The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

The officers are the only men who have absolutely nothing to gain, make, or lose by the Indians, and their point of view is accordingly the fairest, and they themselves say it would be a mistake to follow the plan now under consideration—of placing officers in charge of the agencies. This would at once strip them of their present neutral position, and, as well, open to them the temptation which the control of many thousands of dollars’ worth of property entails where the recipients of this property are as helpless and ignorant as children. They rather favor raising the salary of the Indian agent from two thousand to ten thousand dollars, and by so doing bring men of intelligence and probity into the service, and destroy at the same time the temptation to “make something” out of the office. It may have been merely an accident, but I did not meet with one officer in any of the army posts who did not side with the Indian in his battle for his rights with the Government. As for the agents, as the people say in the West, “they are not here for their health.” The Indian agents of the present day are, as every one knows, political appointments, and many of them—not all—are men who at home would keep their corner grocery or liquor store, and who would flatter and be civil to every woman in the neighboring tenement who came for a pound of sugar or a pitcher of beer. These men are suddenly placed in the control of hundreds of sensitive, dangerous, semi-civilized people, whom they are as capable of understanding as a Bowery boy would be of appreciating an Arab of the desert.

The agents are not the only people who make mistakes. Some friend mailed me a book the other day on Indian reservations, in order that I might avoid writing what has already been written. I read only one page of the book, in which the author described his manner of visiting the Indian encampments. He would drive to one of these in his ambulance, and upon being informed that the chiefs were waiting to receive him in their tents, would bid them meet him at the next camp, to which he would drive rapidly, and there make the same proposition. He would then stop his wagon three miles away on the prairie, and wait for the chiefs to follow him to that point. What his object was in this exhibition, with which he seemed very well satisfied, he only knows. Whether it was to teach the chiefs they were not masters in their own camps, or that he was a most superior person, I could not make out; but he might just as effectively have visited Washington, and sent the President word he could not visit him at the White House, but that he would grant him an interview at his hotel. I wonder just how near this superior young man got to the Indians, and just how wide they opened their hearts to him.

There was an Indian agent once—it was not long ago, but there is no need to give dates or names, for the man is dead—who when the Indians asked him to paint the wagons (with which the Government furnished them through him in return for their land) red instead of green, answered that he would not pander to their absurdly barbaric tastes. Only he did not say absurdly. He was a man who had his own ideas about things, and who was not to be fooled, and he was also a superior person, who preferred to trample on rather than to understand the peculiarities of his wards. So one morning this agent and his wife and children were found hacked to pieces by these wards with barbaric tastes, and the soldiers were called out, and shot many of the Indians; and many white women back of the barracks, and on the line itself, are now wearing mourning, and several officers got their first bar. It would seem from this very recent incident, as well as from many others of which one hears, that it would be cheaper in the end to place agents over the Indians with sufficient intelligence to know just when to be firm, and when to compromise in a matter; for instance, that of painting a wagon red.

VII
A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST

VII
A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST

THE army posts of the United States are as different one from another as the stations along the line of a great railroad system. There is the same organization for all, and the highest officers govern one as well as the other; but in appearance and degree of usefulness and local rule they are as independent and yet as dependent, and as far apart in actual miles, as the Grand Central Depot in New York, with its twenty tracks and as many ticket-windows and oak-bound offices and greatest after-dinner orator, is distant from the section-house at the unfinished end of a road somewhere on the prairie. The commanding officer’s quarters alone at Fort Sheridan cost thirty thousand dollars, and more than a million and a half has been spent on Fort Riley; but there are many other posts where nature supplied the mud and logs for the whole station, and the cost to the Government could not have been more than three hundred dollars at the most. It is consequently difficult to write in a general way of army posts. What is true of one is by no means true of another, and it will be better, perhaps, to first tell of those army posts which possess many features in common—eight-company posts, for instance, which are not too large nor too small, not too near civilization, and yet not too far removed from the railroad. An eight-company post is a little town or community of about three hundred people living in a quadrangle around a parade-ground. The scenery surrounding the quadrangle may differ as widely as you please to imagine it; it may be mountainous and beautiful, or level, flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is always the same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle, and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which the men live, and tennis-courts towards the officers’ quarters. When you speak of the side of the square where the enlisted men live, you say “barracks,” and you refer to the officers’ share of the quadrangle as “the line.” In England you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but you must not say this of a United States officer; he lives in the third or fourth house up or down “the line.”

A ONE-COMPANY POST AT OKLAHOMA CITY

The barracks are a long continuous row of single-story buildings with covered porches facing the parade. They are generally painted an uncompromising brown, and are much more beautiful inside than out, especially the messrooms, where all the wood-work has been scrubbed so hard that the tables are worn almost to a concave surface. The architectural appearance of the officers’ quarters on the line differs in different posts; but each house of each individual post, whether it is a double or single house, is alike to the number of bricks in the walls and in the exact arrangement of the rooms. The wives of the officers may change the outer appearance of their homes by planting rose-bushes and ivy about the yards, but whenever they do, some other officer’s wife is immediately transferred from another post and “outranks” them, and they have to move farther down the line, and watch the new-comer plucking their roses, and reaping the harvest she has not sown. This rule also applies to new wall-paper, and the introduction at your own expense of open fireplaces, with blue and white tiles which will not come off or out when the new-comer moves in. In addition to the officers’ quarters and the barracks, there is an administration building, which is the executive mansion of this little community, a quartermaster’s storehouse, a guard-house, and the hospital. The stables are back of the barracks, out of sight of those who live facing the parade, and there is generally a rear-guard of little huts and houses occupied by sergeants’ wives, who do the washing for the posts, and do it very well. This is, briefly, the actual appearance of an army post—a quadrangle of houses, continuous and one-story high on two sides, and separate and two stories high on the other two sides, facing the parade, and occasionally surrounded by beautiful country.