# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII.
RELATIONS OF GREAT BRITAIN WITH THE INDIANS.
The subject of this chapter involves matters so controverted in some of their bearings as to require most candid treatment in strict conformity to historic truths. It has often been affirmed, and it has generally been allowed to pass unchallenged as if it were a well-established fact, that the British, as represented by their Government, have always been more just and wise in their dealings with the savages, and in the treatment of them, than were the English colonists here, and than the United States Government has ever been down to the present year. We are reminded that Great Britain has always had and still retains immense Indian territories here, over which she exercises administrative control; and that this has always been peaceful. As in sharp contrast with our own hostile relations with our Western tribes the fact is brought to our notice, that, within the three years last past, our latest Indian foe with his band sought and found refuge in British America. Indeed, it has been claimed that the British have been substantially discreet and generous guardians and benefactors of the Indians, protecting them from outrage and oppression, distributing among them bounties, and prudently leaving them to follow their own mode of life. Put in this positive and unqualified form, it would seem as if some huge blunder or some grievous injustice on the part of our Government was the sole cause of disadvantage in which we are thus placed when compared with our mother country.
​Referring to the unsatisfactory state of the Indian question in British Columbia, in an address which he delivered there in 1876, the Earl of Dufferin, then Governor-General of Canada said: —
“Most unfortunately, as I think, there has been an initial error, ever since Sir James Douglass quitted office, in the Government of British Columbia neglecting to recognize what is known as the Indian title. In Canada this has always been done; no Government, whether provincial or central, has failed to acknowledge that the original title to the land existed in the Indian tribes and the communities that hunted or wandered over them. Before we touch an acre we make a treaty with the chiefs representing the bands we are dealing with, and having agreed upon and paid the stipulated price, oftentimes arrived at after a great deal of haggling and difficulty, we enter into possession; but not until then do we consider that we are entitled to deal with a single acre.”
I have quoted these remarks from a most honored and well-informed official of the British crown, simply as an emphatic statement of the prevailing view already referred to. I have no intention of making a special challenge of the correctness of his Lordship's assertion. Only as it conforms in letter and spirit with the terms of very many similar assertions from a large number of persons whose words have not the weight which attaches to his, do I use it as a sort of text to be commented upon with frankness, as it stands in the light of facts in the past and in the present.
Great Britain, as a government, first gained dominion here by invasion and conquest, after her colonists had independently of her patronage secured a footing on the soil. She acceded also by conquest to the territory which had been held by France, precisely as our Government afterwards did to what had been held by our mother country. At the time of each transfer from the French to the English, and from the English to the United States, the natives who had ​been in occupancy were, so to speak, “thrown in.” Not a motion, not a thought, apparently, was entertained about any bargain or settlement in either case with the natives. Nor has England ever added to her territory thus first acquired, as the United States has done, by purchases from other European nationalities. What consideration did the natives receive when Charles II., by a stroke of the pen, made over to his cousin the vast expanses known as Rupert's Land, afterwards the Hudson Bay Company's territory? At what date, then, did the affirmation of purchase in the Earl of Dufferin's statement begin to have a warrant? It would seem to be applicable only to comparatively recent transactions under a great change from the original circumstances. There were vast spaces of lonely, desolate, and uninhabited territory stretching all round the settlements of the French which were ceded to England. For nearly a full century British residents in Canada and the Northwest had no occasion to raise the question of extinguishing Indian titles. While our own people, beginning before the war of the Revolution, were steadily pushing forward their Western frontiers, often displacing for the second time remnants or combinations of remnants of tribes which had been displaced before, the matter of purchasing or extinguishing Indian titles, with compensations and annuities, was continually presenting itself. The occasions, too, were often aggravated by contentions as to whether the Indians in possession for the time had acquired any real ownership of certain regions in dispute. The vigorous and restless activity and enterprise of our own people made this a chronic and embittered trouble. The British on their side of the line, in the long lethargy and apathy as to any extension of their colonization, were spared all this strife. Lumber and furs could be gotten for their traffic without raising contentions with the natives. It was only when, in the planting of the Earl of Selkirk's colony in 1811, and more recently in extending settlements ​in Canada beyond the original centre, the whites began really to press upon communities of natives, that bargain and contracts for territory began to be matters of interest. It may be that the Dominion is to have in the future some of the troubles which we have encountered.
The explanations, qualifications, and abatements to which this alleged claim on behalf of the British Government is to be rightfully subjected, reduce it in such a degree as to leave but little if anything on the credit side. Before our Revolutionary War the dealings of that Government, as such, with the Indians are hardly distinguishable from those of our own colonial authorities. Since the establishment of our Government the matter is more complicated. While we were still colonies Britain sought, as we did, alliances with Indians against Indians; our wars with the savages were in her interest as well as our own, and the declaration of war against them came more than once from the other side of the water. When we were struggling for our independence, agents of the British came and resided and intrigued here to set the savages against us, and succeeded in so doing. After we had achieved our independence, Britain, by retaining the western posts which she had covenanted to surrender, kept us more than ten years at warfare with her Indian allies. More than this, Britain secured the alliance of Indian tribes for working immense havoc and horrors to her colonists, on the solemn pledge on her part to remunerate the savages. She did not do so, but left them, impoverished and infuriated, on our hands at the end of the war. Indeed, it may be safely affirmed that some of the worst aggravations and strifes with the Indians on our borders till the close of the war of 1812 were from the entail or the renewal of hostile relations for which the British were largely if not malignantly responsible.
We strike at the very root of this assumption in behalf of the wise and kindly British policy towards the American ​Indians, when we recognize the fact that that Government, as a government, has never had any such relations with the savages as did our colonists, and as the United States now have. That Government, as such, never undertook and managed the work of colonization on this continent by public initiation, patronage, fostering care, and military support, as it has done in India and Australia. It put its seal to charters and to proprietary rights, but it left adventurers to their own charges; and in fact it awoke to the realization that it had American colonies only when it became aware that they had prospered so as to be available for taxation, and were too strong and independent to yield to the demand. Not in a single instance has the British Government sent over at its own cost a body of colonists to this soil. The Government, therefore, as such, has never had to meet and deal with the Indians on the same footing as did the actual colonists. Those actual colonists were English people exiled from their own homes. As they came for a permanent stay, — not as transient, wandering traders, but as agriculturists and laborers on the soil, — they were brought into intimate relations with the Indians; they had to struggle for a foothold, to secure local property, to provide steadily for an extension of their territory as their numbers increased, to conciliate or subdue bands of the aborigines, and to lay and defend the foundations of a new empire here. Then, in very early stages of their hard enterprise these English colonists, without any aid from their Government at home, had to meet their first collisions with Dutch and French rivals struggling for dominion in the New World. When these antagonistic complications had reached a stage at which Britain, having in view — which ever it might have been — whether her own jealous pride of empire or the defence of her imperilled and exhausted colonies, sent her armies and fleets with generals and admirals to crush the French, she too was forced to put herself into the same relations with the savages as her ​colonists had maintained, — making alliance with some of them, and visiting the scourge of war on others. We shall have occasion to note how she treated the Indians. Again, when Britain sought to crush the spirit of independence among her colonists, and in the second war to tyrannize over the young republic, she again put herself into relations with the savages, — whether more just than ours we shall see.
