—or, perhaps, of “affording a living illustration” of the wisdom and mercy of a policy which, neglecting these poor wretches “without land,” comes down upon other tribes, living peaceably and thrivingly upon reservations “solemnly secured to them for ever,” takes from them their homes and farms, and drives them forth to a new and desolate land; or, if they resist, exasperates them into a war that ends by adding them to the number of “roamers and vagabonds.” The sanguinary conflict which, as we write, is still being waged between a portion of the Nez-Percés Indians and the troops under command of that eminent “Christian soldier,” General Howard, is a flagrant instance of the manner in which Indians of the first and second classes enumerated by the commissioner are driven into the category of “roamers and vagabonds.” We cannot pause to trace the history of this our last and most needless Indian war; we pass it by with the remark that one of the indirect causes of it, according to the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1874, appears to have been the action of the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” a Presbyterian organization, in selling to a speculator certain lands within the reservation which did not belong to the board, but to the Indians themselves.
The report of the commissioner for 1876—the Hon. J. Q. Smith—contains a number of statistical tables, an analysis of which will aid us in forming a correct conception of the present condition of the Indians embraced in the commissioner’s third class, as well as a portion of those in his second class. According to these tables—which contain the latest official returns from all the agencies—the whole number of Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska, and of the “roamers and vagrants,” is put down at 266,151, of whom 40,639 are of mixed blood. The latter are for the most part the children of Indian mothers and of French, Spanish, and American fathers. No less than 153,000 of the whole number “come directly under the civilizing influences of the government agencies,” and of these 104,818 “wear citizen’s dress.” The abandonment of the picturesque blanket for the civilizing coat, the embroidered buckskin leggings for the plain pantaloons, and the gay plume of gorgeous feathers for the hideous hat, is certainly a mark of progress. But when the wigwam is torn down, and the log, frame, or stone house is erected in its stead, a still more decided step towards civilization has been taken; and it may be with surprise that some of our readers will learn that our “savages” have built for themselves, or have had built for them, 55,717 houses, of which 1,702 were erected during last year.
The progress of education is a still further test of the condition of these people. There are 367 school buildings upon the reservations; and in these are conducted 63 boarding-schools and 281 day-schools, 23 of the school buildings, apparently, being unoccupied. The number of teachers is 437, and of pupils 11,328, of which number 6,028 are males. The amount of money expended for education during the year was $362,496, an average of $32 per pupil. The number of Indians who can read is 25,622, of whom 980 acquired that useful accomplishment during the year. The number of births (exclusive of those in the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory) was 2,401, and of deaths 2,215. The religious statistics in this table are evidently incorrect in at least one particular. The number of church buildings on the Indian reservations is 177; the number of missionaries “not included under teachers” is 122; and “the amount contributed by religious societies during the year for education and other purposes” was $62,076.
These figures we do not call in question, but the “number of Indians who are church members” is put down at only 27,215. It is to be desired that the compiler of the statistics had furnished us with a definition of what he understands by the words “church members.” He sets down for the Pueblo agency, in New Mexico, for example: “Number of Indians, 8,400; number of church buildings, 19; number of church members, none!” The truth is that all, or nearly all, of these Pueblo Indians are Roman Catholics, as their fathers were before them for more than three centuries; and that the 19 “church buildings” on their reservation are Catholic churches, in which the Indians are baptized, shriven, married, and receive the Holy Communion; but in the opinion of the honorable commissioner none of the Pueblos are “church members.” So with the Papago Indians in Arizona, who are 5,900 in number, who have a Catholic school, four Catholic teachers, and a Catholic church, but none of whom, in the eyes of the commissioner, are “church members.” In the seven reservations of which the religious control has been assigned to the Catholic Church there is a population of 24,094 souls and 32 churches, but the commissioner’s tables admit only 7,010 “church members” among this population. The truth is, as we shall show, the number of Catholic Indians alone is more than thrice as large as the whole number of “church members” accounted for by the commissioner’s tables. When a human being has received the Catholic rite of baptism he becomes a member of the Catholic Church; and from that moment it is the duty and the privilege of the church to watch over and protect the soul thus regenerated. It is because the church has wished to discharge this duty to her Indian children that certain of the sects have cried out against her, and even the commissioner (Hon. E. P. Smith), in his report for 1875, has not been ashamed to reproach her.
