wishes of the American people. Have we not been taught, from our youth
up, that the two chief glories of our country were the equality of all
its citizens before the law and their absolute freedom in all religious
matters? True, the Indians are not citizens, but we have undertaken the
task of acting as their guardians, with the hope of ultimately fitting
them, or as many of them as may be tough enough to endure the process,
for the duties of citizenship. To begin this task by teaching our pupils
that religion is not a matter of conscience—that the government has a
right to force upon a people a form of Christianity against which their
consciences revolt—and to punish them for attempting to adhere to the
church whose priests first taught them to know and to fear God, is not
merely a moral wrong; it is a crime.
The whole number of Indians in the United States and Territories,
according to the very careful and systematic census contained in the
report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1875, was 279,333,
exclusive of those in Alaska. It is not a very large number; the
population of the city of New York exceeds it nearly fourfold. The
Indian Bureau classifies these people under four heads:
I. 98,108 Indians who “are wild and scarcely tractable to any extent
beyond that of coming near enough to the government agent to receive
rations and blankets.”
II. 52,113 Indians “who are thoroughly convinced of the necessity of
labor, and are actually undertaking it, and with more or less readiness
accept the direction and assistance of government agents to this end.”
III. 115,385 Indians “who have come into possession of allotted lands
and other property in stock and implements belonging to a landed
estate.”
IV. 13,727 Indians who are described as “roamers and vagrants,” and of
whom the commissioner, the Hon. Edward P. Smith, speaks in the following
Christian and statesman-like language:
“They are generally as harmless as vagrants and vagabonds can be
in a civilized country. They are found in all stages of
degradation produced by licentiousness, intemperance, idleness,
and poverty. Without land, unwilling to leave their haunts for a
homestead upon a reservation, and scarcely in any way related
to, or recognized by, the government, they drag out a miserable
life. Themselves corrupted and the source of corruption, they
seem to serve by their continued existence but a single useful
purpose—that of affording a living illustration of the tendency
and effect of barbarism allowed to expand itself uncured,”
—or, perhaps, of “affording a living illustration” of the wisdom and
mercy of a policy which, neglecting these poor wretches “without land,”
comes down upon other tribes, living peaceably and thrivingly upon
reservations “solemnly secured to them for ever,” takes from them their
homes and farms, and drives them forth to a new and desolate land; or,
if they resist, exasperates them into a war that ends by adding them to
the number of “roamers and vagabonds.” The sanguinary conflict which, as
we write, is still being waged between a portion of the Nez-Percés
Indians and the troops under command of that eminent “Christian
soldier,” General Howard, is a flagrant instance of the manner in which
Indians of the first and second classes enumerated by the commissioner
are driven into the category of “roamers and vagabonds.” We cannot pause
to trace the history of this our last and most needless Indian war; we
pass it by with the remark that one of the indirect causes of it,
according to the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1874,
appears to have been the action of the “American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions,” a Presbyterian organization, in selling to a
speculator certain lands within the reservation which did not belong to
the board, but to the Indians themselves.
The report of the commissioner for 1876—the Hon. J. Q. Smith—contains a
number of statistical tables, an analysis of which will aid us in
forming a correct conception of the present condition of the Indians
embraced in the commissioner’s third class, as well as a portion of
those in his second class. According to these tables—which contain the
latest _official_ returns from all the agencies—the whole number of
Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska, and of the “roamers and
vagrants,” is put down at 266,151, of whom 40,639 are of mixed blood.
The latter are for the most part the children of Indian mothers and of
French, Spanish, and American fathers. No less than 153,000 of the whole
number “come directly under the civilizing influences of the government
agencies,” and of these 104,818 “wear citizen’s dress.” The abandonment
of the picturesque blanket for the civilizing coat, the embroidered
buckskin leggings for the plain pantaloons, and the gay plume of
gorgeous feathers for the hideous hat, is certainly a mark of progress.
But when the wigwam is torn down, and the log, frame, or stone house is
erected in its stead, a still more decided step towards civilization has
been taken; and it may be with surprise that some of our readers will
learn that our “savages” have built for themselves, or have had built
for them, 55,717 houses, of which 1,702 were erected during last year.
The progress of education is a still further test of the condition of
these people. There are 367 school buildings upon the reservations; and
in these are conducted 63 boarding-schools and 281 day-schools, 23 of
the school buildings, apparently, being unoccupied. The number of
teachers is 437, and of pupils 11,328, of which number 6,028 are males.
The amount of money expended for education during the year was $362,496,
an average of $32 per pupil. The number of Indians who can read is
25,622, of whom 980 acquired that useful accomplishment during the year.