The simple truth is, we have been resident and extending colonists from the beginning, mostly from British stock. Britain, in her presence and power here, has been only an intermittent visitor, appearing on the scene in arms. As is soon to be stated, the chief relations of Britain with our savages have been for ends quite other than colonization, — ends inconsistent with colonization; and so her position towards the savages has been quite unlike that of the early colonists and their representatives here in our country. The British Empire in North America is much larger in area to-day than that of our own Government. We have an area of 3,026,094 square miles. British America has an area of 3,620,500; that is, Great Britain's domain exceeds our own here by more than half a million of square miles. Nineteen twentieths of her domain is the same old unsettled wilderness that it ever was; but our own people seem already crowded for room. The Northwest Territory of Great Britain is nearly as extensive as our whole domain. Formerly belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, whose charter expired in 1863, it passed to the Crown nearly three millions of square miles of territory, with a population almost wholly of Indians, of which there are 85,000. Had the work of colonization here by Great Britain been as brisk and vigorous as that of her own American offspring, we should have seen lively times on the north and northwest of this continent. As it is, from the acknowledgment of our independence to this day, whenever we have had border troubles with the savages, they ​have invariably found aid and comfort, arms and supplies, from our brethren on the other side of that border. Had there been for a hundred years a rivalry between us for actual colonization of those vast wildernesses, we should certainly have found a Sitting Bull as well as John Bull formidable allies against us.
The Hudson Bay Company was for a long time the representative of the enterprise — wholly commercial and monopolizing — of Great Britain on this continent. A sketch of its plan and operations will show how different were the relations into which those concerned in it were thrown with the Indians, from those of our own people and Government.
The Hudson Bay Company had its origin in a charter given by Charles II. to Prince Rupert, under date of May 2, 1670, on the return of a party of adventurers in the bay from an enterprise under Captain Gillam, in the “Nonsuch” ketch. The charter conferred upon the Company the whole region whose waters empty into the Bay, with the right “to use and enjoy the whole, entire, and only trade and traffic, and the whole, entire, and only liberty, use, and privilege of trading to and from the territory, limits, and places aforesaid, and to and with all the natives and people inhabiting, or who shall inhabit, within the territories, limits, and places aforesaid,” etc.
Captain Butler, in 1870, when he travelled in the region, well described it in the title of his book, as “The Great Lone Land.” There is a grim significance in the motto of the chartered company, — “Pro pelle cutem.”
The enormous and vaguely bounded territory thus bestowed was called Rupert's Land. The Prince was its first governor; his associates, as a committee, were the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Craven, Lord Arlington, and other nobles. More than forty years before the date of this charter, Louis XIII. had made a similar grant to “La Compagnie de la Nouvelle France.” Rupert's rights were made rigidly ​exclusive, and the Company became a gigantic monopoly. No ends or purposes of actual colonization were intended or provided for in it; in fact, the interests of the Company discouraged and withstood colonization. No attempt in a design to civilize or benefit the natives was proposed by it, nor was any effort whatever made in that direction. The Company existed and was managed simply in the interest of trade, and that proved enormously profitable. The dividends made from its original stock, — after that, in modern phrase, had been well “watered,” — for 110 successive years, from 1690 to 1800, averaged between sixty and seventy per cent. Beginning its enterprise with a single factory or post near the shore of the Bay, it extended the field of its operations far into the Northwest, and with a wide embrace of regions producing the fur-bearing animals. Its chain of posts or forts was connected by streams, lakes, and portages, by which the natives brought their peltries to the Company's clerks and agents to be bartered for European commodities. It was but rarely that these posts were fortified, as mutual advantage from traffic secured peaceful relations. There is something very significant of English policy in the names given to these chief factories in Rupert's Land; such as York, Albany, Churchill, Cumberland, Nelson, Carlton, etc. As if to cheer the agents of the Company, — who, as winterers in the stations far inland in the lonely and dreary depths of the wilderness, needed the help of their imaginations for a solace, — these remote posts bore such names as Resolution, Providence, Good Hope, Enterprise, Reliance, Confidence, Hudson's Hope, etc. The posts extended from Oregon to Ungava, and from Mingan to the Mackenzie. The region of country claimed under the charter of the Company took in between two and three millions of square miles, — nearly fifty times the surface of England.
One might gather a whole library of volumes that have been written about the Hudson Bay Company, chiefly by ​those in its employ, — its agents, servants, resident clerks, and winterers. These books cover the whole period of its existence, all its operations, and its controversies. Most commonly the employés of the Company were young men from Scotland and the Orkneys. They were sent out on covenants of apprenticeship or service for terms of years, on salaries, wages, and prospective rewards by promotion. As a rule they proved intelligent, capable, and honest; soon conforming themselves to the conditions around them, and occasionally reaping rich advantages in a fair way. Some of them developed a genius that could turn to account their hazardous and arduous kind of life, — which, however, at intervals became dismal and dreary. The books from their pens would be most interesting and healthfully exciting reading to our young persons who love to read of wild and adventurous life, especially when assured that the narrative is truthful.
The Company had in its service at one time about three thousand persons; and the hunters and trappers who supplied it roamed over a region of five million square miles. Of course this vast extent of operations involved complications of affairs, and jealousies and rivalries in the management of the Company, among its employés, and with French and afterwards with American fur-traders. It is not strange, therefore, that most of the books just referred to — written by the servants of the Company, and often in the dreary winter seclusion of its posts — contain free and not unfrequently severe strictures on its management. Its rapacity and greed in mere money-making, its partiality in distributing its favors, its indifference to the just complaints and grievances of its servants, and its utter neglect of the present and prospective welfare of the savages, whom it dealt with only with reference to their rich spoils, are strongly reflected upon. The Company, intrenched in its chartered monopoly, paid slight attention to these charges. The mercantile interest in England more than once brought about a ​Parliamentary inquiry, alleging the monopoly and the inefficiency of the Company. It appeared that the Company had never in any way recognized the Indian title or rights in the territory, nor made any attempt to extinguish them. The defence was, that, as it was not a colonizing Company, and in fact had always discouraged colonization, territorial rights were not essential to it. This defence induced a further complaint. The Company was known to oppose and thwart all attempts at exploring the country for curiosity, science, or any other purpose that would interfere with or throw light upon its own affairs. To meet these charges the Company sent Samuel Hearne, who had long been a resident agent, to make a journey of exploration to the Copper Mine River and to seek a Northwest passage. His journey was between 1769 and 1772; and he tried to extenuate the complaints against the Company for selfishness and lack of enterprise, made by Dobbs, Ellis, Robson, and others of its employés. He was absent from the post nearly nineteen months; he reached the river and the mines, but was disappointed in the results. Being an observing, intelligent, and cautious man and writer, he made a close study of Indian life and character, and gave a good description of the country, its animals, and products. He somewhat qualifies the reputed sagacity of the beaver, especially as regards its skill in the use of its tail as a trowel. He shows how readily a white man could conform himself to the habits of an Indian. He was unable to humanize his savage companions, or to dissuade them from inflicting a most hideous massacre on the Esquimaux whom they met upon the coast.
