What shall we do with the Indians?
The Commissioners whom our Government recently sent out to the Plains to negotiate treaties with the hostile Indians, have patched up a truce with some of the most dangerous of the tribes, and the people are congratulating themselves that the warfare is over. We might have been on good terms with the savages any time this last half-century, if we had been honestly so minded and had known how to govern ourselves and the red man too. Yet the record of our intercourse with the aborigines has been nothing but a history of long wars and short truces. Years of the most terrible hostilities have been followed by a few months of precarious quiet, and the Western pioneer has been almost invariably obliged, like his New-England ancestors, to till his acres with one hand on the plough and the other on his gun. He has never known a month of security. He has never left his log cabin in the morning without reasonable fear that he would find it in flames when he returned at night. He has learned to look upon the Indian as a noxious beast, whom no promises could bind, no good treatment could mollify; as a pest which every honest man was justified in conscience, if he was not bound in duty, to do his utmost to exterminate. A war of races between the red and the white has long been a cardinal doctrine in the creed of the prairie settler, and his chief social principle has been, War to the knife with the Indian, and no quarter.
Here is a dreadful state of things for a Christian people to contemplate; and the fault of it, to speak plain English, is all our own. Managed as we manage them, Indian affairs can be nothing else than a perpetual affliction. Treated as we treat them, the aborigines of the West cannot help being our cruel and implacable foes. The devil himself could hardly invent a wrong which we have not done to the primitive owners of our territory. They once stood in awe of us as superior beings; we have committed every conceivable baseness that could belittle us in their estimation. They had noble traits of character; we have done all we could to obliterate them. They had the common faults of uncivilized pagans; we have intensified them. They are proud; we insult them. They are revengeful; we aggravate them. They are covetous; we rob them. They have a natural tendency toward drunkenness; we keep them supplied with liquor. They are cruel; we tempt them to murder. The "noble savage" of the novel and the stage, we grant, is a fiction; but he is not more unreal than the irredeemable brute who is popularly depicted as the terror of the frontiersman and the western emigrant. The Indians, after all, are not so very different from other human beings. Like all mankind, they have great virtues and great faults; and if a fair balance could be struck, we are by no means certain that their credits would not exceed our own. There is many a vice which they never would have known if they had not learned it from us; but we can think of no species of crime which the Indians have taught to white men. It is an insane piece of wickedness to treat any race of human beings as vermin, whom it is a mercy to the rest of mankind to sweep out of existence. God never made tribes of men to be slaughtered. All creatures with human souls are capable of moral and mental improvement; capable of a greater or less degree of civilization; capable of being brought under the rule of law, and being made useful to the rest of the world. If we have failed sensibly to improve the condition of the Indians, or to teach them anything more of civilization than some of its worst vices, the fault is our own.
We have to deal with two classes of Indians in the West, and our system with both is as bad as any system can be. As settlements have encroached upon the prairies and forests where the savages roamed in pursuit of game, we have, as a rule, gone through the form of buying the territory from the tribes which claimed it. These tribes have then been removed further westward, or have been assigned certain lands called reservations. The consideration for which the lands are bought is not a sum of money, paid to the savages in hand, but a fixed annuity, given to them in form of merchandise, clothing, blankets, implements of the chase and of husbandry, trinkets, and other goods chiefly prized by the red men; and to oversee the forwarding and distribution of these articles, as well as to look after the general interests of the tribes, to protect them from oppression on the part of the whites, and to check crimes and outrages, we send out into the Indian country a number of officers called Indian Agents and Superintendents. On the reservations, where some effort has been made to teach the savages the habits of civilized life, there are schools, farms, and workshops. The wandering tribes of the far West, however, subsist wholly by the chase, and preserve all their primitive wildness. The Indian Agent in their territory has little to do but distribute their annuities, and when they commit any outrage upon the settlers try to have them punished. Now, there is nothing very objectionable in our way of dealing with these two classes of Indians, provided the agents and superintendents are honest and competent men; but experience has proved that, as a rule, they are neither, though, of course, there are honorable exceptions. One unprincipled adventurer in power over these fierce tribes can raise a tumult which years of warfare cannot subdue. One swindling agent can upset a treaty which has cost the government hundred of lives and millions of dollars. How often has not this been done! It is notorious that most of the men who receive appointments in the Indian country are persons of no character, who demand an opportunity of enriching themselves at the red man's expense, as a reward for political services rendered to the party in power. It is probably a rare thing for any tribe of Indians to receive the whole amount of the annuity to which they are entitled, and for which the government pays. They are swindled first in the price which government pays for the goods, and then they are swindled again by the agents, who deliver just as many of the articles as they please, and no more, or by the teamsters who "lose" packages on the road. Worse still are the traders who sell the poor savages whisky and gunpowder, and collect their "debts" from the distributors of annuities. How many of these debts do our readers suppose are just? And when there is a corrupt understanding between the trader and the agent, what chance has the poor Indian for justice? It is in this atrocious manner that the original owners of our soil have bartered away their birthright for a mess of pottage— sold their rich acres for a glass of rum. It is in this way that the treaties with the tribes are continually broken. The Indians gave up their lands for a certain annual consideration. The consideration is not paid them in full, and often is hardly paid at all. How are they to know whether we are all swindlers alike, or are only in the habit of appointing swindlers to positions of trust and responsibility?
