With such a triumvirate of integrity, high legal attainments, and judicial honor, a teacher may well feel proud. While it is the duty of the teacher to aid and assist his pupils and to impart instruction in the various branches taught, yet this is not his whole, or principal mission. His higher and nobler mission is to arouse into action all the latent forces and qualities of his pupil's nature and to inspire him with a noble ambition to conquer in the arduous conflicts of life. If he succeeds in the accomplishment of this, he has fully performed his mission.
After I ceased to teach public school in Marion County, I became the private tutor of the children of R., who was at the time Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon and Washington. I also became to some extent his literary secretary. R., though not a learned man, had business capacity of a high order. In religious matters he was an agnostic, and he read more of Shakespeare than he did of the Bible. He was a man of inflexible integrity, and a capable and faithful administrative officer. He was much interested in Indian civilization, and talked much of it. He was of the opinion that the system of most of the churches was wrong in principle, and not fruitful in good results. He maintained that the first move in this work of civilization was to improve the physical condition of the Indian, and that the moral improvement would come as a slow, but necessary consequence. Being full of the subject, he concluded to call a council of the chiefs and the principal head men of the various tribes under his jurisdiction, and to impart to them his ideas in this behalf. The time was fixed, the place named was the general council hall in the city of Salem, and notices were sent out requesting their attendance. R., while he had a good residence in town, usually spent most of his time upon his fine farm in the country. At the appointed time he invited me to go with him to the council and take notes of the proceedings. When we arrived at the council chamber we found from fifty to seventy-five Indians seated on the floor with their backs to the wall. After a general salutation, R. took a seat on the rostrum and requested an Indian whom he knew to act as interpreter. As the interpreter could not speak in the language of the various tribes represented, the jargon was adopted as the mode of communication—all the Indians understanding that. R. briefly stated to them the object of the council, and then asked the question, "Did they desire fine houses, fine horses and cattle, and plenty to eat and wear": R. was a very emphatic man and spoke in short and positive sentences. The Indian is a stoic, and if any emotion ever agitates him it is not betrayed in his countenance. I was much interested in the interpreter. He seemed to be full of his mission, and he imitated the tone of voice and gestures of R. Having asked the question, R. himself emphatically answered that all these things that he had mentioned, and which they desired, were obtained by "work." He reminded them that many of them had visited his fine house in the city, and had seen his fine furniture and other things, and he asked: "How did I get these things?" He again answered, "By work." Having concluded his short, emphatic and impulsive speech, silence prevailed for a short time. Finally a chief arose and with great deliberation adjusted his blanket about him; this being accomplished, he spoke as follows: "We are very thankful for the good talk of our father; we will consider it; we cannot answer now." He suggested that one week from that time they would meet the good father at that place and tell him their conclusions.
We afterwards learned that they appointed what we would call a committee. That committee, in their investigations, when they found a man engaged in some menial employment and roughly clad, followed him to his house, found that it was a very humble abode, and was not filled with fine things; then they followed up the merchant, who had many fine things and wore good clothes, to his home, and they found a fine house filled with fine furniture; they also applied the same test to the saloon keeper. Neither the merchant nor the saloon keeper, according to their views, worked at all. On our way home from the council chamber I ventured to suggest to R. that most of the wealth of this world was in the hands of men who organized, or directed labor or work, and but a small pittance in the possession of those who actually performed the labor. I gave as my judgment that the Indian had no conception of this work of directing and organizing labor, and that he would not consider it as work at all. At the appointed time for the answer, the spokesman for the Indians narrated what I have briefly stated above, and announced very plainly and flatly as their conclusion, that what the good father had said was not true. R. was much disappointed at his failure to start a general movement upward in the line of Indian civilization. I am of the opinion that his feelings went farther and impinged on the domain of actual disgust. The subject of Indian civilization fell, henceforward, into innocuous desuetude.
Looking at the surface manifestations only, and not having the ability to look deeper into that complex machine called society, we cannot be astonished at the conclusion reached by the Indian committee.
