We were at it again in 1866. In violation of the most explicit agreements we built Forts Phil Kearney, Reno and Smith, in their country; they flew to arms; the cost to the Government was a million dollars a month; and finally the forts were vacated.
We had a great war with the Cheyennes in 1864-5. It began in the most atrocious massacre that disgraces the annals of our country. It was at a time when settlers were pouring into Colorado. The buffalo had become scarce; the annuities for some reason had ceased; the Indians were sad and depressed. But they kept the peace. Black Kettle, of whom I have already spoken, was their chief. A white man made complaint to a United States officer that an Indian had stolen some of his horses. The officer did not know the man, nor whether or not he had owned any horses; but he fitted out an expedition to seize horses. Soon they ran across Indians and claimed their stock, though the Indians protested that they had only ponies and no American horses. A fight ensued and some Indians were killed. Black Kettle knew his danger. He rushed at once to the Governor of Colorado, seeking protection. It was refused. Col. Boone, an old resident of the Territory, told Bishop Whipple that it was the saddest company he had even seen when they stopped at his house on their way back. He offered them food, but they said: “Our hearts are sick; we cannot eat.”
Soon after troops appeared upon the horizon. Black Kettle and his two brothers went out with a white flag to meet them. They fired on the flag and the two brothers fell dead. Black Kettle returned to his camp. Three men in the United States uniform were in his tepee. He said; “I believe you are spies; it shall never be said that a man ate Black Kettle’s bread and came to harm in his tent. Go to your people before the fight begins.” He gathered his men and they fought for their lives. A few escaped; but men, women and children were massacred in a butchery too horrible to relate, Women were ripped open and babes were scalped; and the Sand Creek massacre has gone upon record, by testimony that cannot be impeached, as a “butchery that would have disgraced the tribes of Central Africa.” (Bishop Whipple’s letter to Evening Post, January, 1879; and the report of the Doolittle Commission.)
But we fought the Cheyennes again in 1867. What occasioned that war? Gen. Hancock, “without any known provocation,” as says the report to Congress of the Indian Bureau, in July, 1867, surrounded a village of Cheyennes who had been at peace since the signing of the treaty of 1865, and were quietly occupying the grounds assigned to them by the treaty, burned down the homes of three hundred lodges, destroyed all their provisions, clothing, utensils and property of every description, to the value of $100,000. This led to a war that extended over three years, and cost us $40,000,000 and three hundred men. (President Seeley’s speech.)
We have just fought the Bannocks and Shoshones. In November, 1878, Gen. Crook wrote to the Government: “With the Bannocks and Shoshones our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of war-path or starvation; and being human, many of them will choose the former, in which death shall at least be glorious.” Is it necessary to say anything more of that war? Why pursue the story? The late Congressman (now President) Seeley, of Amherst College, says: “There has not been an Indian war for the past fifty years in which the whites have not been the aggressors.”
What, then, is to be done? I press upon you the importance of these resolutions. Standing in the courts, the recognition of the Indian as a person with rights, inalienable as yours and mine, to life, to justice, to property, this is the first, the absolute essential. As long ago as 1807, Governor (afterwards President) Harrison said: “The utmost efforts to induce the Indians to take up arms would be unavailing if one only of the many persons who have committed murder upon their people could be brought to punishment.” Generals Harney and Pope have testified of late that this is as true now as then.
In 1802 President Jefferson wrote to a friend that he had heard that there was one man left of the Peorias, and said “If there is only one, justice demands that his rights shall be respected.” Reviewing subsequent history we may well repeat Jefferson’s solemn words, “I tremble for my country when I know that God is just!”
We can make no more treaties with the Indians. The act of 1871 put an end to that dreadful farce. There have been nearly 900 treaties since 1785. They have been the loaded dice with which we have always won and the Indian always lost. We have hoodwinked ourselves by them to a perpetual fraud and deception. They have been to the Indian a veritable compact of death. Relying on them he has sooner or later found himself held by the throat by the wolf starvation, or impaled on the bayonet of the soldier; crowded to the wall by the encroaching settler, or removed to the wilderness by the Government as soon as he had begun to make for himself a home. The Stockbridges have been thus removed four times in a hundred years, and are now on a reservation where it is impossible to get a living. The Poncas are the latest instance.
Treaties must give place to personal rights. We must provide something better for him than a reservation; that is, life in a community for which we have provided no law, no courts, no police, no officer other than an anomalous “agent,” no ownership of land—nothing, in short, that all civilized people regard as the first element of civilized life, and without which the congregate life of bodies of men is impossible. We say to him, Cease to be a savage, hungry but free, and come and be a pauper, dependent on the will of others, without law, and still hungry. As one of the agents wrote in 1875: “It is a condition of things that would turn a white community into chaos in twelve months.” It behooves every honest man, every man who loves his country, to see that the day of equal personal rights for the Indian, the only man on the broad earth who has none, shall at once dawn.
But I remember that I am speaking to a company of Christians. Religion before all else can prepare the Indian to make the most of his citizenship. Look at this picture. Here is a wigwam in the pine forest. Before it is a tall pole, from the top of which hangs a dried bladder containing a few rattling shells and stones. It is the wigwam of Shaydayence, or Little Pelican, chief medicine man of the Gull Lakers. He is the incarnation of the devil in that tribe. He holds the tribe in his hand, and represents their idolatry and their bloodthirstiness. It is due to him that the missionary has been driven away. More than that, he is an inveterate drunkard. He has been rescued from freezing to death, drunk in the woods, by a chance lumberman finding him and thawing him out before an extemporized fire.