A third class of Indians was found at Fort Berthold. This reservation is a hundred miles north of Bismarck, Dakota Territory, on the east side of the Missouri. There are three small tribes combined in one large village for protection against their ancient enemies the Sioux, namely, the Arickarees, the Mandans, and the Gros Ventres. These Indians have latterly made great advances in civilization. They have 800 acres under cultivation, all looking admirably and well fenced in, and they are taking great pride in their work and asking for more land to cultivate. They have comfortable homes, or "lodges," as they are called, made in an octagonal form, of logs completely covered with earth. They are eagerly obtaining from the Government such comforts of civilization as they can—reapers, cooking-stoves, baking-powder, and the like. And yet this people display some of the grossest elements of savagery. Polygamy is common. The disgusting scaffold burials still go on, and the air in the neighborhood of the village is sometimes foul from the adjacent cemetery. Buffalo heads and poles with red streamers, as offerings or invocations to spirits, surmount many of the lodges and bear witness to the heathenism of the people. Many of the men are terribly scarred on the shoulders, breast and arms with the cruel practices of the sun dance. Men and women alike wear the dress of their savage life. There has been as yet little success from schools or church work. Few care for schools, and the attendance at the mission chapel is not large. The fault, however, is not with the devoted missionaries, Rev. C. L. Hall and his helpers of the American Missionary Association, whose faithfulness is unsurpassed, but with bad white men who visit the village. For years these Indians have been brought in contact with some of the worst influences of civilization, and in consequence the women have become gross, the men have lost their sense of honor, and the people are manifestly more degraded and harder to reach than the wild Indians on the Sioux Reservation.
After observation of these three types of Indians, the Christianized, the wild and the polluted, certain conclusions were inevitable.
1. There is a natural nobility in the Indian character. The Indian is debased by heathenism and his wild life, lazy, improvident, filthy, obscene and cruel; and yet he is well endowed by nature with brains and heart and conscience. He is clear-headed and generous; he is often affectionate in his family; he is capable of becoming industrious, conscientious, scholarly, and thoroughly consecrated. If his wild life has affected him unfavorably, it has not done him the same kind of harm that slavery has to the colored man. He is not crushed in spirit and ambition as was the colored slave at the time of the civil war.
INDIAN WOMAN AT FORT BERTHOLD.
INDIAN LODGE AT FORT BERTHOLD.
2. There, as elsewhere, the gospel proves the most efficient instrumentality. The United States Government is doing a noble work for the elevation of the race by introducing the agencies of civilization. The Indian agents in Dakota are, as a rule, noble men, vieing with the missionaries in endeavors to benefit the race. The Board of Indian Commissioners are deserving of all praise for their great services. The present system of Government management in establishing schools, in encouraging agriculture, in discountenancing savage practices, in stimulating the home-life, is most admirable. But Christian efforts are yet more efficacious. It is where the gospel has sway the longest, or has been the chief influence, that the Indians are the most elevated.
SANTEE INDIANS TEN YEARS AGO.