I asked, “What do you do when one Indian kills another?” They answered: “We have a trial, and if the killing was without great cause, we sentence the guilty one to be killed by the near of kin to his victim; we appoint the time and the place, and we have never known an Indian to fail to come voluntarily in time for his own execution.”
They believe that the Great Spirit will give all the hell or all the heaven that each deserves; that there is no possibility of escape from a just penalty and no danger of losing a deserved heaven, but to them it is unjust to hope for anything on the merits of another. H. W. Beecher said in his first lecture after his return from the Pacific Coast:
“I made special inquiry of those who are posted on Indian affairs, as to their moral status, and was always told that when fairly treated they are quite reliable.”
Gen. Crookes said of the Apaches, that while they were protected on their reserves from outside aggression they were as well behaved and orderly as any community of people in the United States.
It is true, they killed Generals Canby and Custer, but the first had, contrary to preliminary agreement, moved his soldiers twenty-five miles, and placed them in two companies on each side of the place where the treaty was to be made. The first demand of the Modoc chief was, to take back the soldiers, and it was not until a long delay, and a firm refusal on the part of Canby, that the Modoc chief fired the fatal shot.
And as for Custer and his men, they fell while ignobly, and without right or authority, invading the peaceful home of Sitting Bull and his people.
General Harney says:
“I have lived fifty years on the frontier, and I have never known an Indian war in which they were not in the right.”
Dr. McLaughlin said:
“I have been fifty-three years an Indian trader, and more than fifty years superintendent of the Hudson Bay Fur Company, and in all that time, I have never seen an occasion to shed the blood of an Indian. The American people suppose that their revenge is proof of savagery. But that is a mistake. It is their sense of justice, and whatever they do is but an echo of what has been done to them. They believe as Moses taught, blood for blood, life for life.”