One of the noblest and most honorable things borne on the record of any nation is the present conduct of the American government toward the original owners of its soil. From the beginning it has made them its favored wards. To its interposition are due the facts that, instead of a dwindling race scattered as mendicants over the face of the land, the Indians are now more numerous than ever, that their blood is fairly pure, that they are rich political communities, and that they are being fitted to hold their own in the tragedy of the "survival of the fittest." Doubtless harsh and bloody deeds have occurred in our Indian history, but they were inevitable when the customs of the savage opposed themselves to the incompatible requirements of civilization; when the issue became unavoidable whether the woodlands, streams, and savannas of half a continent should be abandoned to the scattered wigwams of wild hunters glorying in the scalps hung from their belts, or should become scenes of peaceful industry, with a thousand human beings dwelling in houses for each tepee of the red man. Doubtless many a treaty has been broken or annulled, but seldom until it proved an impediment to Indian advancement and its abrogation became humane. Doubtless mistakes have been made; but they would not have been possible had not the government assumed philanthropic responsibilities. There have been corrupt agents who have transferred their fidelity from the government to the politicians who secured their appointment. have been hungerers for land who have embroiled the frontier in order to despoil the Indian of his home. There have been vendors of fire-water to appease their greed by the destruction of their red victims. Wrongs! yes, enough of them; but they were perpetrated against the law, and they are not greater than those that go unpunished in every community of equal numbers. There The mendicants of the land are as numerous as the Indians, but we do not reproach ourselves for their presence among us, nor charge ourselves to protect them from the consequences of their depraved impotency, though they are near akin to us and the product of our social blunders. They are degenerates; the Indian is unregenerate. Let a few facts be presented from official records to show how magnanimous and efficient is the conduct of our government toward the Indian. During the year ending June 30, 1898, the ordinary expenditures of the government outside of the Indian bureau were $6.20 for each inhabitant; on the Indians it was $44 a head, or seven times as much. Yet the red man paid no taxes, but on the contrary received annuities and possessed houses, farms, and live-stock, while the other inhabitants supplied the money disbursed for them. This is the relative attitude of the nation toward its aboriginal wards for a long series of years. Mulhall, the British statistician, has asserted that the United States is the richest nation in the world, but it may be added that of its inhabitants the Indians have the greatest per capita wealth. In the census of 1890 it was computed that the aggregate wealth of the people of the United States was $65,000,000,000, or $1,022 for each person enumerated on its rolls. This included real estate and its improvements, gold and silver, mines and quarries, all sorts of implements and machinery, investments in means of communication, and personal property. Out of these resources the people support their municipal, state, and national governments, educate their children, and maintain their religious institutions. Turn now to the Indian, who is not taxed; whose religious services, when they exceed the accomplishments of the raindoctor or medicine-man, are furnished by the missionary; who, when sick and distrustful of the resources of witchcraft, sends for the agency doctor; who pays no school-bills; who is defended from external violence and internal disorder by an army and a police paid for by the United States Treasury; and who may idle in his blanket and tepee so long as his savage instincts so dispose him. Of the red race entitled to these exemptions and privileges there are 250,000 souls in the United States, exclusive of Alaska. For these people the government holds $33,362,000 in invested or trust funds, the income from which is paid in annuities or supplies. For them 82,770,345 acres are reserved inviolably, or 331 acres for each Indian of every age or either sex, which is 21⁄2 square miles to each average household, an area as large as Missouri and Arkansas combined, which have a population fifteen times as great. The lowest government price for its wild agricultural lands is $1.25 an acre, but thousands of acres on the Indian reservations lie in railroad belts where the government price for its alternate sections is twice as much. Thousands of other acres are under long leases to graziers and farmers at rentals which would give them a valuation of from $6 to $40 an acre. All this landed wealth is due to the coming of white men and the conservation of Indian interests by Congress, for when Captain John Smith was punting his way about the waters of Chesapeake Bay lands had no agricultural value whatever for Indian uses. For twenty years Congress has appropriated an aggregate of $8,400,000 to its annual Indian service, and there is small prospect of any diminution in the rate for a generation to come. If there be deducted from this sum what is paid out as income from trust and invested funds, the remainder permits a distribution of $27 for each Indian in the country, or, at five per cent, the income of a capitalized sum of $540 per capita. On this basis the wealth of each Indian in the land must be computed as follows: Share in invested and trust funds.. Congressional gratuities capitalized at 5 per $136 