The Indian in the Nineteenth Century.
[=The Relation of Whites and Indians=]
The relation of the American people to the Indians, since the first
settlement of this country, has been one of conflict, which has been
almost incessant in some sections of the land. By the opening of the
nineteenth century the red men had been driven back in great measure
from the thirteen original states, but the tribes in the west were
still frequently hostile, and stood sternly in the way of our progress
westward. We propose in this chapter to describe the various relations,
both peaceful and warlike, which have existed between the whites and
the red men during the century with which we are here concerned.
[=Harrison and Tecumseh=]
The close of the Revolutionary War brought only a partial cessation of
the Indian warfare. The red man was by no means disposed to give up his
country without a struggle, and throughout the interior, in what is
now Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and along the Ohio River, there
were constant outbreaks, and battles of great severity. The conflict
in Indiana brought forward the services of a young lieutenant, William
Henry Harrison, who for many years had much to do with Indians, both
as military officer and as governor of the Indian territory. In 1811
appeared one of those great Indian chiefs whose abilities and influence
are well worth attention and study. Tecumseh, a mighty warrior of
mixed Creek and Shawnee blood, was one who dreamt the dream of freeing
his people. With eloquence and courage he urged them on, by skill he
combined the tribes in a new alliance, and, encouraged by British
influence, he looked forward to a great success. While he was seeking
to draw the Southern Indians into his scheme, his brother rashly joined
battle with General Harrison, and was utterly defeated in the fight
which gained for Harrison the title of Old Tippecanoe. Disappointed and
disheartened at this destruction of his life-work, Tecumseh threw all
his great influence on the British side in the War of 1812, in which
he dealt much destruction to the United States troops. At Sandusky and
Detroit and Chicago, and at other less important forts, the Indian
power was severely felt; but at Terre Haute the young captain Zachary
Taylor met the savages with such courage and readiness of resources
that they were finally repulsed. But rarely did a similar good fortune
befall our troops; and it was not until after Commodore Perry won
victory for us at Lake Erie, that Tecumseh himself was killed, and the
twenty-five hundred Indians of his force were finally scattered, in the
great fight of the Thames River, where our troops were commanded by
William Henry Harrison and Richard M. Johnson, afterward President and
Vice-President of the United States. For a little time the Northwest
had peace. But in the South the warfare was not over. Tecumseh had
stirred up the Creeks and Seminoles against the whites, and throughout
Alabama, Georgia, and Northern Florida the Creek War raged with all its
horrid accompaniments until 1814; even the redoubtable Andrew Jackson
could not conquer the brave Creeks until they were almost exterminated,
and then a small remnant remained in the swamps of Florida to be heard
of at a later time.
[=National Period=]
[=Government Policy=]
Before the new government of the United States was fully upon its
feet it recognized the necessity and duty of caring for its Indian
population. In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence,
the Continental Congress divided the Indians into three departments,
northern, middle and southern, each under the care of three or more
commissioners, among whom we find no less personages than Oliver
Wolcott, Philip Schuyler, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin. As early
as 1832 the young nation found itself confronted with a serious Indian
problem, created a separate bureau for the charge of the red men, and
inaugurated a definite policy of treatment. Speaking in general, we
have altered this policy three times. As a matter of fact, we have
altered its details, changed its plans, and adopted new methods of
management as often as changing administrations have changed the
administrators of our Indian affairs. But in the large, there have
been three great steps in our Indian policy, and these have to some
extent grown out of our changing conditions. The first plan was that of
the reservations. Under that system, as the Indian land was wanted by
the white population, the red man was removed across the Mississippi
and pushed step by step still further west; and as time went on
and the population followed hard after, he was eventually confined
to designated tracts. Yet despite the fact that these tracts were
absolutely guaranteed to him, he was driven off them again and again
as the farmer or the miner demanded the land. In time a new policy was
attempted, or rather an old policy was revived, that of concentrating
the whole body of Indians into one state or territory, but the obvious
impossibility of that scheme soon brought it to an end. Less than
thirty years ago the present plan took its place, that of education and
eventual absorption.
