some of their ponies to feed their families. We do not personally know
this to be so, but we can well believe it. We do know that not three
years ago the Kiowas and Comanches were without flour for months; that
the beef issued to them was miserable. We have seen it stated and have
been told time and again that rations have been drawn for numbers
greatly exceeding those actually at the agencies; and, with the
developments made through the honesty and courage of Professor Marsh
still fresh in our memory, we can well believe it also. Is it a subject
of special wonder that, being the victim of such a system, in addition
to his peculiar training, the Indian should look upon deceit and robbery
as not only justifiable but laudable?
WHAT WE ASK OF THE INDIAN.
All men are naturally tenacious of their rights of property; the more
civilized the community the more sacred those rights. The Indian has the
instinct of property very strongly developed. After we have subdued,
swindled, and reduced him to the verge of starvation we say to him: “You
must now surrender your horses and your arms.” The earliest ambition of
an Indian is to possess a fire-arm. He will pay thirty to forty ponies
for a good rifle. Ponies are his currency. If the government sells this
rifle by auction, it will bring perhaps five to ten dollars. It is hard
for the Indian to see his rifle carried off and his horse ridden away by
some white hunter, “wolfer,” or trapper. He is very fond of his ponies.
No consideration of value will induce him to part with a favorite horse.
A friend of the writer saw a squaw, with tears in her eyes, cut a lock
from the mane of her favorite pony before surrendering the animal to the
representative of the government. Thus, we starve the Indian; we deprive
him of his arms, with which he might kill game to eke out a subsistence;
we take away his ponies, which furnish him food when he is reduced to
extremity through our fault or failure. What Christian people would be
content under such treatment? Can we be surprised that an untutored
savage, who cannot understand our clashing of bureaus, our shifting of
responsibility, or our red-tape refinements of official morality, should
look upon the white man as the liar of liars and the thief of thieves,
and, when he is on the war-path, should execute the wild justice of
revenge on any of the race who happens to come within reach of his
rifle? Can we be surprised if he leaves his reservation and chooses to
fight to the last rather than be the patient victim of such a system of
injustice and spoliation? It is not astonishing that the Indian should
surrender only his poorest animals, should hide his magazine guns and
rifles and give up only rusty old smooth-bores or arms for which he
cannot procure fitting ammunition. In our every transaction with him we
strengthen by example the lessons of deception he was taught in his
childhood.
INDIAN LIFE AT AN AGENCY.
An Indian agency is not usually a school of morality. Interpreters,
traders’ clerks, “squaw-men,” have what are euphemistically termed
“Indian wives.” It is scarcely necessary to say that these are nothing
more than concubines. These poor red slaves are usually purchased from
their savage sires for a blanket, a cheap trinket, a pony, or a few
cartridges. Sometimes they are presents given for the purpose of making
interest with influential underlings. Agency life has no tendency to
elevate the Indian. He lives in idleness and inaction. He has nothing to
do and nothing to hope for. He has no future. He must occupy his time in
some way, and he becomes a slave to gambling and sexual indulgence.
Occasionally the young men, wearied by the monotony of such a life and
ambitious of distinction, seize upon the first real or fancied wrong as
a pretext for revolt, fly the agency, and go upon the war-path.
OUR INDIANS IN CANADA.
Why is it that the Indians who give us so much trouble become peaceable,
and remain so, when they settle on the Canadian side of the border?
There they receive no governmental aid, and are able to procure their
own subsistence. We read of no outrages or robberies there. It is simply
because the Indian’s rights are respected. He has been protected in his
rights even against the greedy nephews of English statesmen who cast
covetous eyes upon his lands. If he is guilty of offence, he is promptly
and sternly punished. The arm of the military is not held back when
offending Indians are within reach of punishment because a million or so
has been appropriated to be expended for their benefit as soon as they
can be reported peaceable, and because the vultures of the ring are
a-hungering for the spoil.
THE FRONTIERSMAN AND THE INDIAN.
