It is well for a man to respect his own vocation,
whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold
it and to claim for it the respect it deserves.
—Charles Dickens
They were good fellows, cordial, modest, although somewhat shy in
manner, the sort that would have been more at home perhaps among fewer
men. They came out of the West, at infrequent intervals, to visit the
Chief, who in those days did not keep them waiting. The course of
business, filtering down through the red-taped labyrinth, brought some
of them to my desk and within my survey. I wonder now what they thought
of me, especially as I am about to relate how I viewed them.
Imbued as I was then with the rare efficiency of bureaucracy, I
sympathized with their apparent helplessness in the transaction of
Departmental business. They were always wanting to do promptly things
that weren’t done. Aside from that, I found them interesting, they
being from what an Easterner would term the “hinterland,” had he vision
enough to know that his country has one. I thought they would have
tales to tell—a hope that never materialized.
When one came to know them better, as I sometimes did, they would
relate their problems in a constrained, half pathetic manner, as if,
seeking something and finding it not, they were confused. The idea came
to me that they were awed, if not actually bewildered, by their
uncommon experiences in the big city. I did not dream that they were
struggling manfully, as indeed they could, to restrain a just wrath;
that their seeming pathos was a sort of crude pity, inspired by the
artificialities and cheap bluff that they saw around them. Their manner
of ill-at-ease, I know now, was a mighty urge to get away from that
which distressed them, and to return whence they came—into the broader,
franker places.
I knew that they were “out of the West,” and this meant—of course it
did—beyond—well, beyond the Mississippi. “The West” is a general term,
and brings to mind the buffalo days, an unpolished period of a dim
past. Therefore I did not know that this one’s bailiwick contained five
troublesome barriers across a coveted valley, where men of three
different races met and snarled at each other, as they had for nearly
four hundred years; that another’s domain included six thousand square
miles of God’s most wonderful creation, having the Marble Cañon of the
Colorado for its western fence; that four States met in a third’s
territory, while a treacherous river gave it a name and, at times,
breaking the harness he had constructed, rolled its hissing flood
through his very dooryard; that grizzlies and wild turkey tracked the
solitudes of mountain parks within sight of this one’s home; that still
another had explored a dozen dead cities, lost, forgotten, in the
silence of uncharted cañons.
No. I did not meet these men in the Smithsonian offices at Washington;
nor were they lecturers before the National Geographic Society. They
were Indian Agents.
They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with
which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills
and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important,
establish hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer
machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They
wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the
frontiers.
Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized
as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in
their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They
might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service
that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a
dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for
these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very
title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and
still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and
God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to
picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage,
they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind.
They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged
to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities
of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized
protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and
poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming
dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma,
smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long
train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant
and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who
daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating
the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men
have no historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be
unknown.
Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the
unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced
and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage
charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the
children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region
few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river
without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in
winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of
transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that
his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened
civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant
notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.
These unromantic facts, having no camouflage of feathers and war paint,
nothing in them of the beating of tom-toms or the chanting of legends,
do not invite a sentimental record; and, it is true, few such things
occur in the “dude season,” when sentimentality, accompanied by its
handmaiden ignorance, takes its neurasthenic outing in the wild.
One of them, a man whose dress spoke rather of the club and office,
invited me thus:—
“Come out with me for a leave. There are deer, and trout streams, and a
hunting-lodge up in the hills.” He was the chap who claimed to have a
census of the grizzlies. “It’ll do you good, and you look as if you
needed a bit of the outside.”