[=Removal of the Southern Tribes=]
[=War with the Seminoles=]
In 1830 the country seemed to stretch beyond any possible need of
the young nation, lusty as it was, and the wide wilderness of the
Rocky Mountains promised to furnish hunting grounds for all time.
The Mississippi Valley and the Northwest were still unsettled, but
in the South the Five Nations were greatly in the way of their white
neighbors, and the work of the removal of the latter beyond the
Mississippi was begun. Under President Monroe several treaties were
made with those tribes--the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and
Seminoles--by which, one after another, they ceded their lands to the
government, and took in exchange the country now known as the Indian
Territory. They were already somewhat advanced in civilization, with
leaders combining in blood and brain the Indian astuteness and the
white man's experience and education. John Ross, a half-breed chief
of the Cherokees, of unusual ability, brought about the removal under
conditions more favorable than often occurred. He was bitterly opposed
by full half the Indians, and it was not without sufferings and losses
of more than one kind that the great southern league was removed to
the fair and fertile land set aside for them in the far-off West. It
was owing to the sagacity of John Ross and his associates that this
land was secured to them, in a way in which no other land has ever been
secured to an Indian tribe. They hold it to-day by patent, as secure
in the sight of the law as an old Dutch manor house or a Virginia
plantation, and all the learning of the highest tribunals has not yet
found the way to evade or disregard these solemn obligations. To these
men, too, and to the missionaries who long taught their tribes, do
they owe an effective form of civilization, and a governmental polity
which preserves for them alone, among all the red men, the title and
the state of nations. The Seminoles, who were of the Creek blood, were
divided, some of them going west with their brethren, the larger number
of them remaining in Florida. With these--about 4,000 in all--under
their young and able chief, Osceola, the government fought a seven
years' war, costing many lives and forty millions in money, and did not
then succeed in removing all the Seminoles from their much-loved home.
[=Hostilities with Northern Tribes=]
A similar state of affairs attended the removals in the north. The
savages bitterly opposed giving up their native soil, there being in
every case two parties in the tribe, one that sorrowfully yielded to
the necessity of submission, and one that indulged in the hopeless
dream of successful resistance. Thus the Sac and Fox tribe of Wisconsin
was divided, and although Keokuk and one band went peaceably to their
new home among the Iowas, Black Hawk and his followers were slow to
depart, and were removed by force. The Indian Department failed to
furnish corn enough for the new settlement, and, going to seek it among
the Winnebagoes, the Indians came into collision with the government.
Thereafter ensued a series of misunderstandings, and consequent fights,
resulting in great alarm among the whites and destruction to the
Indians. The story is the same story, almost to details, that has been
frequently seen since that time. After the fashion above described all
the removals have proceeded, the cause ever the same, the white man's
greed and the ferocity of the wronged and infuriated savage.
[=Treatment of the Western Indians=]
It is useless and impossible to give the details of all the various
tribes that have been pushed about in the manner described. In 1830 the
East was already crowding toward the West, and every succeeding decade
saw the frontier moved onward with giant strides. Everywhere the Indian
was an undesirable neighbor, and when, in 1849, the discovery of gold
began to create a new nation on the Pacific slope, a pressure began
from that side also, and the intervening deserts became a thoroughfare
for the pilgrims of fortune and the lovers of adventure. From year to
year the United States made fresh treaties with the tribes; those in
the East were gone already, those in the interior were following fast,
and there had arisen the new necessity of dealing with those in the
far West. One tribe after another would be planted on a reservation
millions of acres in extent and apparently far beyond the home of
civilization, and almost in a twelvemonth the settler would be upon
its border, demanding its broad acres. The reservations were altered,
reduced, taken away altogether, at the pleasure of the government,
with little regard to the rights or wishes of the Indian. Usually this
brought about fighting, and it produced a state of permanent discontent
that wrought harm for both settler and savage. The Indian grew daily
more and more treacherous and constantly more cruel. The white settler
was daily in greater danger, and constantly more eager for revenge.
