Recent agitation has chiefly concerned the education, lands and rights of the race, and progress has been made in the way of opportunities offered, but the Indian has not moved. He must be touched; the high and low must come together. Virtue will go out of the one into the other as it entered into her who touched the hem of a sacred garment. There is no salvation in acts of Congress; it is from the springs of action within. To awake these in the bosom of the Indian and consummate it in Christian character is the work of individual men by their contact and by their personal influence.
The Indian question is, first, one of organization, second, one of executive duty; of conditions and of action. In the former, of late years, there has been much progress. Respecting the latter there has been little. Crops and herds have somewhat increased and education has advanced, especially in the East; but the executive work drags, because there is nobody to do it. Men are the need of the hour, and money to provide for their wants.
At the northern frontier outposts, this summer, for the first time, the soldiers remained in their barracks. At the forts in Montana and Dakota which I visited, there was general respect for Indian prowess, and belief in his capacity and in his wrongs. “Were I an Indian I would fight” seemed the feeling of all.
So far as army officers are gentlemen of character, force and experience, and of humane ideas (for there are opposing views), I believe they are better fitted than any others to settle the Indian question. Their destructive work is nearly over: it has fitted them for the constructive work to be done. As officers they have peculiar advantages over civilians of the same capacity and worth, far less temptation and far stronger standing ground for the control of Indians. One-half of the sixty agencies might well be put at once under selected officers; not that it is strict military duty, but it is not an “old woman’s work,” as one of high rank said of Capt. Pratt’s effort. The latter is doing, indirectly, more than any two regiments for the pacification of the Indians—the army’s special business.
Railroads are doing the work of pioneers and of soldiers, peace is not far off. There will soon be need of the army only as a national police, and half of the 15,000 troops at the West may be dispensed with. What better service can a few of its accomplished officers undertake than building up a civilization at its weakest point?
The Indian can be rescued from a sad fate only by personal devotion; that has, under God, created the great results of missionary work throughout the world in recent years. The labors of the Riggses, Williamsons and of Bishop Whipple and others during the past half century, in the western wilderness, has been a seed-sowing of which the results are now appearing. The men they have touched and taught are those who are now breaking from the old superstitions and asking for light, while official dealings have scarcely a moral result to show for armies of agents and vast annuities. Only the light of Christian truth and example steadily shining can lift men up. Mission work among the Cherokees and others, and for the Sioux at Sisseton and Fort Sully and Santee agencies in Dakota, where wild Indians are settled on so peaceful prosperous homes that “a stranger traveling through the country would not believe that he was on an Indian Reservation,” attest the complete success of the Congregational, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian societies. Peoria Bottom, which I visited in 1881, is a charming village of twenty Christian families, on thrifty homes, the result of the efforts of the Rev. Thos. L. Riggs. “In proportion to the aid and means employed no missions since the apostolic age have been more successful than those to the American Aborigines,” declares one of these bodies. There have been, however, weak and disappointing missions.
Such work cannot be inspired from Washington, though it may supply many of the conditions of it. A purified civil service would do more for the Indian than for any class in the country. Good agents would create a morale, like a favoring tide, for the Christian teacher.
The “gist” of the Indian question I believe to be honesty and capacity in dealing with them. Given these and the rest will work itself out.