The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

In the thirty-five years following the abandonment of the Indian treaties the problems of management changed with the ascending civilization of the national wards. General Francis A. Walker, Indian Commissioner in 1872, had seen the dawn of the "the day of deliverance from the fear of Indian hostilities," while his successors in office saw his prophecy fulfilled. Five years later Carl Schurz, as Secretary of the Interior, gave his voice and his aid to the improvement of management and the drafting of a positive policy. His application of the merit system to Indian appointments, which was a startling innovation in national politics, worked a great change after the petty thievery which had flourished in the presidency of General Grant. Grant had indeed desired to do well, and conditions had appreciably bettered, yet his guileless trust had enabled practical politicians to continue their peculations in instances which ranged from humble agents up to the Cabinet itself. Schurz not only corrected much of this, but the first report of his Commissioner, E. A. Hayt, outlined the preliminaries to a well-founded civilization. Besides the continuance of concentration and education there were four policies which stood out in this report—economy in the administration of rations, that the Indians might not be pauperized; a special code of law for the Indian reserves; a well-organized Indian police to enforce the laws; and a division of reserve lands into farms which should be assigned to individual Indians in severalty. The administration of Secretary Schurz gave substance to all these policies.

The progress of Indian education and civilization began to be a real thing during Hayes's presidency. Most of the wars were over, permanency in residence could be relied on to a considerable degree, the Indians could better be counted, tabulated, and handled. In 1880, the last year of Schurz in the Interior Department, the Indian Office reported an Indian population of 256,127 for the United States, excluding Alaska. Of these, 138,642 were described as wearing citizen's dress, while 46,330 were able to read. Among them had been erected both boarding and day schools, 72 of the former and 321 of the latter. "Reports from the reservations" were "full of encouragement, showing an increased and more regular attendance of pupils and a growing interest in education on the part of parents." Interest in the problem of Indian education had been aroused in the East as well as among the tribes during the preceding year or two, because of the experiment with which the name of R. H. Pratt was closely connected. The non-resident boarding school, where the children could be taken away from the tribe and educated among whites, had become a factor in Carlisle, Hampton, and Forest Grove. Lieutenant Pratt had opened the first of these with 147 students in November, 1879. His design had been to give to the boys and girls the rudiments of education and training in farming and mechanic arts. His experience had already, in 1880, shown this to be entirely practicable. The boys, uniformed and drilled as soldiers, under their own sergeants and corporals, marched to the music of their own band. Both sexes had exhibited at the Cumberland County Agricultural Fair, where prizes were awarded to many of them for quilts, shirts, pantaloons, bread, harness, tinware, and penmanship. Many of the students had increased their knowledge of white customs by going out in the summers to work in the fields or kitchens of farmers in the East. Here, too, they had shown the capacity for education and development which their bitterest frontier enemies had denied. In 1906 there were twenty-five of these schools with more than 9000 students in attendance.

It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade, and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform, it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:—

"CROWS, WAKE UP!

"Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October.
"Begin Planting for it Now.
"Plant a Good Garden.
"Put in Wheat and Oats.
Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to the Fair.
Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best Exhibits.
"Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too.

"Committee."

A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them, while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country. An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880, but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations. The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in 1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the agency courts.

An act passed in 1887 for the ownership of lands in severalty by Indians marked a great step towards solidifying Indian civilization. There had been no greater obstacle to this civilization than communal ownership of land. The tribal standard was one of hunting, with agriculture as an incidental and rather degrading feature. Few of the tribes had any recognition of individual ownership. The educated Indian and the savage alike were forced into economic stagnation by the system. Education could accomplish little in face of it. The changes of the seventies brought a growing recognition of the evil and repeated requests that Congress begin the breaking down of the tribal system through the substitution of Indian ownership.

In isolated cases and by special treaty provisions a few of the Indians had been permitted to acquire lands and be blended in the body of American citizens. But no general statute existed until the passage of the Dawes bill in February, 1887. In this year the Commissioner estimated that there were 243,299 Indians in the United States, occupying a total of 213,117 square miles of land, nearly a section apiece. By the Dawes bill the President was given authority to divide the reserves among the Indians located on them, distributing the lands on the basis of a quarter section or 160 acres to each head of a family, an eighth section to single adults and orphans, and a sixteenth to each dependent child. It was provided also that when the allotments had been made, tribal ownership should cease, and the title to each farm should rest in the individual Indian or his heirs. But to forestall the improvident sale of this land the owner was to be denied the power to mortgage or dispose of it for at least twenty-five years. The United States was to hold it in trust for him for this time.

Besides allowing the Indian to own his farm and thus take his step toward economic independence, the Dawes bill admitted him to citizenship. Once the lands had been allotted, the owners came within the full jurisdiction of the states or territories where they lived, and became amenable to and protected by the law as citizens of the United States.