[=General "To-morrow"=]
A new complication entered into the problem. The game was fast
disappearing, and with it the subsistence of the Indian. It became
necessary for the government to furnish rations and clothes, lest he
should starve and freeze. Cheating was the rule and deception the
every-day experience of these savages. In 1795 General Wayne gained
the nickname of General To-morrow, so slow was the government to
fulfill his promises; and thus for more than a hundred years it was
to-morrow for the Indian. Exasperated beyond endurance, he was ever
ready to retaliate, and the horrors of an Indian war constantly hung
over the pioneer. During all this period we treated the Indian tribes
as if they were foreign nations, and made solemn treaties with them,
agreeing to furnish them rations or marking the reservation bounds. We
have made more than a thousand of these treaties, and General Sherman
is the authority for the statement that we have broken every one of
them. Day by day the gluttonous idleness, the loss of hope, the sense
of wrong, and the bitter feeling of contempt united to degrade the red
man as well as to madden him.
[=The Sioux War of 1862=]
The fighting did not cease, for all the promises or the threats of the
government. But always, it is credibly declared, the first cause of an
Indian outbreak was a wrong inflicted upon some tribe. And always, in
the latter days as in the earlier period, it has meant one more effort
on the part of the old warriors to regain the power they saw slipping
away so fast. Both these causes entered into the awful Sioux War in
Minnesota in 1862. Suffering from piled-up wrongs, smarting under the
loss of power, and conscious that the Civil War was their opportunity,
a party of one hundred and fifty Sioux began the most horrid massacre
known for fifty years; the beginning of a struggle which lasted more
than a year, and which was remarkable for the steadfast fidelity of
the Christian Indians, to whose help and succor whole bodies of white
men owed their lives. Four years later, in 1866, the discovery of gold
in Montana caused the invasion of the Sioux reservation, and Red Cloud
set about defending it. Scarcely more than thirty years old, but no
mean warrior, he fought the white man long and desperately and with the
cunning of his race.
[=Massacre of General Custer's Command=]
This outbreak was scarcely quieted when another occurred. As was its
wont, the government forgot the promises of its treaty of peace, and
a small band of the Cheyennes retaliated with a raid upon their white
neighbors. General Sheridan made this the occasion he was seeking for
a war of extermination, and in November, 1868, Lieutenant Custer fell
upon Black Kettle's village and after a severe fight destroyed the
village, killing more than a hundred warriors and capturing half as
many women and children. The next year General Sheridan ordered the
Sioux and Cheyennes off the hunting grounds the treaty had reserved
to them, but these were the strongest and bravest of the tribes and
they resisted the order. A number of Civil War heroes, Crook, Terry,
Custer, Miles and McKenzie, led our troops, and among the chiefs whom
they met in a long and desperate struggle were Crazy Horse and Spotted
Tail, notable warriors both. At the battle of the Big Horn, by some
misunderstanding or mismanagement, General Custer was left with only
five companies to meet nearly three thousand savage Sioux. He fought
desperately until the last, but he was killed and his command so
utterly destroyed that not a single man was left alive. The attempt to
remove the Modocs from California to Oregon in 1872 was the signal for
a new war; and a year or two afterwards similar results followed when
it was attempted to push the Nez Perces from the homes they had sought
in Oregon to a new reservation in Idaho. This tribe, under its famous
leader, Chief Joseph, was hard to conquer. The military organization,
the civilized method of warfare, and the courage and skill of the tribe
were publicly complimented by Generals Sherman, Howard and Gibbons, who
declared Chief Joseph to be one of the greatest of modern warriors.
