could be. They were, indeed, underpaid, appointed for political reasons, and often too weak to resist the allurements of immorality or dishonesty; but they were civilians. Their ideals were those of industry and peace. Their terms of service were often too short for them to learn the business, but they were not subject to the rapid shifting and transfer which made up a large part of army life. Army officers were better picked and trained than the agents, but their ambitions were military, and they were frequently unable to understand why breaches of formal discipline were not always matters of importance.

The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau. The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian; that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars, it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson, and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the Indian must go.

The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,—knocks, they claimed, generally due to mistakes of the bureau,—it ought to have the whole responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace. Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.

From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which would have been more effective had coöperation between the army and the bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities, and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men, "eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the Indian Department.

The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts," sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after 1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious, charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an increasing standard of criticism.

In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869, and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In 1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872, "the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its 38th Annual Report, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes, upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may justly be proud."

The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered. Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy. Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the citizen farmer more rapid.

Two years after the erection of the Board of Indian Commissioners Congress took another long step towards a better condition by ordering that no more treaties with the Indian tribes should be made by President and Senate. For more than two years before 1871 no treaty had been made and ratified, and now the policy was definitely changed. For ninety years the Indians had been treated as independent nations. Three hundred and seventy treaties had been concluded with various tribes, the United States only once repudiating any of them. In 1863, after the Sioux revolt, it abrogated all treaties with the tribes in insurrection; but with this exception, it had not applied to Indian relations the rule of international law that war terminates all existing treaties. The relation implied by the treaty had been anomalous. The tribes were at once independent and dependent. No foreign nation could treat with them; hence they were not free. No state could treat with them, and the Indian could not sue in United States courts; hence they were not Americans. The Supreme Court in the Cherokee cases had tried to define their unique status, but without great success. It was unfortunate for the Indians that the United States took their tribal existence seriously. The agreements had always a greater sanctity in appearance than in fact. Indians honestly unable to comprehend the meaning of the agreement, and often denying that they were in any wise bound by it, were held to fulfilment by the power of the United States. The United States often believed that treaty violation represented deliberate hostility of the tribes, when it signified only the unintelligence of the savage and his inclination to follow the laws of his own existence. Attempts to enforce treaties thus violated led constantly to wars whose justification the Indian could not see.

The act of March 3, 1871, prohibited the making of any Indian treaty in the future. Hereafter when agreements became necessary, they were to be made, much as they had been in the past, but Congress was the ratifying power and not the Senate. The fiction of an independence which had held the Indians to a standard which they could not understand was here abandoned; and quite as much to the point, perhaps, the predominance of the Senate in Indian affairs was superseded by control by Congress as a whole. In no other branch of internal administration would the Senate have been permitted to make binding agreements, but here the fiction had given it a dominance ever since the organization of the government.