VOL. LXVI

No. 5

IN

N earlier days, when the flood of immigration was beginning to come in tortuous streams across the West, thin and wayward yet persistent, the land-covetous Anglo-Saxon was pleased to set apart for the previous owners of the property certain places where they might dwell in peace as long as the winds blow and the waters run. Out of the desert he chose certain valleys and mountains, set them off four-square, placed armed men to guard the untracked boundaries, and there in broad reservations lived the Indian.

much better the wide Indian plains would look parceled off in green fields of alfalfa and wheat! And the mountains-who could say what treasures of gold and silver and copper might lie hidden there?

Then happened the inevitable! The fit may no more resist the law than the unfit escape it. Years ago the Anglo-Saxon began to break over the boundaries which he himself had set, and to take up the Indian lands, meting his own justice to the weak. He gave money, which the Indian was a hundredfold better off without;

Shirts they gave and beeves, and they set the half-wild children to reading in books. The Indians roamed on their millions of acres, and ate, and were for the most part content. But it is the fate of the Anglo-Saxon that he go forever forward without resting; he stands for civilization, improved lands, roads, and cities, and he rose like a flood over all the West until the reservations were barren islands in the sea of his progress. The Anglo-Saxon looked across these untilled spots and fretted because they were there. How

swift death; and food, which the Indian ate, and was hungry again. With at least a complexion of honesty, he gave all he could give; the Indian was a willing party to a losing bargain, and the Anglo-Saxon, as always and forever, got more land.

So the opening of the Indian reservation, the sign of the consuming civilization of the white man, has been one of the dramatic and familiar episodes of Western development. Hardly a year passes without some rush to Indian lands; one after another, reservations or parts of reservations have been opened to settlement, are

being opened to-day. The whole Territory of Oklahoma, soon to be a State, was thus taken from the Indians.

A particular vineyard of Naboth lay in the southeastern corner of Idaho, and it was a desert. Thirty-five years ago, by solemn treaty between the warring tribes of the Shoshones and Bannocks and the Great White Father of the East, it was set aside as a dwelling-place for the Indians and their children forever. It was nearly square, forty miles each way, except for one corner, across which ran the Snake River. It was given the name Fort Hall Indian Reservation. From time immemorial the Bannocks and their neighbors the Shoshones, both proud nations, even to-day among the finest types of Indians, had roamed all the great country along the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, hunting the elk and the buffalo. The white man came, and in a day the buffalo were slain and the elk driven to high pastures. The white man said: "This is my land; I will give you a piece of it"; and from a hunting-ground eight hundred miles long he set aside a reservation forty miles square. Here the proud Bannocks agreed to stay, and when, by mistake or intention, they crossed the invisible boundaries, -the white man's "paper lines,"-soldiers drove them back again. It was a barren forty miles: gray sand, gray sage, gray hills, and endless sunshine and dust; so that the white man never dreamed that any but Indians would ever live within the region. It was then a far outpost, farther away from the East in days' travel than Europe. From the streams that flowed through the reservation the Indians irrigated a few ineffectual acres, raised cattle and cayuses, hunted the hills and fished the rivers, dwelling in skin tepees and log huts; and so for years dwelt in comparative content.

But the white man was tramping westward, inevitable, implacable. He drove a railroad across the reservation on his way to the Pacific Ocean. He might have gone around, but time would have been lost; and what were a few Indians anyway? “Nothing shall hinder my progress," he said. Having a railroad, he needed a town, and needing it, he got room for it-one of the best spots, naturally, in the entire reservation. The camel now had its head within the tent. So Pocatello sprang up and grew, and presently it was made a junc

tion-point, and a railroad was built through the reservation in another direction. Settlers crowded in everywhere, even across the "paper lines," squatting on reservation lands; and the soldiers who had kept the Indians within boundary so effectually. failed to keep the white man out. Also, wandering prospectors, who had no business on Indian lands, pecked holes in the hills, inflaming their desires with evident. signs of copper and gold. The Bannock says: "White man take gold, leave meat." The whisper grew to a shout: "Gold in the hills! Gold! Gold!"

What can the Indian do with mines? What indeed? He does n't want copper and gold. He won't work. Therefore we should have the land. And if by any chance it should prove that there is no mineral wealth, we can farm the river-bottoms better than the Indians, make more money out of them, support more people. Give us the land! It was ever the logic of the Anglo-Saxon, and, as ever, its conclusions were the prompt precursors of action. Pleas went up to Washington. The political representatives of the people asserted that the wheels of progress must not be clogged. The Indians had been given their day to improve the land: they had not done it; therefore they should be cast out. Give us the land. The Great Father is a busy father, consumed with many and vital interests; and finally, for their much speaking, he looked out across the smiling western reaches of his land, watered with sweet waters, green with fields, populated with happy people, to this small gray spot in the wilderness. He owned millions of acres of free land in a dozen near-by States, but it seemed that his people most wanted these bare hills and sandy bottoms which he had bestowed upon the Indians and their children forever. And he knew, too,-none better than he,-that until he gave it there would be no rest from the cries of the covetous.

All this time the Indians had gone on impassively, providing for the day in hand and taking no thought for the morrow. To them came, finally, certain commissioners from the East.

"The white man wants your land," they

said.

"We ourselves will keep it," replied the Indians.

"The white man will pay you much