While the Company had thwarted any attempt to obtain information about the Indians in the interior, in order that their territory might be kept simply as a preserve for fur-bearing animals, the French from Canada were pushing their influence and enterprise. La Salle had first conceived and executed the design of opening a way through the ​continent from north to south, and the French in 1731 were the first of white men to penetrate to the Rocky Mountains. So far as the natives were made parties to the struggles and rivalries of the different traders, the influence upon them was simply demoralizing. The keenest of the traders and of their employé's would endeavor near some carrying-place to intercept a band of savages with their peltries, on their route to the centre of their supplies, where they were under contract for credit given to make a return. Where other temptations offered to them failed, rum was generally found to serve the purpose. Those inner reaches of the continent, once wildernesses impenetrated except by savages, have cast the shadows of oblivion over many dismal tragedies of violence and suffering.
Edward Umfreville, who had been eleven years in the service of the Hudson Bay Company, and four years independently in the Canada fur-trade, published a volume in London, in 1790, on the state of the Company at that time. The book is judiciously and temperately written; but is very searching and severe in its strictures upon the management of the monopoly. He says that every one of its servants that has written upon it has censured or condemned it. When he was in its service in 1771, the Company employed two ships and a sloop, — all less than six hundred tons, — to bring merchandise and to take home peltry. Their crews being seventy-five, and there being only 315 employés resident, he thought this was a pitiful company for such a privilege and realm. In 1749 Arthur Dobbs and others had appealed to the House of Commons for an investigation, with a view to break the monopoly which restricted such a privilege, and to lay open the chartered territory to the trade of the nation at large. But the attempt was thwarted by the Company. Though the charter enjoined kindness to the Indians, and the reclaiming them to Christianity and civilization, Umfreville says the injunction was set at nought. The Company then really ​consisted of but seven persons, and was acting illegally, as the time for which Parliament had renewed its charter had expired.
As has been said, the profits of the traffic were enormous, as may be inferred when we read that a good gun, costing twenty-seven shillings sterling, sold for twenty beaver skins, valued at £25; and two yards of cloth, costing twelve shillings, were exchanged for £10 in beaver. At first a single ship was annually sent from England to the Bay, and wintered in the ice of some sheltered inlet; but it being found that a vessel could go in, exchange cargoes, and return within the year, a gratuity of £50 was given to the master who accomplished the feat. The rivalry of the French in Canada with the interests of the Company was very soon experienced, as the Indians were early provided with French guns and found to have a smattering of French words. The number of half-breeds, French and Indian in blood, was another significant token. The operations of the Company gave service and training to that remarkable class of men, daring, skilful, patient, and all-enduring, — as much the growth and product of forest and wilderness as the wild beasts, — who have been referred to as “coureurs de bois,” “voyageurs,” etc., who assimilated all the traits and qualities of the Indian, with the addition of some special acuteness and versatility of their own. These “voyageurs,” for the most part half-breeds, with a complement of the natives and in company with an agent from one of the factories, would course the way between the posts, navigating the rivers and lakes, carrying their burdens, peltries, and canoes over the portages, and employing dogs to drag their loaded sledges over the snow. They were a wild and daring and self-reliant race, capable of enduring exhaustive fatigue and sharp extremities of cold and hunger. They had their intervals of fun and license, of feasting and dancing, and riotous and reckless living at the posts, and the solaces without all of the responsibilities of matrimony. ​When the natives came to the posts, bringing the products of their hunting and trapping from far-off swamps and forests, business was postponed till they had indulged in a wild drinking-bout. Liquor made them furious, and turned them into fiends incarnate, desperate and murderous to all within their reach; so that this drunken and reckless riot was prepared for by the squaws, by taking away and hiding all the weapons of their lords and masters.
The name “fire-water” has a most expressive signification, and a pertinence not always found when we go to the roots of words. A cheap and maddening kind of intoxicating liquor, manufactured in England, was brought thence in great quantities by the Company's vessels, and distributed among its posts. For convenience of transport by boat or portage, it was divided from the barrel into small kegs or runlets, holding one or two gallons. The appreciable value of the liquor for barter, and its ferocious effects upon the savages in its full proof, soon led to a custom of reducing it by equal or larger parts of water, so that the contents of one keg might be parted into two or three. But the Indians had become expert enough to test the deception. The reduced commodity palmed on them as the pure article would extinguish fire; but the real, original, true stuff would support a flame. Hence rightfully the term “fire-water.” The mischief wrought by intoxicating liquors among the Indians has had a more deadly effect upon them all over the continent than has war, or the small-pox, or the plague. Very early in the operations of the Hudson Bay Company, restraints, and then an interdict, were put on the introduction of spirituous liquors among the Indians. Occasionally the restriction may have availed, but for the most part it was futile. More than one plain-spoken savage who had had experience of this “fire-water” is credited with this description of it: “It could only have been distilled from the hearts ​of wild-cats and the tongues of women, it makes me so fierce and so foolish.”
After the savages, on their visit to the trading-post, had recovered — not without a sense of shame and humiliation — from the drinking-riot, they were ready for business, tempted by the sight of the goods in the store, — guns, ammunition, clothes, various commodities, and bright calicoes, ribbons, trinkets, and gewgaws for their squaws. But the first transaction required a payment of their debts, for they were generally a year behindhand, having on their previous visit taken up goods on credit. Generally, too, they were honest debtors, bringing with them enough beyond their obligations to insure a credit in excess of their surplus for another season. The liquor was hidden away during these transactions, and efforts were made to prevent the draft upon what they might carry off with them till they had gone some distance from the trading-station. How diligently the savages followed the work of trapping beaver alone for the Company may be inferred from the fact, that, in the year 1788, more than 127,000 skins were shipped to London. The barter business at the posts was transacted by the aid of small marked sticks, defining values. These were given to the Indians according to the matter in their packs, and then received back again, at the same rate, for the goods which they might select from the store-house. The unit of value was the beaver skin, other peltries being estimated by fractions or multiples of it. The packs of goods which were to be transferred into the wilderness and those which were brought out of it were generally each of them a hundred pounds in weight, with reference to one or two of them being slung over the back in crossing portages or carrying-places between the water-runs.
Some of these commercial transits were made when the streams were open; others in the depths of winter, when the frozen surface of snow in the wilderness and of lakes and streams gave a zest and rapidity to the journey. ​Those who, by the comforts of the winter fireside, enjoy reading tales of adventure or descriptions of home life in far-off solitudes and under grim and perilous surroundings, will find the Hudson Bay literature a rich repository. How some of those young men, exiled from the Scotch Islands, made life tolerable and even gay in those posts, with Christmas festivities and on occasions of arrivals of mails, of supplies, and of bands of trappers, may be read in many graphic and truthful relations.