[=Barbarous Treatment of the Cheyennes=]
In 1877, discouraged by the failure of our efforts to hold the Indians
in check, it was determined by Secretary Schurz, then in charge of the
Department of the Interior, to remove them all to the western part of
the Indian Territory, where the tribes in possession agreed to cede the
necessary land. It was hoped to create there an Indian commonwealth,
but trouble arose from the attempt to carry out the well-meant effort.
A single story, the story of the Northern Cheyennes, will illustrate
the wrongs the Indian suffered, as well as those he inflicted. The
Cheyennes, as has been seen, were a tribe of valiant warriors, some of
them at home in the hills of the North, some residing in the hills of
the South. The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas and Comanches were banded
together in a close and common bond, and, at first the friends of the
government, had become frequently its enemies, by reason of broken
faith, cruel treatment, injustice, and downright wrong. That chronicle
of misery, "A Century of Dishonor," contains forty pages of facts
taken from the government records, which relate the inexcusable and
indefensible treatment of the Cheyenne tribe by the government, and
their vain endurance of wrongs, interspersed with savage outbreaks,
when human nature could endure no longer. It includes the account of a
massacre of helpless Indian women and children under a flag of truce;
a war begun over ponies stolen from the Indians, and sold in the open
market by the whites in a land where the horse thief counts with the
murderer; another incited by a rage against a trader who paid one
dollar bills for ten dollar bills; and tells of whole tracts of land
seized without compensation by the United States itself.
[=How the Cheyennes were Subdued=]
The Northern Cheyennes had been taken by force to the Indian Territory,
and in its severe heat, with scant and poor rations, a pestilence came
upon them. Two thousand were sick at once, and many died because there
was not medicine enough. At last three hundred braves, old men and
young, with their women and children, broke away and, making a raid
through Western Kansas, sought their Nebraska home. This was not a
mild and peaceable tribe. It was fierce and savage beyond most, and
its people were wild with long endured injustice and frantic with a
nameless terror. Three times they drove back the troops who were sent
to face them, and, living by plunder, they made a red trail all through
Kansas, until they were finally captured in Nebraska in December. They
refused to go back to the Indian Territory, and the department ordered
them to be starved into submission. Food and fuel were taken from the
imprisoned Indians. Four days they had neither food nor fire--and the
mercury froze at Fort Robinson in that month! And when at last two
chiefs came out under a flag of truce, they were seized and imprisoned.
Then pandemonium broke loose inside. The Indians broke up the useless
stoves, and fought with the twisted iron. They brought out a few hidden
arms, and, howling like devils, they rushed out into the night and the
snow. Seven days later they were shot down like dogs.
[=President Grant Adopts a New System=]
Experiences like this soon ended the attempt to gather together all
our Indian wards, and we returned to the old plan of the reservations,
but with little more certainty of peace than before. Again and again
starvation was followed by fighting, nameless outrages upon the Indian
by cruel outrages upon the white man. Whether Apaches under Geronimo in
New Mexico, or Sioux in Dakota, it was the old story over again. Thus,
with constant danger menacing the white settler from the infuriated
savage Indian, and constant outrage upon the red man by rapacious and
cruel whites, the government found a new policy necessary. This policy
was inaugurated by a strange and unusual sequence of events. In 1869
a sharp difference arose between the two Houses of Congress over the
appropriations to pay for eleven treaties then just negotiated, and
the session closed with no appropriation for the Indian service. The
necessity for some measure was extreme; the plan was devised of a bill
which was passed at an extra session, putting two millions of dollars
in the hands of President Grant, to be used as he saw fit for the
civilization and protection of the Indian. He immediately called to his
aid a commission composed of nine philanthropic gentlemen to overlook
the affairs of the Indian and advise him thereupon. This commission
served without salary and continues to this day its beneficent work.
Another valuable measure followed. At the next Congress a law was
enacted forbidding any more treaties with Indians, and thenceforth they
became our wards; not foreigners and rivals, as practically the case
before.
