A little back from the street the school building sat bleakly exposed on the sod, flanked on each side by still more inhospitable dormitories—all humming with unseen life. Across the river—the one grateful, gracious touch of all—the yellowed conical tents of the Cheyennes rose amidst green willows, and far beyond, on the beautiful velvet green of the prairies, their untethered ponies fed.
To the careless observer this village was lonely, repulsive; to the sympathetic mind it was a place of drama, for there the passions, prejudices, ancestral loves and hates of two races met and clashed.
There the man of the polished stone age was trying, piteously, tragically trying, to take on the manner of life of a race ten thousand years in advance of him, and there a few devoted Quakers were attempting to lead the nomads into the ways of the people of the plow.
The Cheyennes, at the time practically military prisoners, had given but a nominal consent to the education of their children, and many individuals openly opposed it. For the most part the pupils in the school wore buckskin shirts and were the wastrels and orphans of the tribe, neglected and stupid. The fine, bold sons of the principal chiefs would not surrender their freedom, and their contempt for those who did was expressed in the cry, “Ahyah! Whiteman, Whiteman!”
It will appear that the problem before the teacher of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe school in those days was not merely to govern the pupils in the schoolroom, but to induce men like Tomacham and Tontonava to send their own brave and handsome sons. With great native wit and shrewdness, Seger, the newly appointed master, said to the agent: “Our point of attack is the child. The red man’s love for his offspring is very deep. We must also convince the mothers. They are the conservative forces.”
The young teacher, Seger, had already won many friends among the chief men by his unfailing helpfulness as well as sympathy with their ways, and not content with the few pupils he had, he went out among the tepees pleading the cause of education with the fathers in the hearing of the mothers.
The old men listened gravely and for the most part courteously—never interrupting, weighing each word as it fell. Some of them admitted the reasonableness of his plea. “We think you are telling us the truth,” they said, “but our hearts will not let us go with you on the road. We love the old things. We do not like these new things. We despise the white man’s clothing—we do not want our sons to go crop-haired like a black man. We have left the warpath—never to go back to it. What is before us we do not know—but we are not yet ready to give our children into your hands.” And the women sitting near applauded and said, “Aye, aye!”
Seger argued: “What will you do? The buffaloes are gone. The elk and deer are going. Your sons cannot live by hunting—they must live as the white man lives—by tilling the earth.”
“All that is strange,” darkly answered Tomacham. “We are as the Great Spirit made us. We cannot change. If the Great One wished us to be white why did He not make us so in the first place?”