# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 10

CHAPTER X.
MILITARY AND PEACE POLICY WITH THE INDIANS.
One of the great primary truths which it has taken the world a long time to discover, and which, when discovered, is announced in that simple form of speech befitting the royalty of Truth, is this: That nothing in public or private affairs, in government or in the relations between man and man, has been settled till it has been settled aright. Till that happy and sure disposal of any issue has been reached, discord, passion, wasteful expedients, and failure attend all discussions of it, all dealing with it. Experiment and shifting policy will still keep it open, but only justice and right can ever dispose of it.
And that is the reason why we have before us to-day, under open and impassioned debate, in the councils of Congress, in our Cabinet bureaus, and in the military posts on our frontiers, a very old question, — a century old, but as fresh to us as if it were of this year's origin. It is called the Indian Question. No one can appreciate, without much inquiry and search, the effort, labor, wise and honest purpose on the one hand, nor know how much of aimless and wasteful experiment, wild campaigning, and baffled legislation on the other, have been spent on that question. It has not been, it is not, settled simply because we have not reached the right solution of it. Yet this oracular statement — that nothing is settled till it is settled aright — does not bring with it to those who utter it, nor to those who at once assent to it, the needful wisdom, ability, and means ​even for deciding what is right, much less for securing it. The utmost force of the assertion avails only to fix the resolve that we will aim to do the right when we are certified what it is and can engage all our resources to that end. Any one who to-day wishes to form in his own mind a clear and tenable opinion on the great question, while availing himself of what would seem to be sufficient and adequate means of information and judgment, must be content if he can draw grains of truthful and helpful wisdom from the mass of crude, one-sided, and superficial opinions and utterances upon it. It will be well if, while one comes to realize the vast perplexities and embarrassments which complicate the subject, he can keep his hold of a single guiding thread either of expediency or justice. The long debating and experimenting on this question have not, however, been fruitless. Circumstances, too, in the changes of time and in the relations of things, have increased our means alike of wisdom and of power for disposing of the question. Let us take note, first, of some of the helps and facilities which we have reached for dealing wisely and rightly with it.
1. We have acquired a large amount of very needful and practical information about the numbers, the condition, the relations, and the nature of the Indian tribes. Till within a few years, though we had known Indians for two or three centuries, they had to us a character partly legendary, misty, and fabulous. We conceived of them as in numbers wholly undefined, though in great hordes, inhabiting or roaming over vast, unexplored spaces between us and the setting sun, and supposed that we might at any time draw a line in our territory which should divide between them and the farthest settlements which the whites for long periods to come would be likely to plant in the wilderness. And we had thought that we might easily make treaty arrangements with those nearest to us, — the farthermost tribes being of no account, — by which the peace might be kept, the military power being always in reserve. Now all this ​vagueness and mist about the Indians have been dispelled. We know their numbers almost as accurately as we do the population of one of our oldest towns. Classified statistics of the tribes, in count and in condition, are spread upon documentary records in Washington, and we find, to our satisfaction, though the former exaggerated conceit of the vast number of their hordes may not have shrunken so rapidly as did the estimate of Falstaff's men in buckram, yet that there are by no means so many wild Indians in our domain as we had imagined. They are now circumscribed too, all around, by the regions of civilization in its various stages, — rude, or in the way of advance. There is no longer an unexplored and unlimited realm of mysterious fringes and depth, to which they may wander as the white man pushes them farther to the horizon; for the whites occupy that horizon.