From the first incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company there were constant rivalries and feuds between its employés and the French hunters and traders, — a wild and adventurous race, who were experts and heroes in all wilderness prowess. After the cession of Canada, by conquest, to the British, in 1762, the French, not dislodged from the woods, still continued the fur-trade through the coureurs de bois. The English monopoly for a while slackened in its vigor. The prize at stake, however, was a tempting one. Individual and associated enterprise, involving fierce altercations and treacherous alliances with the Indians, were enlisted in the fur-traffic. In 1783 some merchants of Montreal entered into a partnership company, and in 1787 united with another, thus constituting the famous Northwest Company. It was for a time very prosperous. It had twenty-three shareholders or partners, and employed two thousand men as clerks, guides, interpreters, and boatmen, scattered over the inner lakes and rivers at immense distances to receive peltries and distribute supplies. As no attempt was made by the foreign agents to colonize or permanently occupy Indian territories, but as the aim was to keep them in their wild state for hunting and trapping, the natives took no umbrage against the intruders, but on the contrary, learning to appreciate and to depend upon British goods, they became strongly enlisted in the British interest, as Americans have found to their cost. The Hudson Bay Company supplied the Blackfoot ​Indians of the far West with fire-arms. Their enemies, the Snake tribes, tried to procure the same implements from the Spaniards in California; but as the latter wisely refused, the Blackfeet crushed the Snakes.
In 1796 the United States Government became jealous of this absorption of the internal Indian trade by foreigners, and sent out its own agents with supplies to engage in it. But these agents proved slack and inefficient. John Jacob Astor and others thus found their prompting to undertake the traffic. Mr. Astor, in 1794, was the agent in London of a fur-trader. In 1807, entering the business on his own account, he was thwarted by the rival Mackinaw Company. In 1809 he got a charter from New York for the “American Fur Company,” with a capital of a million dollars, all held by himself. The enterprise of that rich merchant for planting a great trading settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, for commerce with the eastern continent and islands, and for the internal fur-trade, has found a fascinating relator in Washington Irving. A series of cross-purposes, plunders, wrecks, disasters, and catastrophes of every shape and kind overwhelmed the enterprise, and English rivals came in for the reward. The overland party, which was to join at the post the other party which went by sea, was under the guidance of Captain Hunt, took eleven months for crossing the country, travelling 3,500 miles, double the distance in a straight line, and exhibited heroic effort and endurance.
Irving thinks it marvellous that so many Indians should have survived at the West, considering the stern conditions of their life, their fierce wars with each other, fragments of almost extinct tribes timidly cowering in mountain fastnesses and wasted by the ravages of the small-pox. Even their names bear witness to their degradation, — such as Flatheads, Blackfeet, Crows, Pierced Noses, Big Bellies, and Snakes.
The circumstances under which those vast inner ​expanses of mountain, plain, lake, river, valley, and hill have been visited by the wild, lawless, and desperate roamers have attached to the localities names often vulgar, low, and filthy. These offensive names ought not to be retained to degrade and vilify the regions, often so fair and sublime, especially as the Indian names which they displace are so beautiful and fitting. Why call the grand summits the Rocky Mountains? All mountains are rocky. The Indian name for them is the Chippewyan.
The once famous Red River Settlement, another enterprise not of the British Government, but of its subjects, dates from 1811. The Earl of Selkirk, Thomas Douglas, a large proprietor in the Hudson Bay Company, purchased from it and from the Cree and Sauteux or Ojibwa Indians, for an annuity of one hundred pounds of tobacco to each, — not a very generous equivalent, — land on both banks of the Red River and the Assiniboine. This had long been in its undisturbed wilderness condition as a mere preserve of the fur-bearing animals. It was roamed over by wandering Indians, who visited the trading-posts of the employés of the two rival companies, — the Hudson Bay and the Northwest. The enormous herds of buffalo which once coursed it have disappeared. The settlers under Selkirk were Scotch. They planted themselves on the soil with many discomfitures and hardships. Being under the patronage of the Bay Company they were attacked by those in the interest of the Northwest Company, Canadians and half-breeds, and twice driven from their settlement. On their return for a third trial, grasshoppers and myriads of blackbirds consumed their growing crops and reduced them to famine. Not till 1821, after nine years of sturdy toil against all obstacles, did the enterprise become in a measure successful. The two rival fur-companies formed a coalition. In 1835 the Bay Company purchased the Red River Settlement of Lord Selkirk's executors. He had spent upon his colony £85,000 sterling. Near Opashkwa Lake, in the Red River ​Territory, is the height of land, the dividing ridge, which parts the waters flowing into the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
The inhabitants of the region at the time were of as motley and miscellaneous a make-up as any extensive region of the earth would have afforded, — Canadians, half-breeds, Indians, and naked, painted, and feathered savages strutting and fuming, voyageurs, farmers, hunters fishermen, furnished with missionaries of rival creeds, and not without means of education. Groups of human dwellings presented the strongest contrast as between well-furnished and well-stocked houses and farm-barns and the filthiest, dreariest cabins and wigwams. Any of the Indians who were inclined to adopt the usages of civilization had the progressive stages of it set before them and facilitated, all the way up from and all the way down to barbarism. Many of the settlers, however, were faithful to their Indian wives, sought to raise them and their habits and mode of life, and sent their half-blood offspring to Canada and Europe for education.
The object of the British traders was to open a road from Lake Superior through the Rocky Mountains to British Columbia, for direct commerce with China, which was the market for the costliest furs. From the Saskatchewan Valley all the way to the mountains only the agents of the Bay Company wandered. The region covered an area of 65,000 square miles, or forty million acres, much of it rich soil. It is this region, now the Province of Manitoba, which under the prompting and enterprise of land companies, vigorously pressed, is fast becoming populous with settlers, and giving promise of vast prosperity. A just and reasonable energy, not necessarily involving any jealousy, is engaged in this enterprise to offer inducements to colonists under Great Britain to stay on their own territory instead of making preference of that of the United States. Not by any means, however, is this preference overcome in ​all cases. Still, with largesses and other inducements offered, not only to British but to other peoples, the enterprise is full of promise. Settlers from Russia, companies of Memnonites, and others from Iceland, are in thrifty communities on the spot. The project of the Canadian Pacific Railway to British Columbia is one which will task the funds of its proprietors. These enterprises will be found to bring British subjects into those more intimate and disturbing relations with the natives which have occasioned so many collisions between them and our people and Government. It remains to be seen if the British will prevail with a policy more just and pacific than our own. Certainly they have an opportunity to improve upon our methods and doings, and our experience may be a part of their practical discretion.