[Illustration: JAMES G. BLAINE
WILLIAM McKINLEY
GROVER CLEVELAND
WILLIAM J. BRYAN]
[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY.
MURAT HALSTEAD.
ALBERT SHAW.
LYMAN ABBOTT.
CHAS. A. DANA.
HENRY W. WATTERSON.
WHITELAW REID.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
NOTED AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTORS.]
[=Captain Pratt and his Captives=]
The war of 1877 had indirectly another beneficent result, most
far-reaching in its consequences. Among the brave men who had fought
the Cheyennes and Kiowas and Comanches, was Captain Richard H. Pratt,
who was put in charge of the prisoners who had been sent to Fort
Marion, Florida, as a punishment worse than death. They were the
wildest and fiercest warriors, who had fought long and desperately.
On their way East they killed their guard, and repeatedly tried,
one and another, to kill themselves. But Captain Pratt was a man of
wonderful executive ability, of splendid courage and great faith in
God and man. By firmness and patience and wondrous tact he gradually
taught the savages to read and to work, and when after three years the
government offered to return them to their homes, twenty-three of them
refused to go. Captain Pratt appealed to the government to continue
their education, and General Armstrong, with his undying faith in
human beings as children of one Father and his sublime enthusiasm for
humanity, received most of them at Hampton Institute, the rest being
sent to the North under the care of Bishop Huntington, of New York. In
the end these men returned to their tribes Christian men, and, with
the seventy who returned directly from Florida, they became a power
for peace and industry in their tribe. Out of this small beginning
grew the great policy of Indian education, and the long story of death
and destruction began to change to the bright chronicle of peace and
education.
[=How the Indians Live=]
What, then, is the condition of the Indian to-day? In number there
are scarcely more than two hundred and forty thousand in the whole
country. Of these less than one-fifth depend upon the government for
support. All told, they are fewer than the inhabitants of Buffalo
or Cleveland or Pittsburg, yet they are _not_ dying out, but rather
steadily increasing. They are divided and subdivided into many
tribes of different characteristics and widely different degrees of
civilization. Some are Sioux--these are brave and able and intelligent;
they live in wigwams or tepees, and are dangerous and often hostile.
Some are Zunis, who live in houses and make beautiful pottery, and are
mild and peaceable, and do not question the ways of the Great Father
at Washington. Some are roving bands of Shoshones, dirty, ignorant,
and shiftless--the tramps of their race--who are on every man's side
at once. Some are Chilcats or Klinkas, whose Alaskan homes offer
new problems of new kinds for every day we know them. And some are
Cherokees, living in fine houses, dressed in the latest fashion, and
spending their winters in Washington or Saint Louis.
Yet these, and many of other kinds, are all alike Indians. They have
their own governments, their own unwritten laws, their own customs.
As a race they are neither worthless nor degraded. The Indian is not
only brave, strong, and able by inheritance and practice to endure, but
he is patient under wrong, ready and eager to learn, and willing to
undergo much privation for that end; usually affectionate in his family
relations, grateful to a degree, pure and careful of the honor of his
wife and daughter; and he is also patriotic to a fault. He has a genius
for government, and an unusual interest in it. He is full of manly
honor, and he is strongly religious. His history and traditions have
only recently been traced, to the delight and surprise of scientific
students. His daily life is a thing of elaborate ceremonial, and his
national existence is as carefully regulated as our own, and by an
intricate code. It is true that our failure to comprehend his character
and our neglect to study his customs have bred many faults in him and
have fostered much evil. Our treatment of him, moreover, has produced
and increased a hostility which has been manifested in savage methods
for which we have had little mercy.