It is difficult for the honest frontiersman—the hardy pioneer who, with
an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other, hews himself a farm out of
the wilderness—to be just toward the Indian. The memory of massacre of
his neighbors or relatives, of outrage on defenceless women, stirs up,
even in gentle breasts, a hatred of the red man which prompts an undying
vendetta, which begets a feeling that a remorseless shedding of Indian
blood to the very last drop would not be an adequate punishment for such
atrocities. There is many a worthy and otherwise humane and law-abiding
pioneer who believes that dead Indians are the only good ones; and such
a feeling seizes even the strongest advocate of a humane policy when he
sees the scalp of a white woman dangling from the girdle of a filthy
savage. There are men on the frontier, otherwise brave and
gentle-hearted, who would have no more scruple to shoot an Indian at
sight than to kill a prairie-wolf. Peace is difficult to keep between
two opposing elements imbued with corresponding sentiments toward each
other. For this state of things the rapacious Indian rings, the
violators of treaty stipulations, the ruthless adventurers, the
horse-thieves, the murderers, fugitives from justice, respecting no
laws, human or divine, who infest the Indian country, are mainly
responsible. An American gentleman who spent two years recently in
Manitoba told the writer that he found many of the Sioux who were
engaged in the Minnesota massacre living there peaceful and contented.
“Wearing a red coat,” said he, “I can travel alone from one end of the
Territory to the other without danger of molestation.”
THE QUAKERS AND THE INDIANS.
The failure of the Quaker specific does not need to be dwelt upon. We
have had under the Quaker management the most serious and bloody Indian
wars that have afflicted the frontier for many years. Besides, there is
scarcely a wild tribe of which some portion has not been in a state of
hostility to a greater or less extent. There are itching palms among the
Quakers as well as among the other religious denominations. What was
needed was not men who made professions of peace—or “made-up Quakers,”
who put on the Friendly drab for the occasion—but men who practised
honesty and fair-dealing.
THE ARMY AND THE INDIANS.
The worst elements of society on the frontier—“wolfers,”
buffalo-hunters, trappers, guides, scouts, contractors, venders of
poisonous whiskey, and keepers of frontier gambling-saloons—may and
generally do desire Indian wars; for to them they are a source of
employment and profit. Territorial officials, their friends and clients,
may desire a state of hostility, on account of the money it causes to be
expended in their districts, especially if authority can be obtained to
raise special forces. This, in addition to opportunities of profit,
offers a means of augmenting and strengthening what is delicately termed
“political” influence by a judicious distribution of patronage. It is
not very long since a force was raised, in a certain frontier State,
which, during an Indian war then raging, did not kill or capture an
Indian, inflict or receive a scratch, or fire a shot. This force, which
was in service only for a few months, cost the country at large nearly
two hundred thousand dollars. This was very pleasant for the force, very
profitable to the State. No doubt a repetition of the experience would
be agreeable at any time. It was not very economical or beneficial to
the country at large. But to suppose that the regular army desires wars
with the Indian tribes is a very great mistake. Why should it? To the
army Indian wars are neither sources of honor nor of profit. To it they
only mean hard work, no glory, increased personal expenditures without
additional pay. For our hard-worked little army receives no field
allowances. A member of the non-combatant branches of the military
establishment can effect more toward his advancement in one campaign in
Washington than can the live, the real soldiers, the fighting men, in
five lustres of laborious and dangerous field-service in the Indian
country. Operations against hostile tribes, though attended by exposure,
hardship, suffering, and dangers to which civilized warfare presents no
parallel, with the possibility of death by indescribable tortures in the
event of capture, are not considered “war” by certain gentlemen who sit
at home at ease and enjoy, if they do not improve, each shining hour.
Hundreds of brave men in blue may fall in Indian battle, crushed by the
mere power of numbers; but this, forsooth, is not “war.” It is only
wounds, or maiming for life without hope of recognition or reward, or
death upon a battle-field to which glory is denied.
THE TRANSFER OF THE INDIANS TO THE WAR DEPARTMENT.