But whatever may be truthfully said about the greater wisdom or humanity of the official dealings of Great Britain with our Indians, the pages of authentic history are deeply stained for our mother country by the course pursued by her agents in the use they made of the savages alike in the war of the Revolution and in the war of 1812. At the outbreak of the former war England had already under her alliance and service nearly all the neighboring Indian tribes. Such of them as had previously aided the French, and as had been concerned in Pontiac's conspiracy, had been mostly won over or crushed. But the moment the colonies opened the rebellion Christian England, not content with the aid of mercenaries from the European continent, regarded every red man in our forests as fit and helpful material for a border warfare of burnings and massacres. And nearly all the tribes within reach of her call answered to it. It is difficult to trace, in her method of enlisting Indian allies and directing their savage instincts against her rebellious provinces, any feeling of humanity or any purpose of benefiting the natives. We certainly cannot at this point discern any greater consideration on her part ​than on our own towards them. Nor can we find at this crisis the beginning of what is claimed as her more wise and merciful policy.
The opening of our Revolutionary War was the occasion of yet another of the aggravated issues in which, by a long series, the interests of the white and red men have clashed ever since their first contact on this continent. In all the conflicts for possession and empire on our soil the rival European colonists — as we have had already many evidences — sought, and always with success, to secure their respective supporters and allies from the Indian tribes whom they could influence, and also to set those tribes against each other in quarrels of their own. Our quarrel with the mother country was a matter of amazement to the Indians on our borders, and it was long before they understood its causes, could appreciate all its bearings and consequences, and decide the course which they should wisely pursue with a view to their own interests. Only twelve years before, they had seen the close of a seven years' war, which was in fact but the consummation of a struggle running, — as has been repeatedly stated, — with brief lulls and truces, through a century and a half, between the French and the English for mastery here. In that protracted strife, especially in the fierce war which brought it to a close, with complete victory for the English crown, the French had had a great predominancy of influence over, and of efficient help from, the red men. Indeed, we call that series of struggles by the name of our French and Indian War.
The British authorities, during that war, had come fully to appreciate the importance to them of strengthening their influence and alliance with Indian tribes. The agency which they established for that purpose in Eastern New York proved of substantial use to them; and the great popularity which the Johnsons secured, especially among the Mohawks, was turned to good account. Of course the cause of the colonies up to this time had been a common ​one with that of England. But a new role was now to open. All the prestige and favor which British patronage and pay had won among the native tribes were likely now to swell the preponderance of power against the rebellious colonists. It became the latter to anticipate the threatened evil from this quarter. We were to have a contemptuous, arrogant, embittered, and vigorous enemy on our coasts, seeking also at various points to penetrate into the interior. Should we have likewise wily foes, murderous, prowling, savage allies with that enemy behind our borders, — apt for all stratagems, haunting the woods, burning our inner settlements, and inflaming rebellion with untold horrors? This element in the apprehensions and disasters of our Revolutionary conflict has been too often overlooked in our histories. To all of our people distant from the seaboard it was the aggravation of their severest dreads and sufferings. There have been many critical occasions in the earlier history of European nationalities on this continent when the savage tribes held something like what we call the balance of power, as a third party. It was of paramount importance, therefore, in the strifes of rivals and in our civil conflicts, to secure for either party their alliance or their neutrality. The English had sought this advantage against the French; and in turn the rebelling colonists sought it against the English. Our first Congress hoped for nothing more than the neutrality of the Indians, who could do us most harm. Knowing how dependent they had become on the English in the French war, Congress could hardly ask them to take up the hatchet against England. They therefore asked the Indians merely to look on the strife as a family quarrel, and to keep still in their lodges. While commissioners were working for this end, the wanton aggressions and murders perpetrated in 1774 by Colonel. Cresap's band, on the northwest border of Virginia, stirred the rage of the friendly chiefs Logan and Cornstork, and so alarmed their people as to make a grievous difficulty for our ​Government. An Indian department was organized in 1775, and its direct aim was to thwart the intrigues of Sir John Johnson, Guy Johnson, and the famous Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, who held a British commission in engaging the natives. Brant, who was a great warrior and had a wide range among the tribes, with whom he had done much civil business, was a formidable foe to the colonists. The Six Nations at first agreed to a neutrality. The river Indians favored the colonists, as did the Oneidas; the Cawnawagas were halting; the Delawares, neutral. But the fickle and inconstant natives, governed by caprice and impulse, could be but little depended on. Thus we had around us all the elements of a twofold civil war. Our temporary success in Canada was followed by disasters, the sharpest of which was the affair at the “Cedars,” in May, 1776. The policy of Congress was now changed from seeking the neutrality of the Six Nations and other tribes to attempts to draw them into active allied service, under pay. Though Washington favored the measure, Schuyler opposed it. Both parties had occasion to regret the alliance and service of the savages, as wholly unmanageable, regardless of the rules of civilized warfare, plundering, rioting, and carousing, not distinguishing between friend and foe, and watching the changing tide of fortune. New York and Pennsylvania bore the sharpest penalties in broils, murders, burnings, and massacres from this partition of ferocious barbarians in the strifes of civilized men. The Valley of Wyoming has had its tragic woes versified in a poem; and the truth compels the confession, that the white matched the red men in barbaric deeds.
We have to recognize the fact that the experience which French and English colonists had alike had of the cruel inhumanities and the revolting atrocities of Indian warfare had excited among them a dread of that element of their quarrels, and even what may be called scruples of conscience in those who called themselves in any sense ​Christian people, as to the employment of savages as allies. Especially among the English at home was there manifested at the time a strong reluctance, and even a bold protest and opposition, to the engagement of Indians as mercenaries, as it was known to be utterly impracticable to restrain them from their barbarities within the rules of what is called civilized warfare. The satire, invective, and denunciation which early in our war were poured out upon Burgoyne, for his employment of Indians and for his absurd proclamation on his route, might be regarded as the expression of a widely prevailing sentiment of disapprobation and disgust.
Near the close of this famous and fulsome proclamation addressed to the rebels as he was advancing from Ticonderoga, are these sentences: —
“I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction — and they amount to thousands — to overtake the hardened enemies of Great Britain and America, and I consider them the same wherever they may lurk. . . . The messengers of justice and of wrath await them in the field; and devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must occasion, will bar the way to their return.”
When afterwards defending himself for enlisting the savages, Burgoyne said “he spoke daggers, but used none.” He called these allies “at best a necessary evil;” and he said their blood-thirsty and plundering propensities, which he could not restrain, far exceeded the worth of their services.
​Still, whatever may have been the extent and influence of such a feeling, it did not avail to deter the British war secretary from bribing, enlisting, and infuriating Indian allies against us. But if any among the English wished and desired that the controversy between the rebelling colonists and the King might be tried and settled without calling into it the tomahawks, the scalping-knives, and the torches of the fiends of the forest, how much more might our own people, who knew so well what Indian warfare was, shrink from and try to avert the worst of their threatened perils!
