my entire Western trip. They are the prettiest and most beautifully
barbaric little children I have ever seen. They grow out of it very
soon, but that is no reason why one should not make the most of it
while it lasts. And they are as wild and fearful of the white visitor,
unless he happens to be Lieutenant Scott or Second Lieutenant Quay,
as the antelope in the prairie around him. It required a corporal’s
guard, two lieutenants, and three squaws to persuade one of them to
stand still and be photographed, and whenever my camera and I appeared
together there was a wild stampede of Indian children, which no number
of looking-glasses or dimes or strings of beads could allay. Not that
they would not take the bribes, but they would run as soon as they had
snatched them. It was very distressing, for I did not mean to hurt
them very much. The older people were kinder, and would let me sit
inside the tepees, which were very warm on the coldest days, and watch
them cook, and play their queer games, and work moccasins, and gamble
at monte for brass rings if they were women, or for cartridges if they
were men. And for ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, I think
the Indian monte-dealer can instruct a Chinese poker-player in many
things. What was so fine about them was their dignity, hospitality, and
strict suppression of all curiosity. They always received a present as
though they were doing you a favor, and you felt that you were paying
tribute. This makes them difficult to deal with as soldiers. They
cannot be treated as white men, and put in the guard-house for every
slight offence. Lieutenant Scott has to explain things to them, and
praise them, and excite a spirit of emulation among them by commending
those publicly who have done well. For instance, they hate to lose
their long hair, and Lieutenant Scott did not order them to have it
cut, but told them it would please him if they did; and so one by one,
and in bunches of three and four, they tramped up the hill to the post
barber, and back again with their locks in their hands, to barter them
for tobacco with the post trader. The Indians at Fort Sill were a
temperate lot, and Lieutenant Harris, who has charge of the canteen,
growled because they did not drink enough to pay for their share of the
dividend which is returned to each troop at the end of the month.
Lieutenant Scott obtained his ascendency over his troop in several
ways--first, by climbing a face of rock, and, with the assistance of
Lieutenant Quay, taking an eagle from the nest it had built there.
Every Indian in the reservation knew of that nest, and had long wanted
the eagle’s feathers for a war-bonnet, but none of them had ever dared
to climb the mirrorlike surface of the cliff, with the rocks below. The
fame of this exploit spread, by what means it is hard to understand
among people who have no newspapers or letters, but at beef issues,
perhaps, or Messiah dances, or casual meetings on the prairie, which
help to build up reputations and make the prowess of one chief known
to those of all the other tribes, or the beauty of an Indian girl
familiar. Then, following this exploit, three little Indian children
ran away from school because they had been flogged, and tried to reach
their father’s tent fifteen miles off on the reservation, and were
found half-buried in the snow and frozen to death. One of them was
without his heavier garments, which he had wrapped around his younger
brother. The terrified school-teacher sent a message to the fort
begging for two troops of cavalry to protect him from the wrath of the
older Indians, and the post commander sent out Lieutenant Scott alone
to treat with them. His words were much more effective than two troops
of cavalry would have been, and the threatened outbreak was stopped.
The school-master fled to the woods, and never came back. What the
Indians saw of Lieutenant Scott at this crisis made them trust him
for the future, and this and the robbery of the eagle’s nest explain
partly, as do his gentleness and consideration, the remarkable hold he
has over them. Some one was trying to tell one of the chiefs how the
white man could bring lightning down from the sky, and make it talk for
him from one end of the country to the other.
“Oh yes,” the Indian said, simply, “that is quite true. Lieutenant
Scott says so.”
