Mrs. Jackson takes up in detail the despoiling of the Indians even more thoroughly than Mr. Humphrey. She treats of the Delawares, Cheyennes, Nez Perces, Sioux, Poncas, Winnebagoes, Cherokees, California Indians, etc. She devotes a gruesome chapter to the massacre of Indians by white people. She devotes an appendix of 171 pages (small type), to a narration of outrages perpetrated by white people on Indians, broken treaties, and outrageous treatment of Indians by Whites. The appendix includes a spirited correspondence with Secretary of the Interior, Hon. Carl Schurz. There are also several letters to the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver paper, edited by Mr. W. N. Byers. The letters were written in 1880. Schurz was Secretary, it should be remembered, when the famous Ponca case occurred. A tribe of Indians had been forcibly taken from their homes. Through friends in Boston and Philadelphia, who had their case brought before the courts and were sustained in their contentions, these Poncas were returned to their reservation. As to the Byers correspondence, the citizens of Denver had attacked and killed a large number of Indian men, women and children located in a village on Sand Creek, some distance from the mining camps. Mrs. Jackson clearly has the better of both arguments.
It is unfortunate that the present condition of some of the Indian bands does not arouse the same interest as did the case of the Poncas. The Chippewas of Minnesota suffered far greater wrongs than fell to the lot of the Poncas, and yet there has been no outburst of righteous indignation because of what happened to them.
In 1871, near Camp Grant, Arizona Territory, there were a number of Apaches encamped under the jurisdiction of the United States authorities and these Indians did not wish to join Geronimo and others in their raids in the Southwest and Old Mexico. By the 11th of March, 1871, there were over 300 Indians assembled near the camp. They had brought in, in a short time, more than 300,000 pounds of hay which the officer in command purchased. In view of the hostility of Geronimo and his band, that the Apaches should desire peace, and be willing to work, seemed incomprehensible in the Southwest. The frontier element—always hostile to Indians—resented their presence. The Indians continued to come in and presently there were 510 in the camp.
The 30th of April, these Indians were attacked by a large force of white men from Tucson, Arizona. The gentleman who furnished Mrs. Jackson with the information was C. B. Brierley, Acting Assistant Surgeon, United States Army. Mrs. Jackson presents Surgeon Brierley’s report in detail. We need not present particulars, save to say that a large number of the Indians were surprised and killed while in camp and that the white people of Tucson, not satisfied with killing the men, mutilated the dead bodies of women and children.
A Mr. J. H. Lyman of Northampton, Mass., was a pioneer in Arizona in 1810 and 1841. He made a report to the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1871 which explains the hostility in later years of the Apaches toward the white people, as to how one Johnson agreed with the Governor of Senora to procure Indian scalps at an ounce of gold each. Johnson killed large numbers of women and children—and a few warriors. Mrs. Jackson reprints most of his report.
Mrs. Jackson’s book, as I have previously stated, created a profound impression in this country and in England. None of the hundreds of facts and incidents contained in her “Century of Dishonor” were ever successfully denied. Many of the recommendations offered by her are sound and could be applied with profit at the present time, although thirty years have elapsed since she laid down her pen.
Mr. Humphrey may be said to have carried her work down to present times (1906), although there is much to our discredit since he wrote.
As to the irrigation problems, he says:—
“Whether he were the defenseless beginner of the Northwest, or the skilful agriculturalist of the Southwest desert with ancient systems of irrigation, the Indian was never regarded as a man. The forceful settler dispossessed the irrigating Indian with even less than usual formality because his highly-cultivated lands were the more valuable,—either by driving him into the desert and pre-empting his land, or by diverting his water, thus making his land a desert. Typical of these Indians were the four thousand Pimas of Arizona. They had practised agriculture by irrigation along the Gila River for more than three centuries. In the language of the early records, ‘they are farmers and live wholly by tilling the soil, and in the earlier days of the American history of the territory they were the chief support of both the civil and military elements of this section of the country.’