The number of births (exclusive of those in the five civilized tribes in
the Indian Territory) was 2,401, and of deaths 2,215. The religious
statistics in this table are evidently incorrect in at least one
particular. The number of church buildings on the Indian reservations is
177; the number of missionaries “not included under teachers” is 122;
and “the amount contributed by religious societies during the year for
education and other purposes” was $62,076.
These figures we do not call in question, but the “number of Indians who
are church members” is put down at only 27,215. It is to be desired that
the compiler of the statistics had furnished us with a definition of
what he understands by the words “church members.” He sets down for the
Pueblo agency, in New Mexico, for example: “Number of Indians, 8,400;
number of church buildings, 19; number of church members, _none_!” The
truth is that all, or nearly all, of these Pueblo Indians are Roman
Catholics, as their fathers were before them for more than three
centuries; and that the 19 “church buildings” on their reservation are
Catholic churches, in which the Indians are baptized, shriven, married,
and receive the Holy Communion; but in the opinion of the honorable
commissioner none of the Pueblos are “church members.” So with the
Papago Indians in Arizona, who are 5,900 in number, who have a Catholic
school, four Catholic teachers, and a Catholic church, but none of whom,
in the eyes of the commissioner, are “church members.” In the seven
reservations of which the religious control has been assigned to the
Catholic Church there is a population of 24,094 souls and 32 churches,
but the commissioner’s tables admit only 7,010 “church members” among
this population. The truth is, as we shall show, the number of Catholic
Indians alone is more than thrice as large as the whole number of
“church members” accounted for by the commissioner’s tables. When a
human being has received the Catholic rite of baptism he becomes a
member of the Catholic Church; and from that moment it is the duty and
the privilege of the church to watch over and protect the soul thus
regenerated. It is because the church has wished to discharge this duty
to her Indian children that certain of the sects have cried out against
her, and even the commissioner (Hon. E. P. Smith), in his report for
1875, has not been ashamed to reproach her.
“At the seven agencies assigned to the care of the Catholics,”
he remarks, “no restriction has been placed upon their system
and methods of education, and no other religious body, so far as
I am aware, has in any way attempted to interfere. I regret to
say that this is not true, so far as the Catholics are
concerned, of some of the agencies assigned to other religious
bodies, and in some instances the interference has been a
material hindrance to the efforts of this office to bring
Indians under control and to enforce rules looking toward
civilization.”
_We_ regret to say that while, on the one hand, the Catholic Church has
sought only to continue her ministrations to those of her children who
were dwelling upon reservations “assigned to other religious bodies”—a
duty which she could not neglect nor permit to remain unfulfilled—on the
other hand, the most cruel, persistent, and petty persecution has been
waged against Catholic Indians under the charge of Protestant agents,
for the reason that they were Catholics, and the most unwarrantable
interference, opposition, and maltreatment have been in many instances
manifested in cases where Catholic priests were merely exercising the
rights they possessed as American citizens, and discharging the duties
imposed on them as Christian teachers.
But before we enter upon the proof of these unpleasant facts let us
return to the statistics of the commissioner’s report, for the purpose
of completing our review of the condition of the semi-civilized and
civilized tribes. The whole number of acres of land comprised in the
Indian reservations as they now exist is 159,287,778, of which, however,
only a very small portion (9,107,244 acres, or 14,230 square miles) is
“tillable”—that is, land fitted for agricultural pursuits, and on which
crops can be raised. Now, from these figures, which are official, a very
important truth may be deduced. The policy of the government, as
explained by the commissioners in successive reports, is to gather all
the Indians upon these reservations (or upon a few of them), to wean
them from their life of hunting and fishing, and to teach them to
support themselves and their families by purely agricultural pursuits.
The idea may perhaps be a good one; but care should have been taken to
provide ample means for its execution. There are, as we have seen,
266,151 Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska and of the “roamers and
vagrants.” All these, if the present policy of the government be
successful, will be finally planted upon this region of 14,230 square
miles of tillable land, and bidden to live there, they and their
children, for ever, earning their bread by the sweat of their brow in
cultivating the soil. Now, 14,230 square miles of land is equal only to
28,460 farms of 320 acres each, or to 56,920 farms of 160 acres each.