While I had the honor to represent Washington Territory in Congress, and by request of several members of the Committee on Indian Affairs with whom I was acquainted, and while the bill reported by them was under consideration and general debate was in order, I made a speech on Indian civilization. I shall not reproduce that speech here, nor give an extended synopsis of it. I commenced with the declaration that the philosophy of an Indian's life was to put forth an act and to reap immediately, the result of that act; that he threw a baited hook into the water, and expected to obtain fish; that he sent an arrow or a bullet on its fatal mission, and he expected game; that he did not plant nor sow, because the time between planting or sowing, and reaping—the gathering and enjoyment of the result of his work, was too distant; that it requires the highest degree of civilization to do an act, or to make an investment, the profits of which are not to be realized until the lapse of considerable time: that this primary law inherent in an Indian's philosophy of life is fundamental, and no system for his civilization can disregard it. My next cardinal proposition was that Indian tribes, if civilized at all, must be civilized along the lines of their past history, habits and modes of life; that some tribes of Indians subsist, and have subsisted for ages, on the products of ocean, lake and river: that these are sometimes called fish Indians: that to make appropriations to teach these Indians agriculture, or the successful operation of the farm, is a wasteful expenditure of public money; they are naturally sailors, and have carried the art of canoe making and sailing to a high degree of perfection; their larger canoes are models of symmetry, safety and strength; that in them they fearlessly go out on the ocean a distance of 40 or 50 miles to obtain halibut, codfish and fur seals. Let the Government, I said, if it desires to civilize these Indians, build them a sailing-vessel of a hundred tons or more capacity, and they will almost intuitively learn to sail and manage it; it would act as a consort for their larger canoes and as a storehouse for the profits of the sea taken or captured by them; that with such a boat, the Neah Bay Indians, for instance, would soon become self-supporting. My views had a respectful hearing, and influenced to some extent the policy of the Government in that regard. A large number of copies of this speech were sent by me to the people of the Territory, and to all our Territorial papers; but none of these, so far as I know, noticed it further than to say that I had made such a speech. Copious extracts from it, containing its points, were published in many of the Eastern papers, while two published it in full. There was some discussion as to the soundness of my views, but generally they were approved. So far as the Neah Bay Indians were concerned, the Government did build a sailing-vessel of smaller dimensions, however, and many of the Neah Bay Indians have like vessels of their own, and have become, to a great extent, self-supporting and prosperous. The same policy in a modified form, but in fact the development of the same idea, was adopted by Rev. Wilbur, agent of the Yakima Indians; and these Indians, to a great extent, have given up their nomadic mode of life; they have small farms, and neat and comfortable houses; they have gardens, chickens and a large accumulation of domestic animals about them. They are prosperous, and slowly moving along the line to a higher civilization.
Civilization is a slow process. It takes all the forces, moral, intellectual, educational and religious, now in successful operation, to hold the world from falling back and to move it slowly, but surely onward and upward, to a higher plane of civilization. While it is a tedious and arduous, if not an impossible task, to make a white man, in his habits and modes of life, out of an Indian, yet the descent of the white man to the modes, habits of life and appearance of an Indian, is a sadly speedy process.
In a trip I made to Colville, Washington, in 1856 there came into our camp one day a person whom I supposed at first to be an Indian. He was dressed in buckskin, ornamented with fringes and beads, with a blanket over his shoulders; his hair was long and unkept, with no hat on his head and his face bronzed like that of an Indian; and he was besmeared across the forehead with red ochre, or some other kind of paint. I should judge that he was 36 years of age. At first he refused to talk, except in jargon; but after a while, when we were alone, he became more communicative, and gave me something of his history. He spoke good English. He claimed to be a graduate of one of the Eastern Colleges, and I have no doubt his claim was true. He had gotten into some difficulty in the States and had been living as an Indian for some eight years, or more. To all appearances he was an Indian; he looked like an Indian and acted like one. I was in his company for some three days, and when alone he talked to me in good English; he said he loved this wild and nomadic life, with its perfect freedom from the shams and hypocrisy of so-called civilization. He said that the hills, the mountains with their snow-crowned culminations, the dark woods, the silver thread of the stream viewed from an elevated point and fringed with green as it went leaping and rollicking to its ocean home, were to him an unwritten poem, the rythm of which he enjoyed, and the lines of which he was trying to interpret. He quoted to me from Byron the passage concerning the pleasures of the pathless woods, and from Bryant:
"Where rolls the Oregon,
And hears no sound, save his own dashings."
On the evening of the third day he rode away in the continuous woods to enjoy, I suppose, their poetry and solitude. This case illustrates the facility of the descent, by even an educated white man, to the level of an Indian; retaining, however, in his soul, still glowing, some of the lights of civilization.
While I was stopping at R.'s I wrote a series of eight articles for The Oregonian, showing the necessity of manufacturing crevices in the country to hold the gold taken out of the gold mines, and also that which was being brought in great abundance by its citizens from California. These articles were used by The Oregonian, by my implied assent, as editorials. The Oregonian was the leading opposition paper in the Territory, with Silver-Gray Whig tendencies. The leading Democratic paper was The Statesman, published at Salem, and owned and edited by Asa Bush, who was a sharp, pungent, and effective editorial writer. "Tom Drier," as the editor of The Oregonian was familiarly called, was an editorial writer of considerable ability. Drier usually added some introductory matter to my articles, and also some matter of amplification, or illustration. It was to me a matter of interest, and amusement, to note that the editor of The Statesman was always able to point out to its readers the matter written by The Oregonian's "hired man," and what was added by the editor. Bush did not know who wrote these articles, nor did anybody else know except myself, R. and the editor of The Oregonian. Bush spoke highly of these articles and enforced, in editorials of his own, the logic and necessity of the policy recommended by them. These articles had much to do with the establishment of the first woolen mills in the State of Oregon. These mills were built at Salem.