Their appreciation of work is a direct contradiction to the statement that an Indian hates to labor. Frequently boys who are working a half-day at some trade will ask to be allowed to work the entire day, including Saturday, so as to earn more and be better able to take care of themselves when they go home. Their wages are then increased and they go to night school. Every such application is encouraging.
Especially those who make extra time in the shops are inclined to save. They generally agree to draw but one-half of extra earnings, the other half being saved to buy them tools and other outfit when they shall finally leave school. We allow ten per cent. interest on all such savings; they are quick to see the advantage of laying up money. They seem to have no marked aptitude for special trades, unless it be for work in leather, shoe and harness-making. Their ancestors have dealt in this commodity more than in any other. They take to all handiwork remarkably; while quick to learn, they are slow to execute. They seldom bungle or “botch” a job. The first pair of shoes made by an apprentice is always serviceable. An Indian carpenter will make as good a mortise as a white one, but will take three times as long. Our expert harness-maker says he can do no better work than some of his boys, but they are very slow about it. We are constantly making and selling carts made by Sioux boys. They have made all our school benches, desks, wardrobes and wash-stands, besides window-frames, etc., for the outside market.
We would be only too glad to make buggy or plow harness, single or double, tin-ware of all kinds and brogan shoes for individuals or institutions in the North or South, solely on the ground of the merit and cheapness of the work done. A neat carriage harness was made last summer for a lady in Newport, R.I. Of the 500 dozen articles of tinware, 75 sets of double plow harness, and 2,000 pairs of men’s shoes made last year by our Indian boys for the use of the Western tribes (ordered by the Indian Department at the lowest contract prices of the previous year) the New York inspectors reported: “They are as well and as strongly made, and for actual service fully equal to any purchased by the Department.”
This year we are making an even larger amount of material for the Indian Department, but at prices which little more than cover cost of material. An outside private trade would be much more desirable. We were paid for men’s brogans “extra” good leather, $1.22½ per pair, boxed and delivered in New York City. Carlisle does even more than Hampton in supplying Indians, and with excellent success.
Owing to bodily ailments, Indian labor is more unsteady than that of Negroes. While in their own life they have endurance, a steady routine of industry is new to them, and they are for our purposes a rather feeble race: they find digging exhausting, but on the hunter’s trail or on the warpath they are tireless when we would soon be weary.
Unless every Indian child is educated to some occupation, teaching is of little account. Hard work rather than the higher studies gives them the best drill. As for all, so for Indians, home influence is a great thing. After the best practical education they are not fit for the loose, idle, dirty life of Indian camps any more than any other children. What is to be done? The best success with the thirty Sioux children who returned in October, 1881, to their agencies (five of them girls) has been with those to whom the agents gave separate rooms near the agencies, having their food cooked and their life led separately. An efficient agent will, by the care he takes, save four-fifths of our Indian graduates to decent lives; a careless, weak agent (and not a third of the sixty U.S. Indian Agents are first-class men) will lose four-fifths of them. We cannot make men of them in three years, but can give them a start in that time that a good agent can keep up, and lead them to true success.
Here, more and more, we find the real trouble; not with the Indian, but in our miserable system of paying so small salaries to Indian agents that a competent one is the exception. The boy or girl who goes home finds no strong, kind friend to advise and help; the current of influence is against a Christian life. Here the missionary is needed; never more than now.
Hampton, Carlisle and the many schools that are educating Indians need to be supplemented by good agents and wise missionaries who will help them to stand against the odds that would make the new life they have chosen nest to impossible. Here is the point of chief anxiety. Public sentiment must be felt at Washington before it shall remove the chief stumbling-block to Indian progress—poor agents. As Secretary Teller says in his last Report, the Indians are chiefly on reservations, and must for the present be treated there; to be gradually pushed upon lands of their own, individually, by the efforts of wise men and the influence of Christian education.