But what has chiefly contributed to make the lieutenant’s work easy
for him is his knowledge of the sign language, with which the different
tribes, though speaking different languages, can communicate one with
the other. He is said to speak this more correctly and fluently than
any other officer in the army, and perhaps any other white man. It
is a very curious language. It is not at all like the deaf-and-dumb
alphabet, which is an alphabet, and is not pretty to watch. It is
just what its name implies--a language of signs. The first time I
saw the lieutenant speaking it, I confess I thought, having heard of
his skill at Fort Reno, that he was only doing it because he could
do it, as young men who speak French prefer to order their American
dinners in that language when the waiter can understand English quite
as well as themselves. I regarded it as a pleasing weakness, and was
quite sure that the lieutenant was going to meet the Indian back of
the canteen and say it over again in plain every-day words. In this
I wronged him; but it was not until I had watched his Irish sergeant
converse in this silent language for two long hours with half a dozen
Indians of different tribes, and had seen them all laugh heartily
at his witticisms delivered in semaphoric gestures, that I really
believed in it. It seems that what the lieutenant said was, “Tell the
first sergeant that I wish to see the soldiers drill at one o’clock,
and, after that, go to the store and ask Madeira if there is to be a
beef issue to-day.” It is very difficult to describe in writing how
he did this; and as it is a really pretty thing to watch, it seems
a pity to spoil it. As well as I remember it, he did something like
this. He first drew his hand over his sleeve to mark the sergeant’s
stripes; then he held his fingers upright in front of him, and moved
them forward to signify soldiers; by holding them in still another
position, he represented soldiers drilling; then he made a spy-glass
out of his thumb and first finger, and looked up through it at the
sky--this represented the sun at one o’clock. “After that” was a
quick cut in the air; the “store” was an interlacing of the fingers,
to signify a place where one thing met or was exchanged for another;
“Madeira” he named; beef was a turning up of the fingers, to represent
horns; and how he represented issue I have no idea. It is a most
curious thing to watch, for they change from one sign to the other with
the greatest rapidity. I always regarded it with great interest as a
sort of game, and tried to guess what the different gestures might
mean. Some of the signs are very old, and their origin is as much in
dispute as some of the lines in the first folios of Shakespeare, and
have nearly as many commentators. All the Indians know these signs, but
very few of them can tell how they came to mean what they do. “To go
to war,” for instance, is shown by sweeping the right arm out with the
thumb and first finger at right angles; this comes from an early custom
among the Indians of carrying a lighted pipe before them when going on
the war-path. The thumb and finger in that position are supposed to
represent the angle of the bowl of the pipe and the stem.
I visited a few of the Indian schools when I was in the Territory, and
found the pupils quite learned. The teachers are not permitted to study
the Indian languages, and their charges in consequence hear nothing but
English, and so pick it up the more quickly. The young women who teach
them seem to labor under certain disadvantages; one of them was reading
the English lesson from a United States history intended for much older
children--grown-up children, in fact--and explained that she had to
order and select the school-books she used from a list furnished by
the Government, and could form no opinion of its appropriateness until
it arrived.
[Illustration: A KIOWA MAIDEN]
Some of the Indian parents are very proud of their children’s progress,
and on beef-issue days visit the schools, and listen with great
satisfaction to their children speaking in the unknown tongue. There
were several in one of the school-rooms while I was there, and the
teacher turned them out of their chairs to make room for us, remarking
pleasantly that the Indians were accustomed to sitting around on the
ground. She afterwards added to this by telling us that there was no
sentiment in _her_, and that she taught Indians for the fifty dollars
there was in it. The mother of one of the little boys was already
crouching on the floor as we came in, or squatting on her heels, as
they seem to be able to do without fatigue for any length of time.
During the half-hour we were there, she never changed her position or
turned her head to look at us, but kept her eyes fixed only on her son
sitting on the bench above her. He was a very plump, clean, and excited
little Indian, with his hair cut short, and dressed in a very fine pair
of trousers and jacket, and with shoes and stockings. He was very keen
to show the white visitors how well he knew their talk, and read his
book with a masterful shaking of the head, as though it had no terrors
for him. His mother, kneeling at his side on the floor, wore a single
garment, and over that a dirty blanket strapped around her waist with
a beaded belt. Her feet were bare, and her coarse hair hung down over
her face and down her back almost to her waist in an unkempt mass. She
supported her chin on one hand, and with the other hand, black and
wrinkled, and with nails broken by cutting wood and harnessing horses
and ploughing in the fields, brushed her hair back from before her
eyes, and then touched her son’s arm wistfully, as a dog tries to draw
his master’s eyes, and as though he were something fragile and fine.
But he paid no attention to her whatsoever; he was very much interested
in the lesson. She was the only thing I saw in the school-room. I
wondered if she was thinking of the days when she carried his weight on
her back as she went about her cooking or foraging for wood, or swung
him from a limb of a tree, and of the first leather leggings she made
for him when he was able to walk, and of the necklace of elk teeth, and
the arrows which he used to fire bravely at the prairie-dogs. He was
a very different child now, and very far away from the doglike figure
crouching by his side and gazing up patiently into his face, as if
looking for something she had lost.
It is quite too presumptuous to suggest any opinion on the Indian
question when one has only lived with them for three weeks, but the
experience of others who have lived with them for thirty years is worth
repeating. You will find that the individual point of view regarding
the Indian is much biassed by the individual interests. A man told me
that in his eyes no one under heaven was better than a white man, and
if the white man had to work for his living, he could not see why the
Indian should not work for his. I asked him if he thought of taking up
Indian land in the Territory when it was open in the spring, and he
said that was his intention, “and why?”