The transfer of the Indians to the War Department would be advantageous,
for a time, both to the government and the Indian, but it would be
ruinous to the army. The Indian Ring would eventually either effect the
abolition of the army altogether—which would be bad enough—or fill it
with the material of which Indian traders and reservation sharks are
made—which would be still worse. The country cannot afford to risk the
deterioration or destruction of a class of officials admitted on all
hands to be among the most honorable and trustworthy servants of the
government.
CAUSES OF INDIAN WARS.
The usual cause of Indian wars is want of good faith in carrying out the
obligations of treaties. It is scarcely too much to say that we rarely,
if ever, carry out treaty stipulations with Indians. The great majority
of the people of the United States wish to treat the Indian not only
fairly, but kindly, generously, magnanimously. Money enough is
appropriated, if it were judiciously and honestly expended. But the sums
appropriated seem to become small by degrees and wonderfully less before
they reach the Indian. It is not the interest of the Indian Ring to have
the Indian question settled.
The transgression of limits solemnly agreed upon has been already
mentioned. The lawless classes enumerated above steal Indian ponies and
do not scruple to kill an unoffending Indian occasionally. The Indian
does not understand individual responsibility for crime. He holds the
whole race or tribe accountable for the actions of one of its members,
and avenges the killing of his brother on the first victim presented to
him.
Indian wars have doubtless been caused by more than usually grasping
traders whose rapacity has made the Indians discontented and driven them
from the reservations. We have read, at least, of cases in which numbers
have been fed on paper in excess of the actual number present on the
reservation. We are told that in such cases, when an impending
investigation has made discovery possible, the tribe is reported hostile
and large numbers said to have left the agency. The Indians who have
lived quietly on the reservation, utterly unable to comprehend the
forcible measures about to be adopted, suspicious as Indians always are,
and supposing they are all to be killed, leave the reservation and go
upon the war-path.
THE FIRST STEP TOWARD PEACE.
The first step toward bringing the Indian to a permanently peaceful
condition is to place in his country a military force strong enough to
show him the utter madness of keeping up the war. In general, a show of
sufficient force is all that is necessary to bring the Indian to
subjection. No one understands the lesson of force better or applies it
more readily than he. It is the only thing he respects or fears. Instead
of doing this, however, we place in the Indian country meagre garrisons,
barely able to protect themselves, and powerless for offensive
operations. The Indian does not believe our statements of the numbers we
could put in the field if we would. He thinks we are boasting, or—as he
plainly calls saying anything that is not exact truth—lying. With the
directness of mind of a child of nature, he takes a plain, logical view
of the situation, and cannot imagine that we have strength and do not
use it, or, at least, exhibit it. After the annihilation of Custer on
the Little Horn in 1876, and the retirement of all forces from the
country between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, except four or five
hundred infantry, the Indians at certain agencies, who sympathized and
held constant communication with the hostiles, thought they had
succeeded in killing nearly all the white soldiers, and boasted that at
length the Great Father in Washington would have to accede to their
terms. There should be to-day 10,000 men in the Sioux country—6,000
infantry, 2,500 thoroughly drilled and disciplined light cavalry (not
raw boys from the great cities who can neither ride nor shoot, mounted
on untrained horses), and 1,500 light artillery with light steel guns
easily transportable over rough country, but possessing considerable
comparative length of range. Such a force would thoroughly complete the
work done by the infantry amid the snow and ice of the past winter. It
would be the most humane and least expensive mode of laying the
indispensable foundation for further work toward the elevation and
amelioration of the Indian’s condition. Such a force would drive all the
Indians between the Yellowstone and the British line to their agencies,
with little, if any, loss of life. If the humanitarians would end the
war with the least possible shedding of blood, this is the way to do it.
When such a display of force is made as makes resistance hopeless—and
the Indian will be quick to see it—there will be an end of Indian wars
and we may begin the work of civilization in earnest.
THE MODE AND EXTENT OF INDIAN CIVILIZATION.