The tradition established by the government, by its original surveys of
the public lands, by its Homestead Law, and by its Land Bounty Acts, is
that 160 acres of land is the normal quantity for an ordinary farm;
general experience has shown that this is none too much. But if the
attempt were made to arrange the 266,151 Indians into families of 4
persons each, and to allot to each family a farm of 160 acres, there
would not be tillable land enough “to go round”; 9,617 families would be
left out of the distribution. We do not mean to say that a farm of
something less than 160 acres may not be found sufficient for the
maintenance of a family of four persons; but we do wish to call
attention to the fact that the Indian reservations have been now reduced
so far that only 56,920 farms, of 160 acres each, of “tillable land”
remain in them. There is the more necessity for accentuating this fact
since even in the last report of the commissioner is repeated the
suggestion that the reservations are still too large, and that a few
more treaties might be broken and a few more sanguinary wars provoked
with advantage, in order to reduce further the area set apart for Indian
occupation. This suggestion is made plausible by the device of calling
attention to the whole area of the reservations—159,287,778 acres, or
248,886 square miles—while hiding away in very small type, and at the
end of an intricate table of figures, the fact that 150,180,534 acres,
or 234,656 square miles, of these lands are wholly unfitted for tillage,
and can never be made available for agricultural purposes.
The number of acres of land cultivated by the Indians during the year
covered by the last report of the commissioner was 318,194, and 28,253
other acres were broken by them during the year. No less than 26,873
full-blood male Indians were laboring in civilized pursuits, exclusive
of those belonging to the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory.
These people are not savages; they worship God—many of them enjoying the
light of Catholic truth; they educate themselves and their children;
they live in houses and wear decent clothes; they toil and are producers
of valuable articles. Let us see, now, what is said about these and the
other Indians less advanced in civilization, by their rulers, the
successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs and their subordinates, the
agents. When we remark that we select our quotations from nine volumes
of official reports, the reader will understand that we lay before him
only a very few out of the numberless proofs of two facts:
1. That the commissioners, while repeatedly confessing that the Indians
have been most cruelly and unwisely wronged in the past, are of the
opinion that it would be a kind and wise thing to wrong them a little
more in the future.
2. That the Indians are perfectly well aware of their wrongs; are quite
able to formulate them; are often hopeless, from long and painful
experience, of any effectual redress for them; and very frequently
display a remarkable degree of Christian forbearance and forgiveness in
resisting the wanton provocations to revolt offered to them.
“The traditionary belief which largely prevails,” writes the
Hon. J. Q. Smith, in his report for 1876, “that the Indian
service throughout its whole history has been tainted with
fraud, arises not only from the fact that frauds have been
committed, but also because, from the nature of the service
itself, peculiar opportunities for fraud may be found.”
After an exposition of the duties of an Indian agent he thus proceeds:
“The great want of the Indian service has always been thoroughly
competent agents. The President has sought to secure proper
persons for these important offices by inviting the several
religious organizations, through their constituted authorities,
to nominate to him men for whose ability, character, and conduct
they are willing to vouch. I believe the churches have
endeavored to perform this duty faithfully, and to a fair degree
have succeeded; but they experience great difficulty in inducing
persons possessed of the requisite qualifications to accept
these positions. When it is considered that these men must take
their families far into the wilderness, cut themselves off from
civilization with its comforts and attractions, deprive their
children of the advantages of education, live lives of anxiety
and toil, give bonds for great sums of money, be held
responsible in some instances for the expenditure of hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year, and subject themselves to
ever-ready suspicion, detraction, and calumny, for a
compensation less than that paid to a third-class clerk in
Washington or to a village postmaster, it is not strange that
able, upright, thoroughly competent men hesitate, and decline to
accept the position of an Indian agent, or, if they accept,
resign the position after a short trial. In my judgment the
welfare of the public service imperatively requires that the
compensation offered an Indian agent should be somewhat in
proportion to the capacity required in the office, and to the
responsibility and labor of the duties to be performed.”
It is impossible to avoid making the remark, in this place, that there
is a class of men who have no “families”; who are ever ready to renounce
the “comforts and attractions of civilization”; who are accustomed to
“live lives of anxiety and toil”; and who are impervious to “suspicion,
detraction, and calumny,” while at the same time they are “able,
upright, and thoroughly competent.” If the government, when it
inaugurated its plan of filling the Indian agencies with men nominated
by “the churches,” had allowed our bishops to nominate agents in
proportion to the number of Catholic Indians, the chances are that the
right men would have been forthcoming, and the commissioner would not
now be complaining that, in order to keep an Indian agent from stealing,
he must be paid $3,000 a year.
“Relief had been so long delayed,” says the same officer in the
same report, “that supplies failed to reach the agencies until
the Indians were in almost a starving condition, and until the
apparent intention of the government to abandon them to
starvation had induced large numbers to join the hostile bands
under Sitting Bull.”
