VI
ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION
VI
ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION
THE American Indian may be considered either seriously or lightly, according to one’s inclination and opportunities. He may be taken seriously, like the Irish question, by politicians and philanthropists; or lightly, as a picturesque and historic relic of the past, as one regards the beef-eaters, the Tower, or the fishwives at Scheveningen. There are a great many Indians and a great many reservations, and some are partly civilized and others are not, and the different tribes differ in speech and manner of life as widely as in the South the clay-eater of Alabama differs from a gentleman of one of the first families of Virginia. Any one who wishes to speak with authority on the American Indian must learn much more concerning him than the names of the tribes and the agencies.
The Indian will only be considered here lightly and as a picturesque figure of the West.
THE CHEYENNE TYPE
Many years ago the people of the East took their idea of the Indian from Cooper’s novels and “Hiawatha,” and pictured him shooting arrows into herds of buffalo, and sitting in his wigwam with many scalp-locks drying on his shield in the sun outside. But they know better than that now. Travellers from the West have told them that this picture belongs to the past, and they have been taught to look upon the Indian as a “problem,” and to consider him as either a national nuisance or as a much-cheated and ill-used brother. They think of him, if they think of him at all, as one who has fallen from his high estate, and who is a dirty individual hanging around agencies in a high hat and a red shirt with a whiskey-bottle under his arm, waiting a chance to beg or steal. The Indian I saw was not at all like this, but was still picturesque, not only in what he wore, but in what he did and said, and was full of a dignity that came up at unexpected moments, and was as suspicious or trustful as a child.
It is impossible when one sees a blanket Indian walking haughtily about in his buckskin, with his face painted in many colors and with feathers in his hair, not to think that he has dressed for the occasion, or goes thus equipped because his forefathers did so, and not because he finds it comfortable. When you have seen a particular national costume only in pictures and photographs, it is always something of a surprise to find people wearing it with every-day matter-of-course ease, as though they really preferred kilts or sabots or moccasins to the gear to which we are accustomed at home. And the Indians in their fantastic mixture of colors and beads and red flannel and feathers seemed so theatrical at first that I could not understand why the army officers did not look back over their shoulders when one of these young braves rode by. The first Indians I saw were at Fort Reno, where there is an agency for the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. This reservation is in the Oklahoma Territory, but the Government has bought it from the Indians for a half-dollar an acre, and it is to be opened to white settlers. The country is very beautiful, and the tall grass of the prairie, which hides a pony, and shows only the red blanketed figure on his back, and over which in the clear places the little prairie-dogs scamper, and where the red buttes stand out against the sky, and show an edge as sharp and curving as the prow of a man-of-war, gives one a view of a West one seems to have visited and known intimately through the illustrated papers.