We must not try to push the Indian forward too fast. There is no use in
trying to make the adult Indian of to-day an agriculturist, or to take
him far out of the sphere in which he was brought up. Once the writer
happened to be in company with a gentleman who has given some thought to
the Indian question, and has had some experience of the Indian
character, when a feathered and beaded warrior made his appearance. He
was richly dressed—scarlet cloth, eagle’s feathers, profusely-beaded
moccasins. “It is nonsense to expect such a creature as that to dig in
mud and dirt,” said our friend. “He would spoil his fine clothes and
ruin his dainty moccasins.” And there was much wisdom in the remark. The
best you can do with the adult Indian is to make him a stock-raiser.
Give him good brood mares. Introduce good blood among his herds of
ponies. Then find a market for his horses. Buy them for the cavalry. Let
him raise a certain proportion of mules, and let the government buy them
for the Quartermaster’s Department. Encourage him to raise beef-cattle
enough at least for his own consumption; and if you can induce him to
raise a surplus, buy the surplus for the Subsistence Department. Give
the Indian a fair price for his produce. Dash down the monopoly of
Indian trading. Allow any merchant of good standing to trade with the
Indian, under proper restrictions as to exclusion of ammunition and
spirituous liquors. Let the red man have the benefit of free-trade and
competition. Ammunition should be furnished, when necessary, only by the
Ordnance Department.
Let the red man also have the same liberty of conscience which is
accorded to the white, the black, and even the yellow. Let there be no
more parcelling out of Indians among jarring sects. Let them have
missionaries of their choice.
Compel all children now under fourteen years to attend schools. Vary
school exercises with the use of tools in the workshop or agricultural
training in the field. Thus you may make some mechanics and some
agriculturists out of the generation now rising. You will have more out
of the next generation. But you cannot make an agriculturist out of the
grown-up Indian, nor a mechanic. It is folly to attempt it. You cannot
reconcile to our nineteenth-century civilization those who have grown up
to maturity with the ideas, manners, and morals of the heroic ages. You
can no more expect Crazy Horse to use the shovel and the hoe than you
could Achilles and Tydides Diomed to plant melons or beans.
THE ONE GREAT REMEDY, AND THE HOPELESSNESS OF ITS APPLICATION.
The remedy of remedies is common honesty in our dealings with the
Indian, backed by a force strong enough and always ready to promptly
crush any attempt at revolt, and punish speedily and severely every act
of lawlessness committed by an Indian. But too many are interested in
keeping up the present system to warrant even the slenderest hope of any
radical change. To put it in crude frontier terms: “There is too much
money in it.” Politicasters, capitalists, contractors, sub-contractors,
agents, traders, agency employés, “squaw-men”—or degraded whites who
live in a state of concubinage with Indian women, and who are generally
tools and touters for the traders—hosts of sinecurists and their
friends, find “money in it.” The links of the ring are legion. It is too
strong. It can shelve or crush any man with honesty and boldness enough
to attack the system. It is too strong for the commissioner or the
secretary. It is to be feared that it may prove too strong for the
country.
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CHARLES LEVER AT HOME.
The man whose rollicking pen has made more dragoons than all the
recruiting-sergeants in her Britannic Majesty’s service; who has
“promoted” the “Connaught Rangers” and _Faugh a ballaghs_ into _corps
d’élite_; who has broken more bones across country than the six-foot
stone walls of Connemara; whose pictures of that land “which smiles
through her tears like a sunbeam in showers” are as racy of the soil as
her own emerald shamrock; who has painted Irish girls pure as angels’
whispers, bright as saucy streamlets, and the “boys” a bewildering
compound of fun, fight, frolic, and “divarshin”; whose career was as
stainless as his success was merited, and whose memory is an
heirloom—was born in the city of Dublin in the year of grace 1806.
