Rev. Gilfillan, largely at his own expense, built splendid schoolhouses, missions and chapels at Pine Point, White Earth and Twin Lakes. His mission was successful and he had at one time several hundred Indians in attendance in both school and church, and a corps of efficient workers. I think it is correct to state that there were more church members on White Earth reservation during Gilfillan’s administration than at the present time. Certainly the moral tone was far above that which obtains today. It is sad to relate that Gilfillan’s missions were discontinued, and the buildings where he devoted so many years of unselfish labor were taken over by the United States Government at far less than their actual value.
Rev. Gilfillan’s statement made to me, and accepted by the Congressional Committee[[9]] and published in their report is as follows:—
Washington, D. C., Dec. 9, 1910
“Hon. Warren K. Moorehead,
Andover, Mass.
“My dear Sir: Your favor of 8th instant has just reached me, and it gives me pleasure to answer your inquiries. The first is, ‘While there was much suffering when you were missionary at White Earth, Pine Point, Twin Lakes, etc., is it not your opinion that there was less swindling than at the present time?’
“In answer I would say that I do not consider there was any suffering at all to speak of from June, 1873, when I went there, till along toward 1898, when I left. The Indians raised garden produce; many had fine fields of wheat. They could gather all the wild rice they wanted to; fish were abundant. Some of the men made two or three hundred dollars by the muskrat hunt each spring. They made a good deal by furs. Some hunters killed as many as forty deer in a winter. They made maple sugar. They had all the berries they could gather. From all these varied sources they made a good living. They had unlimited fuel at their doors. They were rent free. I have heard people say, and I believe it, that there was not nearly so much poverty or suffering as in a white city, where the poor have only one resource—wages. If they had wished to raise a little more vegetables, as potatoes, corn, etc., they could have lived on the fat of the land. They were in those days happy, peaceful, and contented communities. To the above-enumerated sources of income of theirs I omitted to mention that there passed through my hands for them, given by the Episcopal mission, more than $130,000 in money for all imaginable purposes—from spectacles to building churches for them and supporting their children in schools. There were several thousand dollars’ worth of clothing sent me for them by charitable people. There was no crime during the twenty-five years I was there, although for many years there was not even Indian police. There was no instance of holdup or robbery, not to speak of greater offenses. Life and property were absolutely safe—far safer than in any white community I know. None of them would ever have thought of molesting anyone. They were in those days happy, peaceful, harmless people. As to how the present state contrasts with that, you have been out there lately and know better than I.
“As to your second question, whether there was less swindling than at the present time, I would say that then there was none at all. The Indians had no lands to sell; no property of any kind except their little patches of gardens, their little furs, wild rice, etc. There was nothing to tempt the cupidity of the white man. As to how that contrasts with the present, you have been out there and know better than I.
“But I ought to qualify this by saying that for some years in the nineties there was a great deal of swindling from them unwittingly perpetrated by the Government, for an account of which I refer you to my inclosed printed statement made to Mohonk Conference in 1898, which you will find on Page [13] of the inclosed pamphlet. And that you may know that the statements made therein are true, I may inform you that the then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hon. William Jones, who went to the ground and personally investigated, endorsed upon that statement: ‘I find that the statements herein made by Mr. Gilfillan are in the main correct.’ This indorsement does not appear on the copy I send you, but is on other copies. To briefly specify the heads under which this swindling was done: it was; First, by billeting upon them three Chippewa commissioners at $39 a day for the three, making with their clerks, etc., $88 a day, the Indians said; said commissioners being mostly politicians out of a job, and their positions almost sinecures. Secondly, by repeated farcical ‘estimating’ of their pine; three several ‘estimations’ (pretended), covering a period of perhaps nine years; two of said estimations costing $360,000, and then done dishonestly in the interests of those who bought the pine, whereas the real worth of the work, done honestly, was only $6,000. Thirdly, by cutting green pine, but paying for it as ‘dead and down’ pine, so getting for it seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars a thousand. But most destructive of all was the swindling done by fire; the timber being fired to allow of its being cut as ‘dead and down’ and paid for at seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars. It was a pitiful sight to see those magnificent pine forests, where I used to ride for seventy miles on a stretch through great pine woods, shapely and tall, the trees reaching up, it seemed, 100 feet, that, like the buffalo, could never be replaced, now all blackened and scarred, killed and dead. The glory of the State of Minnesota was gone when in the nineties her magnificent pine forests that covered so large an area of her northern part were fired to get the Indians’ pine for seventy-five cents a thousand.
“Now, as to your next question, whether there was more drinking among the Indians then than now. I am glad to say that for many years after 1873, when I first knew them, there was, one may say, no drinking among the Indians. The mixed-bloods, who were mostly French-Canadian mixed bloods, always drank a little, but the Indians were remarkably free from it. The White Earth Indians lived twenty-two miles from the railroad, the nearest place where they could get liquor; they were almost that distance from the nearest white men. The Red Lake Indians were one hundred miles from the railroad, the Cass Lake one hundred, the Leech Lake seventy miles. They were almost as far from any white men, except the Government employees and the missionaries. So they were secluded from the white man and his vices. But the great reason of their immunity was the missions. The influence of the Gospel and the church in their secluded position kept them safe. It is no reflection on the White Earth Indians to say that in the place from which they had been removed in 1868—Crow Wing—they had fallen most dreadfully under the dominion of the ‘firewater,’ both men and women. They were in a most dreadful state of degradation from that cause. But never was the power of the Gospel more signally shown than in their cleansing and renovation on the White Earth reservation. I never saw a drunken Indian nor even one that I thought had tasted liquor. They had become communicants of the church, had their family prayers, their weekly prayer meetings from house to house, where they exhorted each other to steadfastness in the Christian life. What had such a people to do with liquor? Some of them, who at Crow Wing had been in the lowest depths, told me that they had not tasted liquor in twenty years, others for other periods; and I know they told the truth. Among all the chiefs, numbering perhaps twenty, on White Earth Reservation, there was just one who drank, and he, I am informed, had the liquor supplied to him by a mixed-blood, who, in payment, got him to swing the Indians to his schemes.