The officers are the only men who have absolutely nothing to gain,
make, or lose by the Indians, and their point of view is accordingly
the fairest, and they themselves say it would be a mistake to follow
the plan now under consideration--of placing officers in charge
of the agencies. This would at once strip them of their present
neutral position, and, as well, open to them the temptation which
the control of many thousands of dollars’ worth of property entails
where the recipients of this property are as helpless and ignorant as
children. They rather favor raising the salary of the Indian agent
from two thousand to ten thousand dollars, and by so doing bring men
of intelligence and probity into the service, and destroy at the same
time the temptation to “make something” out of the office. It may have
been merely an accident, but I did not meet with one officer in any of
the army posts who did not side with the Indian in his battle for his
rights with the Government. As for the agents, as the people say in the
West, “they are not here for their health.” The Indian agents of the
present day are, as every one knows, political appointments, and many
of them--not all--are men who at home would keep their corner grocery
or liquor store, and who would flatter and be civil to every woman in
the neighboring tenement who came for a pound of sugar or a pitcher
of beer. These men are suddenly placed in the control of hundreds of
sensitive, dangerous, semi-civilized people, whom they are as capable
of understanding as a Bowery boy would be of appreciating an Arab of
the desert.
The agents are not the only people who make mistakes. Some friend
mailed me a book the other day on Indian reservations, in order that I
might avoid writing what has already been written. I read only one page
of the book, in which the author described his manner of visiting the
Indian encampments. He would drive to one of these in his ambulance,
and upon being informed that the chiefs were waiting to receive him in
their tents, would bid them meet him at the next camp, to which he
would drive rapidly, and there make the same proposition. He would then
stop his wagon three miles away on the prairie, and wait for the chiefs
to follow him to that point. What his object was in this exhibition,
with which he seemed very well satisfied, he only knows. Whether it was
to teach the chiefs they were not masters in their own camps, or that
he was a most superior person, I could not make out; but he might just
as effectively have visited Washington, and sent the President word he
could not visit him at the White House, but that he would grant him an
interview at his hotel. I wonder just how near this superior young man
got to the Indians, and just how wide they opened their hearts to him.
There was an Indian agent once--it was not long ago, but there is no
need to give dates or names, for the man is dead--who when the Indians
asked him to paint the wagons (with which the Government furnished them
through him in return for their land) red instead of green, answered
that he would not pander to their absurdly barbaric tastes. Only he
did not say absurdly. He was a man who had his own ideas about things,
and who was not to be fooled, and he was also a superior person, who
preferred to trample on rather than to understand the peculiarities of
his wards. So one morning this agent and his wife and children were
found hacked to pieces by these wards with barbaric tastes, and the
soldiers were called out, and shot many of the Indians; and many white
women back of the barracks, and on the line itself, are now wearing
mourning, and several officers got their first bar. It would seem from
this very recent incident, as well as from many others of which one
hears, that it would be cheaper in the end to place agents over the
Indians with sufficient intelligence to know just when to be firm, and
when to compromise in a matter; for instance, that of painting a wagon
red.
VII
A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST
VII
A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST
THE army posts of the United States are as different one from another
as the stations along the line of a great railroad system. There is
the same organization for all, and the highest officers govern one
as well as the other; but in appearance and degree of usefulness and
local rule they are as independent and yet as dependent, and as far
apart in actual miles, as the Grand Central Depot in New York, with
its twenty tracks and as many ticket-windows and oak-bound offices and
greatest after-dinner orator, is distant from the section-house at
the unfinished end of a road somewhere on the prairie. The commanding
officer’s quarters alone at Fort Sheridan cost thirty thousand dollars,
and more than a million and a half has been spent on Fort Riley; but
there are many other posts where nature supplied the mud and logs
for the whole station, and the cost to the Government could not have
been more than three hundred dollars at the most. It is consequently
difficult to write in a general way of army posts. What is true of
one is by no means true of another, and it will be better, perhaps,
to first tell of those army posts which possess many features in
common--eight-company posts, for instance, which are not too large
nor too small, not too near civilization, and yet not too far
removed from the railroad. An eight-company post is a little town or
community of about three hundred people living in a quadrangle around
a parade-ground. The scenery surrounding the quadrangle may differ
as widely as you please to imagine it; it may be mountainous and
beautiful, or level, flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is
always the same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle,
and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which the men live,
and tennis-courts towards the officers’ quarters. When you speak of the
side of the square where the enlisted men live, you say “barracks,” and
you refer to the officers’ share of the quadrangle as “the line.” In
England you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but
you must not say this of a United States officer; he lives in the third
or fourth house up or down “the line.”
