Reservations are merely places for herding Indians; temporary, necessary experiments, that, after a given time, may become growing evils. Herding negroes in like manner would have been a curse to both white and black races. There has been more sentiment than sense in treating the Indian as a separate people. It was kindly meant but a cruel plan in its results. This part of the red race has suffered most from the whites; their comfortable eastern homes have been broken up, their thrifty farms and fruitful orchards abandoned for a western wilderness where thousands have died from exposure. Their record has been the saddest part of the “Century of Dishonor.”
THE WILD TRIBES.
The destruction of the buffalo has been more trying to the Indian than sudden emancipation was to the Negro. The latter changed the relations rather than the realities of life; the former the realities rather than their relations. The one remained on its old foundation of land and of labor—any shifting was voluntary. Game, the support of the other, has gradually failed and they have been roughly pushed from place to place till pauperism seems the only fixed fact of their life. The human machine after running for centuries does not readily reverse itself; the strain on the Indian is tremendous. Was greater ever put upon men?—force to control them, charity to weaken them. Justice demanded help, but wisdom demanded self-help as its condition. Exigency is man’s best teacher. “Necessity is the mother of invention;” it makes men creative. The facts of human nature, and of experience, have been ignored in our treaties with the Indians, probably because we never really conquered them, but purchased peace on the best terms we could make.
Carrying the Indian from helplessness to self support is the most difficult administrative problem of our country. The Negro has taken care of himself. “The forty acres and a mule” method would have ruined the race. He was thrown on himself and given a vote; dangerous as it once seemed, who would now have it otherwise? He struggled, suffered and succeeded.
The Indian is fed “till he shall become self-supporting,” which gives him a motive for not becoming so. He alone of all men on the earth, finds in industry not reward but a penalty. The Shoshone farmers, when a reduction of rations was suggested, threatened to stop cultivating their fields. A few may go to work, but the whole line will not move forward while rations and other gratuities are issued, as now, to lines of ragged, wretched-looking mendicants who are helped for the asking.
Treaties must be kept, but the treaties contemplate ultimate self-support and the necessity of education to that end. It is, I believe, quite within their spirit to withhold supplies from the lazy and intractable.
At Yankton, Devil’s Lake, Cheyenne River and at other points, efficient agents kept the schools full, and the Indians busy by the argument to the stomach, which is their weak point. It is, I believe, the starting point of Indian civilization. The plan is as excellent as it is unusual.
On the Fort Hall reservation, in Idaho, I recently saw fields of wheat, oats and potatoes; two-thirds of the tribe had become farmers, besides owning herds of cattle, because a former agent had issued the coffee and sugar rations, which the red man dearly loves, only as each one successively staked out, plowed and planted his allotted little farm. The nation’s gratuities may do the Indian as much good as they are doing him harm, if wisely administered, especially the luxuries, which afford the best leverage. He is managed now by a class of men whose title, in spite of shining exceptions among them, is a byword and a reproach. Decayed clergymen, hungry politicians, and the broken of every profession, are not the ones to make citizens of the red man. Fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a year will not secure first-class men, who must travel far with their families, at their own expense, and be liable at any day to discharge and disgrace. By refusing adequate salaries, Congress (and Congress means the people) decides that the Indian’s greatest need shall be unsupplied, for lack of a trifling comparative cost. Millions for fuel and dry goods, but not one or two hundred thousand dollars more that men of repute and of capacity may go to the Agencies. Good beef and flour and shoes, but second-rate men, whose average official life is less than two years, is the present provision for them.
The tender mercies of the Government to the Indian are cruel; the much-talked-of treatment of the slave owner was tender by comparison. The self-interest of the Southern barons was humanity itself, in contrast with the course of men sent in the name of a high duty, many of whom have been tempted, if not forced, into corruption. I would throw no slur on the better class among them, of whom the country is not worthy.
The Indian is a child and needs a Father; physically mature, he is mentally an infant. He stands proud but helpless on the track of a locomotive. He will not heed the advice of whites inferior in natural force to himself, and such, as a rule, he has to deal with. No wonder the young prefer their own leaders. In the school of civilization only object lessons are good for anything. What lessons we have given the Indians!