WHENCE COME MY PEOPLE?
The holiday recesses were spent by Chiquita in the great eastern cities, where she attended theater, opera, and many social functions of greater or lesser magnitude.
After Jack's wedding she came to rely upon his wife—who found the Indian Señorita always included in the invitations sent the Sheppard house—to smooth the difficult paths of etiquette and to instruct her in the many formalities necessarily omitted in her college life, that were imperative upon being presented in the whirl of fashionable circles. She was welcomed by various clubs, literary folk, and at state receptions—this grandly intellectual daughter of a savage chief.
The first great effort she made in behalf of her people was an attempt to forestall the opening of the great expanse of land in the Indian Territory to settlement by the white people. A venerable senator from Massachusetts espoused her cause sufficiently to awaken a hope in her inexperienced breast that the object could be accomplished. Another, from a western state, gladly joined in the undertaking, while a brilliant ex-secretary of state devoted his energies in her behalf.
At a memorable cabinet meeting the question was discussed, and in the presence of that august body, and of the President himself, Chiquita delivered her appeal, recounting step by step the claims under which the prerogative of the Indian to the land in question should be forever recognized:
"Mr. President, and gentlemen who constitute his advisers, you ask whence come my people?
"For ages, as countless as the sands of the Big River, the fresh waters of the great inland seas skirting the first lofty range of the Rocky Mountains washed in torrents and torrents the salt deposited by the great upheavals of the western continent, through the yawning cañons which were created by these torrents' own irresistible force, to the bases of the great barrier where the sun disappears. The fresh waters' encroaching left their alluvial deposits further and further toward the setting sun in the same manner as the white settlers dispossessed the noble red warrior and primeval possessor of the Western hemisphere. The fresh waters divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller compasses. In these grand forest-grown, grass-covered areas herds of wild horses, buffalo, deer, elk and mountain sheep found subsistence. The fertile valleys and meadows were thronged with villages of beaver, otter and mink, whose dams were overgrown with the silvery-leafed aspen upon which these busy families existed. The forests were fragrant with fir, cedar and pine, among whose branches the birds of the wood built their nests.
"But before these were other possessors of this great mass of tangled volcanic eruptions, at a time so remote that the mind becomes a mist, a fog bank in its endeavor to locate the date, and then only as an age, it being impossible to determine the century. The fossils of these prehistoric creatures have been found in deposits over three thousand feet in thickness, species until recently unknown to science. Here man inhabited dwellings of unhewn stone cemented with mortar containing volcanic ashes, at a period so long ago that the waters were supposed to wash the face of the cliffs upon whose precipitous side these ancient people lived, in evidence of which are the fossilized human bones.
"In this legacy is found the answer, 'Whence come my people?' And what nation has ever disputed the title of land conveyed by the Indians? As early as 1851, when Colorado was organized as a territory, a treaty was made at Fort Laramie with several tribes of Indians, by which the latter gave up all the lands east of the Rocky Mountains. West of the continental divide were the great warlike tribes of Utes extending to the Sierra Nevadas, 15,000 free-born American savages to whose necks the galling yoke of civilization was to be adjusted.
"The Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Comanches and Kiowas, plains Indians, were mild and tractable in comparison with the Utes. These latter were fearless, indomitable warriors, who owned the forest, the river beds and mountain crags by inheritance from Almighty God, and whose disestablishment is written in letters of blood where the forest man was the aggressor by retaliation. But the outrages of the new people, the educated, civilized white man, must be forever unrecorded. Repudiation, shameless duplicity, political and martial perfidy, local and national, followed each other year after year until 1865, when the final treaties effected the abandonment of Colorado by the plains Indians, who were removed to the Indian Territory, where the government agreed to pay each Indian $40 annually for forty years.