These, however, are not the only wrongs of which the Indian has to complain. The testimony of missionaries and other trusty witnesses, is unanimous in saying that the frontier settlers as a general rule are perfectly unscrupulous and lawless in all their dealings with the tribes. Contact with the whites always means demoralization, drunkenness, and domestic infamy for the Indian. His property is appropriated, his cabin is invaded, his house is defiled, and if he resists he is murdered, and the murderer never is punished. He has no rights which the white man is bound to respect. He is nothing but a brute, to be hunted as men hunt the buffalo, or killed off like the wolves, with a price set upon his scalp. No wonder we have war; it is a wonder we ever have peace.
The commissioners who were recently sent out to the plains by the national government to investigate the troubles and try to devise a way out of them, are understood to favor the removal of all the Indian tribes to reservations where they will be out of the way of the great routes of travel across the continent, and where white men will have no excuse to interfere with them. That is to say, their plan consists merely of an enlargement of the superintendent system. Cut off from a great part of their hunting-grounds, the savages will become more than ever dependent upon the liberality of the United States government, and more than ever in the power of the agents and traders through whose hands the national largeness must pass. Moreover, it is evident that the boundaries of the reservations cannot be permanently fixed. As the white settlements expand, the Indian territories must contract. Nobody can for a moment suppose that the proprietary rights of the Indians will long be respected when the Yankee emigrant wants their lands. What will happen when the boundaries are broken through? Unless the Indians have learned by that time to support themselves by labor and to conform to a civilized mode of life, they will infallibly be crushed out of existence. There will be another horrible war which will have no end until the red men are virtually exterminated. Now, the serious duty of preparing these rude tribes for the changed conditions of life which must soon come upon them, and fitting them for a gradual and peaceable absorption into the rest of the community—which is their only hope of existence—must fall, if the plan of the commissioners be adopted, upon the Indian agents and superintendents. The power of these men for good or for mischief will be enormously increased. Hence, unless some effective measures be taken to fill these important offices with men of a better class than have hitherto secured them, our present evils will be correspondingly increased. The government swindler will come back to the savages with seven other devils more wicked than himself, and the last state of those poor wretches will be worse than the first.
Is there any reason to expect improvement? We see not the slightest so long as these offices are distributed on the same principle as other government appointments, and rated among the political spoils that belong to the party in power. An Indian agent ought to be a man of superior abilities; but men of superior abilities will not banish themselves to the desert except for one of two reasons: either they must be animated by disinterested charity, or they must expect to make a good deal of money out of the office over and above their trifling salaries. Charity is not one of the characteristics of political hacks. As for the other motive, we know pretty well how often it operates. To find capable persons to undertake this work; men of incorruptible integrity, of lofty purpose, and of moral force; men whom the Indians will respect and obey, and who will be likely to persevere in their arduous task, we must go outside the partisan ranks. Where shall we find them and how shall we recognize them?
There are such men, who have been at work in this very enterprise ever since the discovery of America, and there are numerous communities of Indians whom they have almost entirely reclaimed from savage life and made quiet and useful members of society. If they have not done more, it is because they have never been free from interference. The unruly settler has invariably broken in upon their work and brought into the communities which they were laboriously civilizing the fatal disturbances of drunkenness and license. If the missionaries could be left alone, they would soon not only Christianize the savages but reduce them to order. Scattered all over the West there are thriving little settlements where the dusky hunter has turned his spear into a ploughshare, and under the directions of the priest has learned more or less of industry and peaceful arts, and forgotten the fierce impulses which once made him a terror to the plains. In these quiet villages the school-house and the chapel are crowded with zealous learners, the fields and gardens bloom with the evidences of thrift. So long as the white man keeps away, there is quiet and prosperity. The great mission of St. Mary's, among the Pottawattomies in Eastern Kansas, is a notable example of what the missionaries can do toward civilizing the poor wretches whom we have so long been trying to tame with gunpowder. And the testimony of travellers, army officers, and government functionaries generally is unanimous as to the complete success of the Catholic priests in dealing with the great problem which perplexes our national legislature.