The logical relation of these paragraphs to the preceding one is striking, and the bearing of the two together on the case of the Winnebagoes is still more striking.
In the same report the Commissioner for Indian Affairs says: "If legislation were secured giving the President authority to remove any tribe or band, or any portion of a tribe or band, whenever in his judgment it was practicable, to any one of the reservations named, and if Congress would appropriate from year to year a sum sufficient to enable him to take advantage of every favorable opportunity to make such removals, I am confident that a few years' trial would conclusively demonstrate the entire feasibility of the plan. I believe that all the Indians in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota, and a part at least of those in Wyoming and Montana, could be induced to remove to the Indian Territory."
He adds "that the Indian sentiment is opposed to such removal is true," but he thinks that, "with a fair degree of persistence," the removal "can be secured." No doubt it can.
Later in the same report, under the head of "Allotments in Severalty," he says: "It is doubtful whether any high degree of civilization is possible without individual ownership of land. The records of the past, and the experience of the present, testify that the soil should be made secure to the individual by all the guarantees which law can devise, and that nothing less will induce men to put forth their best exertions. It is essential that each individual should feel that his home is his own; *** that he has a direct personal interest in the soil on which he lives, and that that interest will be faithfully protected for him and for his children by the Government."
The commissioner and the secretary who wrote these clear statements of evident truths, and these eloquent pleas for the Indians' rights, both knew perfectly well that hundreds of Indians had had lands "allotted to them" in precisely this way, and had gone to work on the lands so allotted, trusting "that that interest would be faithfully protected by the Government;" and that these "allotments," and the "certificates" of them, had proved to be good for nothing as soon as the citizens of a State united in a "demand" that the Indians should be moved. The commissioner and the secretary knew perfectly well, at the time they wrote these paragraphs, that in this one Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, for instance, "every head of a family owned eighty acres of land," and was hard at work on it—industrious, self-supporting, trying to establish that "hearth-stone" around which, as the secretary says, he must "gather his family, and in its possession be entirely secure and independent." And yet the secretary and the commissioner advise the moving of this Winnebago tribe to Indian Territory with the rest: "all the Indians in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota" could probably be "induced to move," they say.
These quotations from this report of the Interior Department are but a fair specimen of the velvet glove of high-sounding phrase of philanthropic and humane care for the Indian, by which has been most effectually hid from the sight of the American people the iron hand of injustice and cruelty which has held him for a hundred years helpless in its grasp.
In this same year an agent on one of the Nebraska agencies writes feelingly and sensibly:
"Nothing has tended to retard the progress of this tribe in the line of opening farms for themselves so much as the unsettlement occasioned by a continued agitation of the subject of selling their reservation and the removal of the tribe. *** The improvement that has been made at this agency during the past three years in the direction of developing among the Indians the means of self-support, seems to have caused an uneasiness that has been prolific of a great deal of annoyance, inasmuch as it has alarmed this speculative element around us with the fear that the same (continued) will eventually plant the Indians on their present fertile land so firmly that they cannot be removed, and thus they be deprived of the benefits of manipulating the sale of their reservation."
Nevertheless, the Winnebagoes keep on in their work—building houses, school-buildings, many of them of brick made on the ground.
In this year (1876) they experienced a great injustice in the passing of an Act of Congress fixing the total amount to be expended for pay of employés at any one agency at not more than $10,000. This necessitated the closing of the fine building they had built at a cost of $20,000 for the purpose of an industrial boarding-school.