Of course there has been the usual charging and counter-charging of American and British partisan historical writers as to which of the contending parties was first in the enlistment of savage allies. It seems strange that the matter should not have been regarded as settled by precedent on both sides. It was said in Parliament, when the measure was under discussion, that Congress had already got the start in that policy. Still, the British war minister was sharply rebuked in the House of Lords on account of his savage allies, though they had been advised by Burgoyne to restrain their ferocity. The Earl of Chatham poured forth his indignation so fiercely that it was said that the tapestry-figures on the walls listened with frowns on their faces. Burke thus sarcastically illustrated the appeal to the savages' humanity: —
“Suppose there was a riot on Tower Hill. What would the keeper of his Majesty's lions do? Would he not fling open the dens of the wild beasts, and then address them thus: ‘My gentle Lions, my humane Bears, my tender-hearted Hyenas, go forth! but I exhort you, as you are Christians and members of civilized society, to take care not to hurt any man, woman, or child.’ ”
Our people had to start in the conflict under the reasonable and dread apprehension that they would have to ​contend with savage foes who had so recently been in the pay and service of Britain against the French. The Provincial Congress of Massachusetts had exercised their forethought upon this matter before the opening of hostilities. A company of Stockbridge Indians had been engaged as minutemen, and were stationed at Watertown. It was known that we had sympathizers in Canada; and the Provincial Congress addressed a letter in April, 1775, to one of our missionaries among the Six Nations in Western New York, seeking that every effort should be used to engage the good feeling, and if possible the active help, of the tribes on our side, or, if that was impracticable, at least to secure their neutrality. British agents, however, had already the start of us in that scheme, and attained considerable success, so that even among the tribes from which we might have looked for aid, as well as from all other Indian tribes, the weight was against us during the whole war.
From the moment in which Washington took command of the American army and saw his work before him, among the perplexities which burdened his mind was this of the threatened part which the Indians would have in the strife. Well did he know the qualities of the Indians in carnage and battle, whether as allies or foes. He also put himself in correspondence with the same missionary, Mr. Kirkland, who had won great influence among the Oneidas, and who visited the camp at Cambridge, with a chief and others of the tribe, whom Washington treated with wise favor. The second Congress, in 1775, appointed that there should be three Indian Departments in its service, — Northern, Middle, and Southern, — with Commissioners for each; and sent an address to the Six Nations, in which they were told that ours was a family quarrel, that had no concern for them; that they were not asked to take up the hatchet against the King's troops, but only to be strictly neutral, keeping quiet at home. A treaty was made with some of them that effected nothing, for the sway over them of ​Johnson and other agents was supreme. After the bloody massacre at the Cedars, where Indians under a British officer murdered several American prisoners, Congress took active measures to enlist and employ and pay the natives who were willing to enter our service, and authorized Washingteon to follow up these measures. These Indians were to receive the same pay as our own soldiers, with extra bounties for British prisoners. Yet we had through the whole war but very little, if any, help from the forest warriors. Rather did our frontiers suffer devastation and many a shuddering horror from their insidious onsets, as they fought from a love of cruelty, and their ferocity was fed by the hope of plunder. We gave the British the odium for instigating these atrocities, and rage on that score helped to embitter our strife as it proceeded. Happily, among the causes of self-reproach for the treatment of the Indians by our Government, we have not to add that of ingratitude for any good service done us in the war, either that of the Revolution or that of 1812. This ingratitude was charged severely upon the British.
Before Congress had taken the steps just mentioned, the subject of employing the Indians had been, as before stated, under warm discussion in Parliament. It was known that the ministry had authorized their generals here to engage their aid. Burke, in denouncing the act as criminal, said that while the ministry had made such alliances through the whole country, the Americans had only sought from the Indians promises of neutrality, which British officers were bribing them to break. He thought, even, that the Americans would be more justified in employing their savage countrymen against armed and trained soldiers than the British were in goading them against poor defenceless men, women, and children in their scattered homes. Lord George Germain, the war minister, insisted that we had already solicited and secured Indian helpers in our rebellion, and that it was not ​in their nature to remain idle and neutral when a fight was going on. Lord North admitted that the employment of Indians was bad, but affirmed that it was unavoidable.
Previous to the confederation of the thirteen colonies each one of them had assumed control of the natives within its bounds, either under instructions from the Crown, or by its own local legislatures. Our records, therefore, contain a long series of stipulations, provisional arrangements, and so-called treaties made with one or more tribes, disposing of troublesome issues as they rose, generally by a bargain, the consideration in which was either paid down or made a matter of annuities for a longer or a shorter period. When the English took possession of New York, over the Dutch, in 1664, they made a covenant with the Five Nations, which continued without a breach substantially down to our Revolution. The Indians asked to have the Duke of York's arms set upon their “castles.” But this was not so much for their love of the English as from their fear of the French. On this ground it certainly might have seemed that if either the mother country or the colonists were entitled to such benefit as might come from an Indian alliance, the former party was entitled to it. The colonists would have been more than content with the absolute neutrality of the savages; but as this could not be secured, the result was but one more of the aggravations of what was so often spoken of as “the unnatural quarrel between mother and daughter.” Candor will urge, and will scarcely grudge to allow, in a comparison of the treatment of the natives respectively by Great Britain and by our Government, that, in the matters of difficulty and responsibility when the Indians fell into our hands, our case had been sadly complicated and prejudiced by the state in which Britain had left her red allies. These malign influences affected our first treaty relations with the Indian tribes nearest to us, which began under the confederation in 1778. These were designed, as has been said, to secure ​either the alliance of the natives or their neutrality. Of course, the tribes with whom we first formed treaties were few, and were on our immediate borders. Till the beginning of this century the treaties were almost wholly confined to Indians on this side of the Mississippi, after its confluence with the Ohio, and down to the Gulf of Mexico. Till quite recently these treaties have been steadily multiplying with natives on further reaches of territory, and judging by the increase of new tribal names on our records one would suppose that we have come into contact with thickening multitudes of them. There was always an over-estimate of the number of Indians on our soil; and this over-estimate has been helped in our days by the greed of agents, guardians, and bounty distributors, interested to make the number of their wards as large as possible. The census of 1850 was the first in which the United States Government made a systematic effort for anything like exactness in estimating the Indians within its borders. Separate censuses had at times been made by the colonies. The annexation of States and Territories — as Florida, Texas, and California — has of course swollen the Indian census.
During the war of the Revolution we found, as we had every reason to expect, that the savage allies of our British foes, continually plied by active agents among them, under good pay, and well supplied with arms, were, and were long afterwards to be, a pestering and destructive enemy. The confederation had committed to it the oversight and management of the Indians, and the power to make compacts and treaties with them. It accomplished a great deal of hard work in this direction, and negotiated many treaties, such as they were, securing by purchase more than a hundred million acres. It came into collision, however, with the claims and rights asserted by the States and Territories, though at the time of the adoption of the Constitution all these disputes had been adjusted, save those with North Carolina and Georgia. Only the Iroquois and the ​Cherokees were then left as tribes still of much consequence or strength within State bounds. Through all these negotiations down to the very latest, we encountered obstacles and perplexities entailed upon us by the previous relations and measures of England towards the savages. These considerations are fairly to be taken into account in comparing the Indian policy of the two Governments, in view of the circumstances presented to each of them.