Two other instances of the same kind are mentioned; and a third is
recorded, in which, owing to the failure of Congress to provide money
promised by a treaty, “hundreds of Pawnees had been compelled to abandon
their agency, to live by begging and stealing in southern Kansas.” “In
numerous other instances,” adds the commissioner pathetically, “the
funds at the disposal of this office have been so limited as to make it
a matter of the utmost difficulty to keep the Indians from starving”—and
this, too, when the same Indians had large sums of money standing to
their credit held “in trust” for them in the treasury of the United
States. A long discussion advocating the removal of all the Indians to a
few reservations—although this could not be done without violations of
the most solemn treaties—is clinched with the cynical remark that “there
is a very general and growing opinion that observance of the strict
letter of treaties with Indians is in many cases at variance both with
their own best interests and with sound public policy.”
And these words are from the official report of the chief of a great
bureau in the most important department of our government! Did we know
what we were about when we made these treaties? If “no,” we were fools;
if “yes,” then we are knaves now to violate them without the consent of
the other, the helpless party. “The Indians claim,” says the
commissioner, “that they hold their lands by sanctions so solemn that it
would be a gross breach of faith on the part of the government to take
away any portion of it without their consent, and that consent they
propose to withhold.” Still, let us do it, cries the commissioner;
“public necessity must ultimately become supreme law.” “Public
necessity”—which in this case means private rapacity—“public necessity,”
and not truth, good faith, and justice, must rule. Many tribes are
living peaceably and doing well, on lands solemnly promised to them for
ever, in various parts of the West; the civilized and semi-civilized
tribes in the Indian Territory are living peaceably and doing well on
lands solemnly promised to them for their own exclusive use for ever,
and in some cases bought with their own money. But it would be more
convenient for us to have them all together; so let us tear up the
treaties, and drive all the Indians into the one territory.
From the same report we take this paragraph, which is only one of very
many like it:
“The Alsea agency, in Oregon, has been abolished, but inadequate
appropriations have worked hardship and injustice to the
Indians. They are required to leave their homes and cultivated
fields” (for no other reason than that white men covet them)
“and remove to Siletz, but no means are furnished to defray
expense of such removal or to assist in their establishment in
their new home.”
The Board of Indian Commissioners, in their third annual report (1871),
in view of the continued violation of treaties by the government in
compelling tribes to remove from the reservations assigned to them,
found themselves constrained to say:
“The removal of partially civilized tribes already making fair
progress and attached to their homes on existing reservations is
earnestly deprecated. Where such reservations are thought to be
unreasonably large, their owners will themselves see the
propriety of selling off the surplus for educational purposes.
The government meanwhile owes them the protection of their
rights to which it is solemnly pledged by treaty, and which it
cannot fail to give without dishonor.”
But it _has_ failed to give this protection in numberless instances, and
it seems to rest very easily under the stigma of dishonor thus
incurred—as, for instance, in the case of the Osages, of whom their
agent, in a report dated Oct. 1, 1870, thus speaks:
“This tribe of Indians are richly endowed by nature, physically
and morally. A finer-looking body of men, with more grace and
dignity, or better intellectual development, could hardly be
found on this globe. They were once the most numerous and
warlike nation on this continent, with a domain extending from
the Gulf to the Missouri River and from the Mississippi to the
Rocky Mountains; but they have been shorn of their territory
piece by piece, until at last they have not a settled and
undisputed claim to a single foot of earth. It is strictly true
that one great cause of their decline has been fidelity to their
pledges. More than sixty years ago they pledged themselves by
treaty to perpetuate peace with the white man. That promise has
been nobly kept—kept in spite of great and continual
provocation. White men have committed upon them almost every
form of outrage and wrong, unchecked by the government and
unpunished. Every aggressive movement of the whites tending to
the absorption of their territory has ultimately been
legalized.”
These Osages are nearly all Catholics, and the agent who thus writes of
them is Mr. Isaac T. Gibson, a Quaker, or an “Orthodox Friend.” Would it
be believed that three years afterwards the kind and sympathizing Friend
Gibson was busily engaged in inflicting upon the people for whose wrongs
he was so indignant an injury greater than any they had yet suffered?
“Enterprising scoundrels” of whom he wrote in his report had robbed the
Osages of everything save their faith; and good Friend Gibson tried to
rob them of that. How he set about the task, and how he fared in it,
will be told later.
If this be not enough, look at the picture of a model Indian reservation
drawn by a lawyer of California, and addressed to J. V. Farwell, one of
the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners. He is describing the
Hoopa Valley reservation: