“The traditionary belief which largely prevails,” writes the Hon. J. Q. Smith, in his report for 1876, “that the Indian service throughout its whole history has been tainted with fraud, arises not only from the fact that frauds have been committed, but also because, from the nature of the service itself, peculiar opportunities for fraud may be found.”
After an exposition of the duties of an Indian agent he thus proceeds:
“The great want of the Indian service has always been thoroughly competent agents. The President has sought to secure proper persons for these important offices by inviting the several religious organizations, through their constituted authorities, to nominate to him men for whose ability, character, and conduct they are willing to vouch. I believe the churches have endeavored to perform this duty faithfully, and to a fair degree have succeeded; but they experience great difficulty in inducing persons possessed of the requisite qualifications to accept these positions. When it is considered that these men must take their families far into the wilderness, cut themselves off from civilization with its comforts and attractions, deprive their children of the advantages of education, live lives of anxiety and toil, give bonds for great sums of money, be held responsible in some instances for the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and subject themselves to ever-ready suspicion, detraction, and calumny, for a compensation less than that paid to a third-class clerk in Washington or to a village postmaster, it is not strange that able, upright, thoroughly competent men hesitate, and decline to accept the position of an Indian agent, or, if they accept, resign the position after a short trial. In my judgment the welfare of the public service imperatively requires that the compensation offered an Indian agent should be somewhat in proportion to the capacity required in the office, and to the responsibility and labor of the duties to be performed.”
It is impossible to avoid making the remark, in this place, that there is a class of men who have no “families”; who are ever ready to renounce the “comforts and attractions of civilization”; who are accustomed to “live lives of anxiety and toil”; and who are impervious to “suspicion, detraction, and calumny,” while at the same time they are “able, upright, and thoroughly competent.” If the government, when it inaugurated its plan of filling the Indian agencies with men nominated by “the churches,” had allowed our bishops to nominate agents in proportion to the number of Catholic Indians, the chances are that the right men would have been forthcoming, and the commissioner would not now be complaining that, in order to keep an Indian agent from stealing, he must be paid $3,000 a year.
“Relief had been so long delayed,” says the same officer in the same report, “that supplies failed to reach the agencies until the Indians were in almost a starving condition, and until the apparent intention of the government to abandon them to starvation had induced large numbers to join the hostile bands under Sitting Bull.”
Two other instances of the same kind are mentioned; and a third is recorded, in which, owing to the failure of Congress to provide money promised by a treaty, “hundreds of Pawnees had been compelled to abandon their agency, to live by begging and stealing in southern Kansas.” “In numerous other instances,” adds the commissioner pathetically, “the funds at the disposal of this office have been so limited as to make it a matter of the utmost difficulty to keep the Indians from starving”—and this, too, when the same Indians had large sums of money standing to their credit held “in trust” for them in the treasury of the United States. A long discussion advocating the removal of all the Indians to a few reservations—although this could not be done without violations of the most solemn treaties—is clinched with the cynical remark that “there is a very general and growing opinion that observance of the strict letter of treaties with Indians is in many cases at variance both with their own best interests and with sound public policy.”
And these words are from the official report of the chief of a great bureau in the most important department of our government! Did we know what we were about when we made these treaties? If “no,” we were fools; if “yes,” then we are knaves now to violate them without the consent of the other, the helpless party. “The Indians claim,” says the commissioner, “that they hold their lands by sanctions so solemn that it would be a gross breach of faith on the part of the government to take away any portion of it without their consent, and that consent they propose to withhold.” Still, let us do it, cries the commissioner; “public necessity must ultimately become supreme law.” “Public necessity”—which in this case means private rapacity—“public necessity,” and not truth, good faith, and justice, must rule. Many tribes are living peaceably and doing well, on lands solemnly promised to them for ever, in various parts of the West; the civilized and semi-civilized tribes in the Indian Territory are living peaceably and doing well on lands solemnly promised to them for their own exclusive use for ever, and in some cases bought with their own money. But it would be more convenient for us to have them all together; so let us tear up the treaties, and drive all the Indians into the one territory.
From the same report we take this paragraph, which is only one of very many like it:
“The Alsea agency, in Oregon, has been abolished, but inadequate appropriations have worked hardship and injustice to the Indians. They are required to leave their homes and cultivated fields” (for no other reason than that white men covet them) “and remove to Siletz, but no means are furnished to defray expense of such removal or to assist in their establishment in their new home.”
The Board of Indian Commissioners, in their third annual report (1871), in view of the continued violation of treaties by the government in compelling tribes to remove from the reservations assigned to them, found themselves constrained to say: