The feeling against the redmen, intensified throughout the State by the
removal of Sennett, beat against Curtis like a flood. Delegations of
citizens, headed by Streeter and Johnson, proceeded at once to
Washington, laden with briefs, affidavits, and petitions, and there laid
siege to Congress as soon as the members began to assemble. The twenty
original homesteaders were taken as the text for most impassioned
appeals by local orators, and their melancholy situation was skilfully
enlarged upon. They were described as hardy and industrious patriots,
hemmed in by sullen savages, with no outlet for trade and scant
pasturage for their flocks--in nightly fear of the torch and the
scalping-knife.
To Curtis, these settlers were by no interpretation martyrs in the cause
of civilization--they were quite other. His birth, his military
training, and his natural refinement tended to make him critical of
them. They were to him, for the most part, "poor whites," too pitiless
to be civilized, and too degenerate to have the interest of their
primitive red neighbors. "The best of them," he said to Jennie, "are
foolhardy pioneers who have exiled their wives and children for no good
reason. The others are cattlemen who followed the cavalry in order to
fatten their stock under the protection of our guidon."
The citizens of Pinon City wondered why their delegates made so little
impression on the department, but Streeter was not left long in doubt.
The Secretary interrupted him in the midst of his first presentation of
the matter.
"Mr. Streeter, you are a cattleman, I believe?"