414 540 $1,090 In other words, under the existing system each Indian is $68 better off than his compatriots of other hues. Nor is this all, for this computation makes no account of the 25,000 houses built by the government for its red wards, nor of the royalties paid them on the quarries and mines of the reservations, nor of the live-stock owned by them. Flood mark of Indian opulence is reached on the Osage reservation, one of the more recent settlements. Yet it is not here that the best results of the government policy must be sought, and, probably, because the inhabitants have been demoralized by their wealth. Here lives one of the richest political communities in the world. On the southern boundary of Kansas, shut in by the Arkansas and Verdigris rivers, with railroads impinging on its borders, is a reservation, half as large as Connecticut, known as the Osage Agency. There dwell upon it 1,937 full-blood and half-blood Indians, of whom a tenth belong to the Kaw or Kansas tribe. The rest are Osages, and the ancestral hunting-grounds of these people ranged from the Arkansas to the Missouri River. Formerly they plundered their neighbors, lived by the chase, and were constantly on the war-path, violating treaties and raiding other tribes. They took part in the Kansas border troubles and in the Civil War, siding with the cause of the slave States. By reason of their sanguinary spirit and their incorrigible attachment to wild habits, they became reduced to a third of the number attributed to them a century ago. In 1872 they were settled on their present reservation and President Grant entrusted their future to the peaceful and generous Quakers. Although the Kaws are much poorer than the Osages their numbers are so small that it is not worth while, notwithstanding the consequent reduction in the averages, to separate the two tribes in this presentation of their fortunes. On the books of the United States Treasury the Indians on this reservation are credited with $8,530,280.30 in trust and invested funds, on which five per cent interest is given, and an annuity of $213 is due to each Indian on the reservation, or $1,115 for each family of that stock. The reservation contains 800 acres for each soul of the race, and these, at the low price of $1.25 an acre, gives a per-capita estate worth $1,000. These untaxed people dwell in 410 houses built by the government rent-free, and their schools and churches are maintained at no ex pense to them. Two years ago they owned 7,507 horses, 12,200 horned cattle, and 11,000 swine, besides 11,000 domestic fowls. Computing this wealth into percapita interests, each Indian enumerated on the reservation is worth as follows: Share in trust funds..... 44 $4.265 1,000 150 184 $5.599 Here, then, is a distinct political community in which each household of five persons owns $28,000 in realty and personal property, which probably makes it the richest political unit in the world. Where can savagery show its equivalent under any guardianship? Exceptional as this case is, it is so in the degree of wealth possessed rather than in its nature. Every tribe enjoys in some measure the same sort of endowments held by like titles, and also the guardianship of the United States. The Indians of this reservation lease lands on shares to white men, who thus become debtors and subordinates to their dusky landlords. In this way and by some personal labor the Osages have under plough about thirty-two acres to each household. Two thirds of them display the attire customary in a Delaware peach-orchard or a Kansas corn-field; a third can read and speak English; three fourths subsist on rations bought by the government out of their annuity moneys; a fourth work in civilized pursuits; nearly all the children are in government schools; there are neither many criminals nor many church members. These people are indolent; use their excellent credit to incur large debts with licensed and border traders who are secured by their annuities; hold their lands in common; go off the reservation to get liquor; and are pestered by men seduced by Osage opulence, who strive in every way to join the tribe. With self-reliance and character rising as material fortune is lessened, as a rule, the condition now described on the Osage reservation prevails all over the territories occupied by Indian tribes. Here, then, is a race which, if left to its heathen ineptitudes, would either have disappeared from the earth, like the Abenakis from Maine and the aborigines from Tasmania or the Antilles, or have sunk into peons, like the Indians of the Spanish Americas, now among the richest and best preserved political communities of the world. It is all due to the fidelity with which the United States has nurtured and guarded them. It is a record of singular honor, the beauty of which is enhanced by the equally singular self-condemnation of Americans because it is not perfect. The material prosperity of the Indians is but a sordid result of our treatment of them. It is an outcome also of a large nurture service that has always had root in the land. The attitude of the first English immigrants to America toward the aborigines was to secure peaceably and justly from them indisputable land titles. "The inhabitants of New England," says Bancroft, "had never, except in the territory of the Pequods, taken possession of a foot of land without first obtaining a title from the Indians." This tribe, for a series of unprovoked assassinations, was broken up and dispersed by the colonists within ten years from Endicott's coming to Salem, and then it had no lands to convey. By treaty the Dutch gained foothold on the Hudson River, and, as each new colony was formed, amicable rights of settlement were sought from the natives. In the seventeenth