In 1779 General Sullivan, with a force of four thousand continentals, went to chastise the Indians of the Six Nations under the lead of the Chief Brant, Sir John Johnson, and other Tories, as hostile British allies. Sullivan was successful in dealing a severe blow, and destroying the Indian settlements. The instructions given to Sullivan by Washington for the conduct of this expedition are so severe and imperative in their terms, coming from so humane and righteous-hearted a chief, as to prove how his spirit had been stirred by the sharp exigencies of the struggle. These Six Nations, with meagre exceptions, goaded on to inhuman excesses even for warfare by their British instigators, were to be dealt with in a way to curb them from any further mischief. Sullivan was to listen to no appeal from them, to make no terms with them, to accept no profession or act of submission or surrender, till he had completely destroyed their towns and devastated their growing crops, so as to reduce them to a state of utter destitution, with no means of recuperation for the immediate future. The General carried out his instructions to the letter. Only he failed of one of the objects which Washington desired to realize; namely, obtaining possession, as prisoners, of the Johnsons, Butlers, and Brant, the main instigators of the savages.
Another large abatement which truth requires us to make from the claim of Great Britain to a more politic and humane dealing with the Indians, is because of the ungrateful and heartless manner in which she abandoned the tribes that had suffered from alliance with her at the close of our ​Revolutionary War. The first, the chief, the longest protracted, and the most harrassing of our relations with the savages, at the beginning of our separate nationality, is directly chargeable upon the course pursued by the British Government; and for two reasons. First, the large majority of the Indian tribes had during the war been in the service and pay of Great Britain. They did faithful service, too, under the alarms and atrocities of which the colonists smarted. They fought, and multitudes of their warriors died, for the British, whose officials had promised by solemn covenant, at the opening of the war, that all their losses by the alliance should be made good to them, whatever the result of the conflict. But in the treaty of peace acknowledging our independence, Great Britain made no mention whatever of these her red allies, required of us no terms on their behalf, or lenience or pardon to them, made them no compensation, except as she held them for further mischief against us, and left them maddened and hungry on our hands.
Again, the territorial boundaries which Britain granted to her freed colonies in America took in the ancient hunting-grounds of the Six Nations and other tribes, which she had no right to give away; and by retaining the Lake and Western posts which she had agreed to surrender, she fomented all sorts of strifes for us with the savages. It was by the sinister influence which she continued to exercise over the Indians within our own bounds that Britain was able, down to and inclusive of the war of 1812, to give us constant and costly trouble with tribes instigated and paid by her.
When the English obtained the transfer of the Dutch colony of New York, in 1664, the Six Nations had come under her protection against the French, the Hurons, and the Algonquins of Canada. A very complicated arrangement ensued. England recognized in terms the territorial rights of the natives, but claimed a right of pre-emption ​over all other intending purchasers. This right was made over to us; but under the loose articles of our Confederation, the consequent pre-emptory privileges belonged to the respective States within which the lands lay. So in the Legislature of New York, acting under the assumption that in subduing Great Britain and her Indian allies that State had come into possession of the Indian's lands, there were some who proposed to drive off the Six Nations from their remaining territory. A similar measure, on like grounds, was proposed in other States. General Schuyler, thinking this would be an outrage, impolitic, inhuman, and iniquitous, memorialized Congress against the design. Washington heartily accorded with Schuyler, and stood successfully for condoning the offence of the Indians, waiving the right to drive them over the Lakes with those whose allies they had been, and allowing them to remain, thinking by a conciliatory course to get from them cessions of lands as they should be needed for settlement.
But then arose another difficulty still consequent on the entail of trouble which Britain had left for us. In the treaty at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, the savages, observing what power the Americans derived from their federation as one people, began then and thenceforward to feel that they too would be strong if they acted in concert. Some of the chiefs of the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix objected to making a separate agreement with the United States about land, and proposed a general, comprehensive disposal of the matter of boundaries with all the native tribes. But the Commissioners of the United States secured a separate bargain, as alone then possible, leaving open matter for later animosities. As a matter of course, England was on the ground when the conspiracy of Tecumseh at the South and West, in full vigor before the war of 1812, gave her another opportunity, alike from Canada and the Gulf, to renew her alliances with the savages, and to ply and pay and arm them against us.
​The great Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant — Thayandanegea — went to England, in 1785, to obtain compensation for the losses of his people. There are intimations that he conferred with crown officers on a plan of his own for confederating the Western Indian tribes — as Pontiac had done twenty years before — whether for war or peace. He sounded the Government of Britain as to help in that design, and obtained the promise of it. England justified her delay in yielding up the Western posts, — Niagara, Detroit, etc., — on the plea that we had not secured, as agreed, compensation to unarmed Loyalists for losses during the war. Our Congress had agreed to ask, not to secure, this compensation, for it could not coerce the separate States which alone held the purse-strings. So the Indians, countenanced and aided by the English, kept up hostilities at the West. They maintained that the Ohio must be the boundary, and that we should not cross it. They protested against separate treaties with separate tribes by which their lands were alienated by piece-meal. This was at a council held at Huron, a village near Detroit. Our “Thirteen Council Fires” made the chiefs long for an imitation in a confederacy of their own. So a temporary result of a conference with them was attested by the emblems, symbols, or totems of several nations, not as formerly by the names of chiefs. A proposed general Indian council in 1788 was a failure. But a somewhat successful treaty at Fort Harmar in January, 1789, broke or deferred the Indian confederacy.
Our Government authorities knew all the while, that, in all the vexations, embarrassments, and opposition in their first attempted pacifying and covenanting with the wild tribes, English officials, when not openly, were always secretly plying the Indians mischievously with encouragement and aid. This was understood to be one of the remaining grudges of the war. It was the policy of our Government to divide the tribes by jealousies of each ​other, and to secure separate treaties with them. If the English can magnanimously claim that in pure love for the Indians they aimed to thwart this disintegrating art and cunning of ours, we might compliment them as for a commendable purpose. It is none the less true that when we are now in trouble with some of our Indians, they are well aware that they will find aid, comfort, and supplies across the border. By Jay's treaty the British on our border, where they retained the posts, were allowed to trade with the Indians, but were to pay duties on goods. This the British evaded. They gave medals of their sovereigns to the chiefs, and put up English flags at fortified posts not belonging to them. So late as 1805, Lieutenant Pike, sent by our Government on an expedition to the sources of the Mississippi, made complaint to an agent of the English Northwest Company of the grievances which we were suffering from the mischievous and illegal dealings of our neighbors, in spite of all agreements and provisions for our security.
I refer to this series of annoyances, grave or petty, not for the purpose of criminating the English, or as charging upon them the whole burden of very much of the incidental hostility into which we have been driven with our Western Indians. My statements are addressed merely to the qualification of the claim that the British have been more just and more pacific in the treatment of the savages than has our Government or its people. The circumstances of the respective parties have been quite unlike, and the occasions of animosity with the Indians have often been wholly peculiar to ourselves. If, therefore, British policy has availed for keeping its own territory or people quiet at our expense, that policy — whatever else it may have been — has hardly been a magnanimous one.