“At the seven agencies assigned to the care of the Catholics,” he remarks, “no restriction has been placed upon their system and methods of education, and no other religious body, so far as I am aware, has in any way attempted to interfere. I regret to say that this is not true, so far as the Catholics are concerned, of some of the agencies assigned to other religious bodies, and in some instances the interference has been a material hindrance to the efforts of this office to bring Indians under control and to enforce rules looking toward civilization.”
We regret to say that while, on the one hand, the Catholic Church has sought only to continue her ministrations to those of her children who were dwelling upon reservations “assigned to other religious bodies”—a duty which she could not neglect nor permit to remain unfulfilled—on the other hand, the most cruel, persistent, and petty persecution has been waged against Catholic Indians under the charge of Protestant agents, for the reason that they were Catholics, and the most unwarrantable interference, opposition, and maltreatment have been in many instances manifested in cases where Catholic priests were merely exercising the rights they possessed as American citizens, and discharging the duties imposed on them as Christian teachers.
But before we enter upon the proof of these unpleasant facts let us return to the statistics of the commissioner’s report, for the purpose of completing our review of the condition of the semi-civilized and civilized tribes. The whole number of acres of land comprised in the Indian reservations as they now exist is 159,287,778, of which, however, only a very small portion (9,107,244 acres, or 14,230 square miles) is “tillable”—that is, land fitted for agricultural pursuits, and on which crops can be raised. Now, from these figures, which are official, a very important truth may be deduced. The policy of the government, as explained by the commissioners in successive reports, is to gather all the Indians upon these reservations (or upon a few of them), to wean them from their life of hunting and fishing, and to teach them to support themselves and their families by purely agricultural pursuits. The idea may perhaps be a good one; but care should have been taken to provide ample means for its execution. There are, as we have seen, 266,151 Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska and of the “roamers and vagrants.” All these, if the present policy of the government be successful, will be finally planted upon this region of 14,230 square miles of tillable land, and bidden to live there, they and their children, for ever, earning their bread by the sweat of their brow in cultivating the soil. Now, 14,230 square miles of land is equal only to 28,460 farms of 320 acres each, or to 56,920 farms of 160 acres each. The tradition established by the government, by its original surveys of the public lands, by its Homestead Law, and by its Land Bounty Acts, is that 160 acres of land is the normal quantity for an ordinary farm; general experience has shown that this is none too much. But if the attempt were made to arrange the 266,151 Indians into families of 4 persons each, and to allot to each family a farm of 160 acres, there would not be tillable land enough “to go round”; 9,617 families would be left out of the distribution. We do not mean to say that a farm of something less than 160 acres may not be found sufficient for the maintenance of a family of four persons; but we do wish to call attention to the fact that the Indian reservations have been now reduced so far that only 56,920 farms, of 160 acres each, of “tillable land” remain in them. There is the more necessity for accentuating this fact since even in the last report of the commissioner is repeated the suggestion that the reservations are still too large, and that a few more treaties might be broken and a few more sanguinary wars provoked with advantage, in order to reduce further the area set apart for Indian occupation. This suggestion is made plausible by the device of calling attention to the whole area of the reservations—159,287,778 acres, or 248,886 square miles—while hiding away in very small type, and at the end of an intricate table of figures, the fact that 150,180,534 acres, or 234,656 square miles, of these lands are wholly unfitted for tillage, and can never be made available for agricultural purposes.
The number of acres of land cultivated by the Indians during the year covered by the last report of the commissioner was 318,194, and 28,253 other acres were broken by them during the year. No less than 26,873 full-blood male Indians were laboring in civilized pursuits, exclusive of those belonging to the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory. These people are not savages; they worship God—many of them enjoying the light of Catholic truth; they educate themselves and their children; they live in houses and wear decent clothes; they toil and are producers of valuable articles. Let us see, now, what is said about these and the other Indians less advanced in civilization, by their rulers, the successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs and their subordinates, the agents. When we remark that we select our quotations from nine volumes of official reports, the reader will understand that we lay before him only a very few out of the numberless proofs of two facts:
1. That the commissioners, while repeatedly confessing that the Indians have been most cruelly and unwisely wronged in the past, are of the opinion that it would be a kind and wise thing to wrong them a little more in the future.
2. That the Indians are perfectly well aware of their wrongs; are quite able to formulate them; are often hopeless, from long and painful experience, of any effectual redress for them; and very frequently display a remarkable degree of Christian forbearance and forgiveness in resisting the wanton provocations to revolt offered to them.