Graduating at Cambridge University, and subsequently at the
_U_-niversity of Göttingen, his student-life betrayed no symptoms of the
mental _élan_ which was to distinguish him later on, and, save for its
Bohemianism, was absolutely colorless, and even dull. The boy was not
father to the man. Selecting the medical profession as much by chance as
predilection, he succeeded, during the visitation of cholera in 1832, in
obtaining an appointment as medical superintendent in the northwest of
Ireland, in the districts of Londonderry and Coleraine, and for a time
continued to “guess at prescriptions, invent ingredients,” and generally
administer to the requirements of afflicted humanity. But the task was
uncongenial, the life a dead-level, flavored with no spice of variety,
uncheckered in its monotonous routine. It was a “bad billet, an’ no
Christian man cud live in it, barrin’ a say-gull or a dispinsiry
docthor.” Doctor Lever!—pshaw! Charley Lever; who ever thinks of the
author of _Harry Lorrequer_ as Doctor Lever? Nevertheless, his
experiences at this period bore him rich fruit in the after-time, and in
Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (_The Fortunes of
Glencore_), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then
associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I
can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for
any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic
diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould
school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The
hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an
institution of the past.
Charles Lever, however, was not destined to blush unseen or waste his
sweetness on a country practice. Appointed to the Legation at Brussels,
he bounded from the dreary drudgery of a dispensary to the glittering
gayety of an embassy, from the hideous squalor of the fever-reeking
cabin to the coquettish gravity of the palatial sick-room. In “Belgium’s
capital” the _cacoethes scribendi_ seized him, and the result was _Harry
Lorrequer_. He awoke, and, like Lord Byron, found himself famous. The
distinct portraiture, the brilliant style, the thoroughly Hibernian
_ensemble_, claimed a well-merited success for the book, and, written at
the right moment—how many good works have perished by being floated on
an ebb tide!—the public, who had hitherto accepted Ireland through the
clever but trashy effusions of Lady Morgan, and the more genuine metal
of Maria Edgeworth and Samuel Lover, joyously turned towards the rising
sun, and, seizing upon this genuine bit of shillelah, clamorously
demanded a fresh sprig from the same tree. The wild dash, as
exhilarating as “mountain dew,” the breezy freshness, the gay _abandon_
of society and soldiering, the “moving accidents by flood and field,”
acted upon the jaded palates of the British public like a tonic, and
_Harry Lorrequer_, instead of being treated as an _entrée_, became
respected as the _pièce de résistance_. Harry’s appearance on parade
with the Othello blacking still upon his face; Miss Betty O’Dowd’s visit
to Callonby on the “low-backed car”; her desire of disowning the
nondescript vehicle, and its being announced by her shock-headed
retainer as “the thing _you know_ is at the doore”; the description of
boarding-house life in Dublin sixty years ago; Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s, in
Molesworth Street—the establishment is still in existence, and may be
recognized in Lisle House; the “amateur hotel,” so graphically described
by Mr. Lever; the picture of “dear, dirty Dublin” itself:
“Oh! Dublin, sure there is no doubtin’,
Beats every city upon the say;
’Tis there you’ll see O’Connell spoutin’
And Lady Morgan making tay”;
a night at Howth; the Knight of Kerry and Billy McCabe—form a succession
of sketches teeming with vivacity, humor, and wit, and dashed off with a
pen which almost makes a steeplechaser of the reader, so exciting and so
rapid is the pace.
To Lever’s official career at Brussels we are indebted for several
diplomatic portraits, notably those of Sir Horace Upton (_The Fortunes
of Glencore_) and Sir Shally Doubleton (_A Day’s Ride_); the former of
“a very composite order of human architecture, chivalrous in sentiment
and cunning in action, noble in aspiration and utterly sceptical as
regards motives, deep enough for a ministerial dinner and fast enough
for a party of young guardsmen at Greenwich,” and the latter who could
receive a Foreign Office “swell” thus: “Possibly your name may not be
Paynter, sir; but you are evidently before me for the first time, or you
would know that, like my great colleague and friend, Prince Metternich,
I have made it a rule through life never to burden my memory with what
can be spared it, and of these are the patronymics of all subordinate
people; for this reason, sir, and to this end, every cook in my
establishment answers to the name of Honoré, my valet is always Pierre,
my coachman Jacob, and all Foreign Office messengers I call Paynter.”
Upon the small-fry of diplomacy Mr. Lever is occasionally very severe,
and his pictures of life at Hesse Kalbbratonstadt and similar
unpronounceable principalities are as amusing as they are possibly
realistic.