[=Indian Character and Habits=]
[=The Indian Agencies=]
But we have not always given the same admiration to warlike virtues
when our enemy was an Indian that we have showered without stint upon
ancient Gaul or modern German. The popular idea of the Indian not only
misconceives his character, but to a large degree his habits also. Even
the wildest tribes live for the most part in huts or cabins made of
logs, with two windows and a door. In the middle is a fire, sometimes
with a stovepipe and sometimes without. Here the food is cooked, mostly
stewed, in a kettle hung gypsy-fashion, or laid on stones over the
fire. Around the fire, each in a particular place of his own, lies or
sits the whole family. Sometimes the cooking is done out of doors,
and in summer the close cabin is exchanged for a tepee or tent. Here
they live, night and day. At night a blanket is hung up, partitioning
the tent for the younger women, and if the family is very large,
there are often two tents, in the smaller of which sleep the young
girls in charge of an old woman. These tents or cabins are clustered
close together, and their inhabitants spend their days smoking,
talking, eating, or quarreling, as the case may be. Sometimes near
them, sometimes miles away, is the agent's house and the government
buildings. These are usually a commissary building where the food for
the Indians is kept, a blacksmith shop, the store of the trader, school
buildings, and perhaps a saw-mill. To this place the Indians come week
by week for their food. The amount and nature of the rations called for
by treaties vary greatly among different tribes. But everywhere the
Indian has come into some sort of contact with the whites, and usually
he makes some shift to adopt the white man's ways. A few are rich, some
own houses, and almost universally, at present, government schools
teach the children something of the elements of learning as well as the
indispensable English.
[=The Indian Rights Association=]
The immediate control of the reservation Indian is in the hands of
the agent, whose power is almost absolute, and, like all despotisms,
may be very good or intolerably bad according to the character of the
man. The agencies are visited from time to time by inspectors, who
report directly to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,--an officer
of the Interior Department and responsible to the secretary, who
is, of course, amenable to the President. In each house of Congress
is a committee having charge of all legislation relating to Indian
affairs. Besides these officials there is the Indian Commission already
mentioned. The National Indian Rights Association and the Women's
National Indian Association are the unofficial and voluntary guardians
of the Indian work. It is their task to spread correct information,
to create intelligent interest, to set in motion public and private
forces which will bring about legislation, and by public meetings and
private labors to prevent wrongs against the Indian, and to further
good work of many kinds. While the Indian Rights Association does the
most public and official work for the race and has large influence
over legislation, the Women's Indian Association concerns itself more
largely with various philanthropic efforts in behalf of the individual,
and thus the two bodies supplement each other.
[=Appropriations for Education=]
Hopeless and impossible as it seemed to many when this effort began
to absorb the Indian, to-day we see the process well under way and
in some cases half accomplished; and in this work the government,
philanthropy, education and religion have all had their share, and so
closely have these worked together that neither can be set above nor
before the others. We began to realize, it is true, that our duty and
our safety alike lay in educating the Indians as early as 1819, when
Congress appropriated $10,000 for that purpose, and still earlier
President Washington declared to a deputation of Indians his belief
that industrial education was their greatest need; but it is only
within recent years that determined efforts have been made or adequate
provision afforded. Beginning with $10,000 in 1819, we had reached
only $20,000 in 1877; but the appropriation for Indian education is
now over $2,500,000. With this money we support great industrial
training schools established at various convenient points. In them
several thousand children are learning not only books, but all manner
of industries, and are adding to study the training of character.
There are more than 150 boarding schools on the various reservations
teaching and training these children of the hills and plains, and many
gather daily at the three hundred little day schools which dot the
prairies, some of them appearing to the uninitiated to be miles away
from any habitation. This does not include the mission schools of the
various churches. But all together it is hoped that in the excellent
government schools now provided, in the splendid missionary seminaries,
and in the great centres of light like Hampton and Carlisle and Haskell
Institute, we shall soon do something for the education of nearly or
quite all the Indian children who can be reached with schools. At
present the daily school attendance is over 20,000.