century it probably was as difficult for a European settler to conceive of a land title not derived from an older one, as for the Indian, acquainted only with the communal rights of the tribe, to comprehend a personal fee in land or an absolute alienation of title. The white man needed some derivation of right, even though a flimsy one, as a means of quieting controversy in any subsequent conveyance of realty. At all events, the equity of natives in the soil has widely been respected in the United States, just as those of the Maoris have more recently been by the English in New Zealand. Early conspicuous American examples are Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan Island and Penn's bargain under the tree at Shackamaxon. The most disastrous experiences of the red men have come through their own intertribal strifes, in which neither woman nor child was spared; but these are all over now, because the government has ended them. Next in destructiveness come their alliances with either party in the wars of the white men, as in the contests of the colonies with Canada and Great Britain, and in those of the French or Spanish with the English-speaking people of the Gulf States. Far slighter are the tragic incidents that have accompanied the removal of Indians from their ancestral seats to homes beyond the Mississippi, where on their new reservations they have laid aside the tomahawk and turned to the arts of mendicancy and peace. There is a yet humaner strain sounding in the history of the North American Indian. Missionary operations began very early, and they have been continued with expanding scope to this day. "The Society for the Propagation of The Gospel in Foreign Parts," which succeeded to Cromwell's organization for spreading Christianity in New England, took its final shape at the suggestion of Dr. Thomas Bray, who especially interested himself in the conversion of the Indians in Virginia. Even two generations earlier a converted Indian in 1622 informed the people of Jamestown of an Indian attack meditated upon that young settlement. The origin of William and Mary College in the same State was in a school for training missionaries to the Indians, as was that of Dartmouth College two generations later. On the rolls of the Society already mentioned appear the names of John Eliot, the "apostle to the Indians," with his praying bands at Natick, and of Thomas Mayhew, who christianized the Elizabeth Islands in Vineyard Sound. Thus early did the English colonists take up their responsibility for the regeneration of the American natives; and from that time to this, notwithstanding the massacres at Jamestown and Deerfield, at Cherry Valley and Wyoming, the Christian nurture of the aborigines has been steadily pursued until now there are 230 mission stations among these red wards of the government, exclusive of the "Five Civilized Tribes." As illustrative of the attitude of the country toward this race it is interesting to note that, after General Jackson had chastised Indians in the Gulf States more than any American commander, he is found pleading in the Senate for «< some more fostering and paternal care on the part of the general government" toward this pathetic race. Magnanimous has been the uniform policy of the government toward the aborigines. It has extinguished their land titles by purchase. Then, instead of giving these childish, improvident people the money and sending them away to find homes as they might, it has removed them to vast protected reservations and commuted the purchase price into perpetual annuities, so that their principal could not be sacrificed to the cajolery or threats of their neighbors. The Indians of the United States are an endowed race, and that is a unique political condition on the earth. The result has not been without serious disadvantages; for the possession of secure estates and incomes has taken away the spur of the Indians to become civilized. Theoretically, each tribe has been an independent sovereignty, and the government has not dealt with individuals, but with the sovereignty, just as it would do with France or Mexico. All treaties have been made with the recognized chiefs or representatives of tribes, and to this scheme the communal organization of a tribe lends itself with too great facility. No individual Indian right in the soil could be acquired, because there was none. The purchase of a tribal title bought out all personal rights, for they were only undivided shares of a whole. Corollaries growing out of this doctrine of sovereignty have been logically followed. Not only were Indian lands bought in bulk, but the people were removed to new domains, and did not become citizens of the United States. The Indians were not taxed, neither could they vote. They could fish and hunt, in seasons closed to the whites, over treaty areas. On their reservations white men were intruders, unless they obtained permission from the Indians to trade or dwell there. Indian councils were legislatures for their respective tribes, and set up their own courts, which kept out federal tribunals; Congressional authority was restricted to treaty duties, or would have been had it been possible for Congress to abnegate its sovereignty over a people incapable of selfprotection; disputes that arose between Indians and intruders were settled by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who thus became, as it were, an international arbiter; moneys were paid to the tribe for distribution to its members, or parcelled out according to lists furnished by the tribe; in a word, each tribe was a distinct autonomous unity, dwelling on inviolable lands and perpetuating its ancestral customs, while the Federal government guarded its feebleness, protected its interests, and