[Illustration: A ONE-COMPANY POST AT OKLAHOMA CITY]
The barracks are a long continuous row of single-story buildings with
covered porches facing the parade. They are generally painted an
uncompromising brown, and are much more beautiful inside than out,
especially the messrooms, where all the wood-work has been scrubbed
so hard that the tables are worn almost to a concave surface. The
architectural appearance of the officers’ quarters on the line differs
in different posts; but each house of each individual post, whether
it is a double or single house, is alike to the number of bricks in
the walls and in the exact arrangement of the rooms. The wives of the
officers may change the outer appearance of their homes by planting
rose-bushes and ivy about the yards, but whenever they do, some other
officer’s wife is immediately transferred from another post and
“outranks” them, and they have to move farther down the line, and
watch the new-comer plucking _their_ roses, and reaping the harvest
she has not sown. This rule also applies to new wall-paper, and the
introduction at your own expense of open fireplaces, with blue and
white tiles which will not come off or out when the new-comer moves
in. In addition to the officers’ quarters and the barracks, there is
an administration building, which is the executive mansion of this
little community, a quartermaster’s storehouse, a guard-house, and
the hospital. The stables are back of the barracks, out of sight of
those who live facing the parade, and there is generally a rear-guard
of little huts and houses occupied by sergeants’ wives, who do the
washing for the posts, and do it very well. This is, briefly, the
actual appearance of an army post--a quadrangle of houses, continuous
and one-story high on two sides, and separate and two stories high on
the other two sides, facing the parade, and occasionally surrounded by
beautiful country.
The life of an army post, its internal arrangements, its necessary
routine, and its expedients for breaking this routine pleasantly,
cannot be dealt with so briefly; it is a delicate and extensive
subject. It is impossible to separate the official and social life of
an army post. The commanding officer does not lose that dignity which
doth hedge him in when he and his orderly move from the administration
building to his quarters, and it would obviously confuse matters
if a second lieutenant bet him in the morning he could not put the
red bail into the right-corner pocket, and in the evening at dress
parade he should order the same lieutenant and his company into the
lower right-hand corner of the parade at double-quick. This would
tend to destroy discipline. And so, as far as the men of the post are
concerned, the official and social life touch at many points. With the
women, of course, it is different, although there was a colonel’s
wife not long ago who said to the officers’ wives assisting her to
receive at a dance, “You will take your places, ladies, in order of
rank.” I repeat this mild piece of gossip because it was the only
piece of gossip I heard at any army post, which is interesting when
one remembers the reputation given the army posts by one of their own
people for that sort of thing.
The official head of the post is the commanding officer, he has under
him eight “companies,” if they are infantry, or “troops” if they are
cavalry, each commanded in turn by a captain, who has under him a first
and second lieutenant, who rule in their turn numerous sergeants and
corporals. There is also a major or two, two or three surgeons, who
rank with the captains, and a quartermaster and an adjutant, who are
selected from among the captains or lieutenants of the post, and who
perform, in consequence, double duty. The majority of the officers are
married; this is not a departmental regulation nor a general order, but
it happens to be so. I visited one very large post in which every one
was married except one girl, and a second lieutenant, who spoiled the
natural sequel by being engaged to a girl somewhere else. And at the
post I had visited before this there were ten unmarried and unengaged
lieutenants, and no young women. It seems to me that this presents
an unbalanced condition of affairs, which should be considered and
adjusted by Congress even before the question of lineal promotion.
[Illustration: THE OMNIPOTENT BUGLER]
It is true that the commanding officer is supposed to be the most
important personage in an army post, but that is not so. He, as well
as every one else in it, is ruled by a young person with a brass
trumpet, who apparently never sleeps, eats, or rests, and who spends
his days tooting on his bugle in the middle of the parade in rainy
and in sunny weather and through good and evil report. He sounds in
all thirty-seven “calls” a day, and the garrison gets up and lies
down, and eats, and waters the horses, and goes to church and school,
and to horse exercise, and mounts guard, and drills recruits, and
parades in full dress whenever he thinks they should. His prettiest
call is reveille, which is sounded at half-past six in the morning.
It is bright and spirited, and breathes promise and hope for the new
day, and I personally liked it best because it meant that while I
still had an hour to sleep, three hundred other men had to get up and
clean cold guns and things in the semi-darkness. Next to the bugler in
importance is the quartermaster. He is a captain or a first lieutenant
with rare executive ability, and it is he who supplies the garrison
with those things which make life bearable or luxurious, and it is he
who is responsible to the Government for every coat of whitewash on
the stables, and for the new stove-lid furnished the cook of N Troop,
Thirteenth Cavalry. He is the hardest-worked man in the post, although
that would possibly be denied by every other officer in it; and he
is supposed to be an authority on architecture, sanitary plumbing,
veterinary surgery, household furnishing from the kitchen range to the
electric button on the front door, and to know all things concerning
martial equipments from a sling-belt to an ambulance.