THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE WEST.
Before going to Minnesota, I had the common Cooper idea of the dignity
and glory of the noble red man of the forest; and was especially
impressed by his unexampled faithfulness to those pale-faces who had
ever been so fortunate as to eat salt with him. In planning my
hermitage, I had pictured the most amicable relations with those
unsophisticated children of nature, who should never want for salt while
there was a spoonful in my barrel. I should win them to friendships as I
had done railroad laborers, by caring for their sick children, and
aiding their wives. Indeed, I think the Indians formed a large part of
the attractions of my cabin by the lakes; and it required considerable
time and experience to bring me to any true knowledge of the situation,
which was, and is, this:
Between the Indian and white settler, rages the world-old, world-wide
war of hereditary land-ownership against those who beg their brother man
for leave to live and toil. William Penn disclaimed the right of
conquest as a land title, while he himself held an English estate based
on that title, and while every acre of land on the globe was held by it.
He could not recognize that title in English hands, but did in the hands
of Indians, and while pretending to purchase of them a conquest title,
perpetrated one of the greatest swindles on record since that by which
Jacob won the birthright of his starving brother.
This Penn swindle has been so carefully cloaked that it has become the
basis of our whole Indian policy, the legitimate parent of a system
never equalled on earth for crime committed with the best intentions. It
intends to be especially just, by holding that the Creator made North
America for the exclusive use of savages, and that civilization can only
exist here by sufferance of the proprietors. This sufferance it tries to
purchase by engaging to support these proprietors in absolute idleness,
from the proceeds of the toil they license, even as kings and other
landed aristocrats are supported by the labor of their subjects and
tenants.
As the successors of the tent-maker of Tarsus have for thirteen
centuries been found on the side of aristocrats in every contest with
plebians, so the piety of the East, controlled by men who live without
labor, was and is on the side of the royal red man, who has a most royal
contempt for plows, hoes and all other degrading implements.
The same community of interests which arrayed the mass of the clergy on
the side of Southern slaveholders, arrayed that same clergy on the side
of the Western slave holder, and against the men who seek, with plows
and hoes, to get a living out of the ground. Under this arrangement we
have the spectacle of a Christian people arrayed in open hostility to
those who plant Christian churches, schools and libraries on the lair of
the wolf; and in alliance with the savage who coolly unjoints the feet
and hands of little children, puts them in his hunting pouch as evidence
of his valor, and leaves the victim to die at leisure; of those who
thrust Christian babies into ovens, and deliberately roast them to
death; of those who bind infants, two by two, by one wrist, and throw
them across a fence to die; of those who collect little children in
groups and lock them up in a room, to wail out their little lives; of
those who commit outrages on innocent men and women who the pen must
forever refuse to record. The apology with which piety converts the
crimes of its pets into virtues, is that its own agents have failed to
carry out its own contract with its own friends.
The men and women who take their lives in their hands to lead the
westward march of civilization, are held as foes by the main body of the
army, who conspire with the enemy, and hand them over as scapegoats
whose tortures and death are to appease divine wrath for the crimes
which this same main body say it has itself committed against Indians.
No one pretends that Western settlers have injured Indians, but Eastern
philanthropists, through the government they control, have, according to
their own showing, been guilty of no end of frauds; and as they do not,
and cannot, stop the stealing, they pay their debts to the noble red man
by licensing him to outrage women, torture infants and burn homes. When
gold is scarce in the East, they substitute scalps and furnish Indians
with scalping-knives by the thousand, that they may collect their dues
at their own convenience.
This may seem to-day a bitter partisan accusation, but it must be the
calm verdict of history when this comes to be written by impartial pens.
Under the pretense that America belonged, in fee simple, and by special
divine right, to that particular hoard of savages, who, by killing off
some other hoard of savages, were in possession when Columbus first saw
the Great West, the Eastern States, which had already secured their land
by conquest, have become more implacable foes to civilization than the
savages themselves.
The Quaker would form no alliance with Southern slave-holders. He
recoiled from the sale of women and children in South Carolina, but
covered with his gray mantle of charity the slave trade in Minnesota.
When a settler refused to exchange his wife or daughter with an Indian
for a pony, and that Indian massacred the whole family to repair his
wrongs, his Quaker lawyer justified the act on the score of extreme
provocation, and won triumphal acquittal from the jury of the world.
When the Sioux, after the Bull Run disaster, arose as the allies of the
South, and butchered one thousand men, women and children in Minnesota,
the Quakers and other good people flew to arms in their defense, and
carried public sentiment in their favor. The agents of the Eastern
people had delayed the payment of annuity three weeks, and then insulted
Mr. Lo by tendering him one-half his money in government bonds, and for
this great wrong the peaceable Quaker, the humanitarian Unitarian, the
orthodox Congregationalist and Presbyterian, the enthusiastic Methodist
and staid Baptist, felt it but right Mr. Lo should have his revenge.
Most Eastern Christians are opposed to polygamy in Utah, and Fourierism
in France, but in Minnesota among Indians these institutions are sacred.
They demanded that England should by law prohibit widow-burning and
other heathen customs in India, but nothing so rude as statutes must
interfere with the royal privileges of these Western landlords. If by
gentle means Mr. Lo can be persuaded to stop taking all the wives he can
get, extorting their labor by the cudgel, and selling them and their
children at will, all well and good! Millions are expended on the
persuading business, and prayer poured out like the rains in Noah's
flood, without any perceptible effect; but still they keep on paying and
praying, and carefully abstain from all means at all likely to
accomplish the desired result. All the property of every tribe must be
held in common, so that there can possibly be no incentive to industry
and economy; but if the Indian refuse to be civilized on that plan, he
must go on taking scalps and being excused, until extermination solve
the problem.
Long before I saw an Indian on his native soil, the U.S. Government had
spent millions in carrying out this Penn policy. For long years, Indians
had sat like crows, watching the white farmers and artisans sent to
teach them industry, and had grunted their honest contempt. They watched
the potato planting, that they might pick out the seed for present use.
They pulled down fences, and turned their ponies into the growing crops,
used the rails for fire wood, burned mills and houses built for them,
rolled barrels of flour up steep acclivities, started them down and
shouted to see them leap and the flour spurt through the staves; knocked
the heads out of other barrels, and let the ponies eat the flour; poured
bags of corn on the ground when they wanted the bag, and in every way
showed their contempt for the government, whose policy they believed to
be the result of cowardice. Thousands of dollars' worth of agricultural
machinery lay "rotting in the sun" while the noble red aristocrat played
poker in the shade; his original contempt for labor intensified by his
power to extract a living from laborers, through their fear of his
scalping knife.
Hole-in-the-day, the Chippewa chief, had been educated by Baptist
missionaries, and was a good English scholar, but would not condescend
to speak to the government except through an interpreter. For him six
hundred acres of land had been fenced, and a large frame cottage built
and painted white. In this he lived with six wives, and a United States
salary of two thousand a year and his traveling expenses. He dressed
like a white man, dined with State officers in St. Paul, went to church
with a lady on his arm, sat in a front pew, and was a highly
distinguished gentleman of the scalping school.