A suggestive illustration of the alleged kindly course pursued by an official Englishman towards the natives is given in “Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, by Gilbert Malcolm Sproat” (London, 1868). He writes: —
​“In August, 1860, I entered Barclay Sound, on the western coast of Vancouver Island, with two armed vessels, manned by about fifty men, for the purpose of taking possession of the district now called Alberni. Near the beach was a summer encampment of a tribe of natives. In the morning I sent a boat for the chief, and explained to him that his tribe must move their encampment, as we had bought all the surrounding land from the Queen of England, and wished to occupy the site of the village for a particular purpose. He replied that the land belonged to themselves, but that they were willing to sell it. The price not being excessive, I paid him what was asked, — about £20 worth of goods, — for the sake of peace, on condition that the whole people and buildings should be removed next day.”
The savages — being ten to one of the English, with their faces blackened — made resistance, with bold threats, but concluded to move off when their attention was called to the cannon on the vessels. Sproat visited and saluted them in their new resting-place, and the chief said to him: —
“Our families are well, our people have plenty of food; but how long this will last we know not. We see your ships, and hear things that make our hearts grow faint. They say that more King George men will soon be here, and will take our land, our firewood,our fishing-grounds; that we shall be placed on a little spot, and shall have to do everything according to the fancies of the King George men.” Sproat replied that more King George men were coming, but that the land would be bought at a fair price. The chief rejoined, “We do not wish to sell our land, nor our water: let your friends stay in their own country.” Sproat said: “My great chief (Victoria), the high chief of the King George men, seeing that you do not work your land, orders that you shall sell it. It is of no use to you. The trees you do not need; you will fish and hunt as you do now, and collect firewood, planks for your houses, and cedar for your canoes. The white man will give you work, and buy your fish and oil.” — “But we don't care to do as the white man wishes,” said the chief. “Whether or not,” replied Sproat, “the white man will come. All your people know that the whites are your superiors. They make the things which you value. You cannot make muskets, blankets, or bread. Thewhite men will teach your children to read printing and to be like themselves.” The chief plainly avowed: “We do not want the white man; he steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.” ​
Mr. Sproat proceeds to argue that he had made a bona fide purchase of the land from his own Government, and again from the natives; that his occupation of it was justifiable in nature and in morals; that the natives had only partial and imperfect rights, as they did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, and that the right of actual colonization surpassed theirs and annulled it. He goes further, and urges that Britain even had a right to conquer a peopled and cultivated country like Oude, in India, as it was a delinquent state and endangered neighboring English territories. Sproat says that during the five years of his residence the Indians deteriorated, and sickness and mortality increased, — not from rum or syphilis, but that the Indians seemed cowed, dispirited, discouraged, by the presence of a superior race. Nobody harmed them; they had more comforts; yet they decayed: savagism wasted them.
Nor have the British authorities, when it suited their ends to purchase land of the Indians, been any less covetous or any more generous in their business transactions than has our own Government. The Indians of Canada have, at different times, surrendered over sixteen millions of acres of land at prices from threepence down to less than a penny an acre. The treaty of 1850 surrendered to the Canadian Government a territory as large in area as Britain, — rich in minerals, fisheries, and forests, with less than three thousand Indians upon it, — for the sum paid down of $16,640 and a perpetual annuity of $4,400.
I have before me, as I write, two substantial volumes, bearing, respectively, the following titles: “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1881,” Washington; and “Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of ​Indian Affairs for the Year ending 31st December, 1881, printed by Order of Parliament,” Ottawa. These volumes are almost identical in the nature and substance of their contents. Indeed, the reader might turn from the one to the other in perusing their pages, and be unable, except from the names of places in the heading of letters and documents, to decide from which of them he was receiving information. As all the lands within our boundary-lines are called our “domain,” so those of the Dominion are called “crown lands.” Precisely the same system of reservations, — with agents, superintendents, schools, teachers, resident farmers, etc., — with reports from each of the condition and prospects of their respective charges, with similar qualifications, difficulties, hopes of improvements, special embarrassments, are found in each volume. Supplies, helps, facilities, and inducements for the adoption of civilized ways are noted on both sides of the border. “Improvident Indians” appear in both regions. Some of the Canada agents complain that their red wards kill and eat the cattle sent to them for breeding, and consume the seed given to them for planting. “Some of these poor creatures were discovered, after having planted the potato seed under the instructor's eye, to have returned, unearthed what they had sown, and eaten it” (p. xvii). Another agent writes, “I never was so sick of the work as I have been the last two days: do what you can for the Indian, he cannot be satisfied” (p. xxxi). Many of the agents write of the importunity of some of the Indians to have deeds on paper of personal, private land-ownership. They receive only in special cases “location tickets,” conditioned on fixtures and improvements. Glass for windows, locks and other finishings, are given by Government when decent houses are built. The complaint always is that the Indians are most troublesome when in proximity to white settlements. The largest congregated band of savages, partially civilized, in any one place, seems to be those who represent the old Six ​Nations in Ontario, numbering three thousand four hundred and thirty. Sir John A. Macdonald, Minister of the Interior of the Dominion, in his last report to the Marquis of Lome, the Governor-General, sounds the note of warning intimated on a former page, when the Canadians, by the progress of their Pacific Railway, will be brought into relations with the savages more like those which our own Government and people have encountered. He writes: —
“It will be necessary, at an early day, to give serious consideration to the many circumstances which indicate that erelong a larger force of police would be required to preserve law and order in the Northwest. Altercations between white men and Indians are becoming more frequent, and the influx of settlers consequent upon the rapid construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway will demand additional precautions for the maintenance of peace and order in the territories and friendly relations between the white and the red man.”
We suppose these “Northwest mounted police” are armed; but they are not called soldiers. The “Census Return of Resident and Nomadic Indians in the Dominion of Canada” presents a total of 107,722. The number of acres of “Indian lands” sold in the year ending June, 1881, to new settlers, was 33,293, at the price of $52,787. The area of such lands unsold is estimated at 539,433 acres. The number of Indians on the reserves, when counted in the Northwest Territories, was 11,459; the number of “absentees” from reserves was 11,577.
* ↑ Speeches and Addresses by the Earl of Dufferin, p. 209. London, 1882.
* ↑ Life and Correspondence of the Right Honorable John Burgoyne, p. 492. By E. B. De Fonblanque. London, 1876. In a rebel parody of this proclamation is the following stanza: — “ I will let loose the dogs of hell, — Ten thousand Indians, who shall yell And foam and tear and grin and roar, And drench their moccasons in gore; To them I'll give full scope and play From Ticonderog’ to Florida.”
* ↑ Horace Walpole's Letters, Cunningham's ed., vol. vii. p. 29.
* ↑ Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, for the Year ended 30th June, 1881. Ottawa.