[=Hampton and Carlisle Indian Schools=]
The two great training schools at the East, Hampton and Carlisle,
have proved object lessons for the white man as well as the Indian,
and the opposition they constantly encounter from those who do not
believe that the red man can ever receive civilization is in some sort
a proof of their value. In the main, they and all their kind have one
end--the thorough and careful training in books and work and home life
of the Indian boy and girl--and their methods are much alike. Once a
year the superintendents or teachers of these schools go out among the
Indians and bring back as many boys and girls as they can persuade the
fathers and mothers to send. At first these children came in dirt and
filth, and with little or no ideas of any regular or useful life, but
of late many of them have gained some beginnings of civilization in
the day schools. They are taught English first, and by degrees to make
bread and sew and cook and wash and keep house if they are girls; the
trade of a printer, a blacksmith, a carpenter, etc., if they are boys.
They study books, the boys are drilled, and from kind, strong men and
gentle, patient women they learn to respect work and even to love it,
to turn their hands to any needed effort, to adapt themselves to new
situations.
[=The Effect of Education=]
It is charged that the Indian educated in these schools does not remain
civilized, but shortly returns to his habits and customs. A detailed
examination into the lives of three hundred and eighteen Indian
students who have gone out from Hampton Institute has shown that only
thirty-five have in any way disappointed the expectations of their
friends and teachers, and only twelve have failed altogether; and the
extraordinary test of the last Sioux war, in which only one of these
students, and he a son-in-law of Sitting Bull, joined the hostiles, may
well settle the question. A recent statement says that 76 per cent.
of the school graduates prove "good average men and women, capable of
taking their place in the great body politic of our country."
[=The Severalty Act=]
In 1887 a new step was taken for the advancement of the Indian, in the
passage of the Severalty Act, by which homesteads of 160 acres were
set aside for each head of a family willing to accept the proffer, and
smaller homesteads for other members of the family. These were to be
free from taxation and could not be sold for twenty-five years. They
might be selected on the reservation of the tribe or anywhere else
on the public domain. This allotment of land carried with it all the
rights, privileges and immunities of American citizenship. In case the
Indian should not care to take up a homestead, he could still become a
citizen if he took up his residence apart from the tribe and adopted
civilized habits. The purpose was to break up the tribal organization
which had stood so greatly in the way of the beneficent purposes of the
government, and to convert each Indian into an individual citizen of
the United States.
[=The Homestead Indians=]
The effort has been attended with highly encouraging success.
Within twelve years after the law was passed 55,467 Indians had
taken up homesteads, aggregating in all 6,708,628 acres. Of these
agriculturists, more than 15,000 were heads of families, around whose
farms were gathered the smaller ones of the other members of the
family. The change to the independence and responsibilities of United
States citizenship was so sudden as to prove a severe strain to the
Indian, accustomed to consider himself a fraction of a tribe and
lacking the full sense of individuality. Yet the failures have been
very few, and we begin to see our way clear to a final disposal of the
long-existing Indian question.
As regards the effect of religious training upon the Indians, it may be
said to be quite encouraging. Of the 33,000 Sioux, for instance, 8,000
are now church members. The Presbyterian Church numbers nearly 5,000
Indian members and 4,000 Sunday-school pupils; while the total number
of church communicants among the Indians is nearly 30,000.
[=The Outcome of Indian Policy.=]
Thus, with the close of the nineteenth century, there is good reason to
hope for the end of a serious difficulty that has confronted the whites
since their first settlement in this country nearly three hundred years
ago. War, slaughter, injustice, wrongs innumerable have attended its
attempted solution, which long seemed as if it would be reached only
when all the red men had been exterminated. Fortunately it was justice,
not slaughter, that was needed, and the moment our government awoke
fully to this fact and began to practice justice the difficulty began
to disappear. To-day just treatment, education, religious training
are rapidly overcoming the assumed ineradicable savageness of the
Indian, while the breaking up of the tribal system promises before
many years to do away with the political aggregation of the Indians,
and distribute them among the other citizens of our country as members
of the general body politic. Thus has the nineteenth century happily
disposed of an awkward problem that threatened seriously the successful
development of our nation a century ago.