enforced its will. Until recently such has been the scheme of Indian administration by the United States. It was founded on the conflicting principles that each tribe was an independent sovereignty whose allegiance the government was not entitled to demand, and that the United States must ceaselessly exercise its guardianship to maintain the peace of the tribe and uphold its rights. Endowing the Indian with the equities of a rational adult, it administered its affairs as those of a child. This policy held unbroken sway until the presidency of General Grant, when a new Indian era began to open. A generation before, the Indian Territory was dedicated to the solution of the Indian problem. Thither General Scott led the Cherokees from Georgia in 1838, and the movement went on until the entire Muskogee family was transferred from the Gulf States to lands beyond Arkansas. These people constitute what are now known as "The Five Civilized Tribes," a phrase which signifies rather five communities in control of their own affairs than possessors of the laws and arts of enlightenment. They comprise the kindred na tions of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, and number 65,000, or a fourth of the Indians in the country. Although a considerable care to the government, they are not enumerated with other Indians among the technical wards of the country. A fifth of them, it is said, wearied with the pressure of civilization upon them, have asked their brethren for "the portion of goods that falleth to them," and are about to take a " journey into a far country» in Mexico, where they can live unmolested by white men's ways. The Civilized Tribes own 31,000 square miles of land in the Indian Territory, have $8,000,000 to their credit on the books of the United States Treasury, elect their own rulers and councillors, make their own school appropriations, and until recently had their own tribal courts. They are now a peaceable people, drink whiskey when they can escape the vigilance of the police, increase in numbers because so many of their children live to grow up, regulate their own affairs, and are made indolent by annuities the magnitude of which their ancestors never imagined. Dissatisfied with a policy more generous than remedial, the government has recently attempted to convert these civilized tribes into American citizens and incorporate them into the national life. If the Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles will follow the example of the Choctaws and Chickasaws two years ago, in their negotiation with the "Dawes Commissioners," all the Five Nations will soon be governed by the laws of Arkansas; their tribal courts will be displaced by those of the United States; and each soul of them will have an ample homestead inalienable for twenty-one years. During that time they cannot be despoiled of their homes by any sophistry of the whites, their children can be educated in the public schools, their ample annuities will keep them from destitution, and in the end they will have exchanged the communism of savages for the dignities and customs of citizenship. Exclusive of these tribes there are 188,ooo Indians distributed among 133 agencies, over whom the government exercises guardianship. The chief means relied upon to incorporate these wards into citizenship are education, allotments of land in severalty, and the jurisdiction of civilized courts. The old tribal communism, so long a barrier to advancement and protected by the government, is doomed to give place to individual rights and duties. When the rapidly advancing plans of the government are achieved, there will be no more Indian reservations, no more alien tribes sequestered among white populations, no more anomalous conditions, but only citizens having equal rights and privileges whether their lineage be aboriginal or European. "It was not until 1870," says the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, "that the government undertook with earnestness to provide Indian tribes with schools." In former times and in a small way it had assisted the evangelizing work of religious societies. But then began the movement known as "Grant's Peace Policy." The reservations were parcelled out among the different religious denominations applying for the work, and grants of money were made from the public funds in support of their schools for Indians. Thusstarted the system of contract schools, and they were followed by purely government day and boarding schools, and by industrial schools both on and off the reservations. There are thirty-two private boarding-schools where Indian pupils are placed by contract. As the government built up its own system it relinquished its dependence on denominations of churches, which is now dwindling to extinction through a lessening number of contract schools. Yet missions have not ceased, but they are additional and voluntary agencies supplementing the national work. There are now 450 missionaries of both sexes working among the Indians, and supported at an expenditure of $300,000 a year by the religious societies they represent. The operations of government are on a very large scale. In 1897 it maintained 326 day and boarding schools, in and about which were employed 1,807 white persons and 846 Indians. These schools have a capacity for 25,000 pupils. The average attendance was 19,000, which is about half the population of school age. The cost of maintenance to the government is $135 for each pupil in attendance. Five sixths of the children are in boarding-schools, where they are removed from the debasing influence of unregenerate homes and associates, and these institutions are equipped with farms, workshops, industrial apparatus, sanitary fixtures, and, here and there, with electric lights. |