It was a great day when Miss Slopham, so many years conspicuous in our
best society, discovered the North American Indian--not for the
Indian, perhaps, but certainly for Miss Slopham. Envious and
slanderous tongues said that Miss Slopham was afflicted with an
ambition. She wanted a mission--not a foreign mission, in any sense of
the words. She was debarred from one kind by her sex, and the other
involved the possibility of crocodiles and yellow fever, not to
mention the chance of being sacrificed to some ugly heathen god. She
could not paint, or write, or sing. The stage had never offered any
attractions to her, for various reasons, one of which was, so said the
same untrustworthy authority, that she had never offered any
attractions to the stage. She was tall and spare, and of a dry and
autumnal aspect. She wanted fame, but she wanted it respectable.
Therefore it was, said gossip, that this excellent woman turned to
philanthropy. Even here her fate was against her. If she had not been
a woman, she would have mourned the ill-luck that brought her into the
world rather late for the anti-slavery agitation. The malicious rumor,
by-the-way, which declared that she wore a bib and tucker at the time
of Jackson's war with the United States Bank, was wickedly false. Miss
Slopham tried tenement-house reform, but fled before the smells. She
had a little practice in the hospitals and orphan asylums, but found
the sphere too contracted. She felt that she needed the stimulus of
public approval. She was almost in despair, when, as if by accident,
her eye lighted on the North American Indian. For centuries he had
been chasing the buffalo and the white man, shooting and being shot,
taking up the tomahawk and perishing by the rifle, robbing and being
robbed, massacring and pillaging whenever massacre and pillage suited
his grim humor, and being all this while alternately pampered and
starved, cajoled and cheated, by a government which at the same time
that it furnished him with guns for shooting its own soldiers, often
failed to fulfil the solemn treaties it had made with him.
He had been having this lively and variegated experience for a century
or so, without any intimation, prophetic or present, of Miss Slopham's
existence, when that lady discovered him, and when that happened she
exclaimed: "He is mine!" Hers, she meant, for the purposes of
philanthropy. Wicked tongues had suggested that in Miss Slopham's
philanthropy distance lent enchantment to the view.
Only a day or two later, and before she had had time to form any
plans, the postman brought a letter with the postmark of St. Louis. It
read as follows:
"ST. LOUIS, _October 20, 1881_.
"MY DEAR MISS SLOPHAM,--I want to make an appeal to your
benevolence, which I know never fails in case of need. There
is in this city at this moment, in hiding, at the house of
one of our friends, a poor persecuted Kickapoo. A Kickapoo
is an Indian, you know. He has fled from his reservation
because, he says, he cannot endure any longer the
persecutions and wrongs he has received at the hands of the
agent who has charge of the tribe. This agent must be a very
bad man. Poor Ogla-Moga--that is his name; it means
Young-man-who-digs-up-seed-potatoes-and-feeds-them-to-his-pony,
he says, but we call him by his Indian name because it's so
much prettier--says that this agent has repeatedly refused
to let them go hunting, which is the only amusement the poor
things have, on the miserable pretext that the hay must be
got in; and he once took away the gun of one of the
Kickapoos because he pretended to believe that the man had
shot a settler, whereas there was no proof of it at all,
except, Ogla-Moga says, that the man died soon after the gun
went off. Ogla-Moga says nothing wounds the self-respect of
an Indian so deeply as to take his gun away from him, and we
have all felt a great deal of sympathy with that poor
insulted Kickapoo. Isn't it a shame that a great government
should deliberately and maliciously oppress these
unfortunate and high-spirited people?
"But I had almost forgotten what it was that I had to ask.
Poor dear Ogla-Moga--he is so quiet and gentle and sad that
we have all really grown fond of him--says that it won't be
safe for him to stay here: the officers will soon be after
him for having left his reservation. Now we have arranged to
send him eastward with Mr. Michst. He is the new lecturer
before our Ethical Circle, which meets every Sunday in Azure
Hall. I read a paper there last Sunday, called, 'Is there
Anything?' which Mr. Michst says contains the most
triumphant series of negations he ever heard. He says I
completely disprove the existence of everything, including
many things we all know to be true. My friends in the Circle
are begging me to publish it, and I think of doing so, under
the title of 'The Everlasting No Indeed.'
"But I am wandering again. When Mr. Michst brings Ogla-Moga
to you, can't you get him shelter somewhere? Mr. Michst
thinks of taking him on to Washington, so that he may lay
the whole matter before the President. We have all been
studying this Indian question for the last ten days, and we
are convinced that the whole trouble is that the President
doesn't understand it. Mr. Michst feels sure that if the
President will give him, say, three days of his time, he can
make it perfectly clear to him. Please answer by telegraph.
"Your friend,
"CLARA O. VERRAUGHT."
Now Miss Slopham lived in a neat and aesthetic apartment in a
fashionable apartment-house, and it might have been supposed that she
was hardly prepared to set up an asylum for fugitive Kickapoos. But
that intrepid woman never faltered. Her answer went whirling by wire
before she had paused to think of the ways and means of caring for
poor Ogla-Moga.
"_October 23._
"_Miss Clara O. Verraught, St. Louis, Missouri_:
"Let him come at once, and send his Indian costumes with
him. I have a special reason for this request.
"AMELIA SLOPHAM."
Miss Slopham formed a plan. What it was will presently appear.