2. And this suggests another advance in relieving the Indian question of what was till very recently one of its most perplexing and embarrassing conditions. We have found that it is utterly impossible to keep the Indians from contact and intercourse with the whites: push them back as far as we please, they are still our neighbors. Once it was the opinion of our wisest statesmen that the prime condition for just and peaceful relations with the Indians was to divide our territory with them, and leave them to themselves. We cannot do that now. The Indians themselves have had so much to do with the whites, and in spite of all our fights with them have received such benefits from us, that they desire more. In fact they cannot now exist without the presence and the help of the whites. Their range over the former wild reaches of territory for hunting has been steadily reduced, and the game has become scarce, in many vast spaces extinct. So they absolutely need our best improved weapons, our goods and implements; and whole tribes of them are now kept from actual starvation only by the supplies which Government ​furnishes. Then, too, within all the regions most solemnly covenanted to them as reservations on which the whites were forbidden to intrude, the moment the rumor gets abroad that there are mines upon them the explorers, the miners, and the farmers are found to have raised their shanties and then their so-called cities. These facts settle the point that all our future relations with the Indian tribes, instead of starting from non-intercourse with them, must proceed upon a rapidly advancing intimacy, — of dependence on their part, and of generous help on ours. This is a fact which we shall find by and by to have essentially modified the old Indian question.
3. A third facility for wisely and effectively dealing with that question is found in the fact that our Government has, though only so recently, given up the foolish fancy that the Indian tribes are independent and sovereign nations. We have adopted them as wards, — a very interesting and a very troublesome class of dependents, — with quite a precarious and unappraised inheritance claimed by them as invested in our keeping, and likely to cost us in the end a great deal more of our funds than of their own. But this change of their status from a rude independency to an extreme dependency has given us rights in the case which, though we may have usurped, we did not in terms claim, but really renounced, before. We have now the rights of guardianship: we may intermeddle with the internal affairs of the Indians, with their relations to each other; we may restrain them, bring them under a strict and firm control, dictate to them terms and conditions. It must now be with our Government a perfectly open and free question; our own decision of it being absolute, how shall our authority over the Indians be exercised?
This is at present the aspect and import of the Indian question. Our Government — giving over all faltering, hesitancy, and inconstancy of method — has, first of all, to recognize the fact that it has this great question to deal ​with, positively, effectively, and decidedly, — arbitrarily if so its wisdom dictates, but with the best lights of expediency, policy, and humanity. We have had enough of a fretting and an aimless experimenting continued through a century. All the conditions of the case now prompt to decisive action; for we have passed the stages of experiment. A wise Government in these days cannot be satisfied with either alternative in treating an uncivilized race on its frontiers, numbering less than one in one hundred and fifty of its white population, — as a fighting enemy or a hungry corps of paupers. Government has the power and the means to deal absolutely with the subject, and it now feels that it is under the obligation to dispose of it. And the possession of power by those to whom it rightfully belongs will always prompt magnanimity in its exercise. We no longer dread the Indians with the dismay which our ancestors felt about them, as near or distant. Their reduced and humbled condition demands of us forbearance, mercy, and even lavish benevolence.
Let us next look at the actual situation, with a view especially to its chief embarrassments.
1. We have shut ourselves, our citizens, out of large portions of several of our States and Territories, and of vast regions of our wild domain, which we have covenanted to Indian tribes “forever;” to Indian tribes, with an agreement to exclude the whites or to punish trespassers. Many of these reservations are encompassed by free territory and by stages of civilization. But both our Government and our citizens wish to enter, to traverse, and to occupy these cordoned regions; and we fret under our self-exclusion when railroad projects, mines, or emigration tempt us.
2. While we have shut ourselves out from, we have not really shut the Indians within, these reservations. We have assented in some cases to allow conditional roamings outside of them, for the chase and for hunting; and we cannot in other cases restrain the Indians from this roaming ​beyond their bounds, — the most stirring cause of border strife, raids, pillaging, and butchering on our frontiers. Portions of even peaceful treaty tribes indulge this propensity on the plea of poverty and threatened starvation. For when we covenanted to each tribe its special reservation, so generous in its extent, it was with the expectation that the tribe would live on its resources, after its own way of life. Circumstances have made such subsistence impossible; so that the reservation has become an artificial annoyance and obstruction to the white man, and an insufficient provision and a galling restraint to the red man.
3. Our Government, as a trustee, holds large amounts of funds invested in its securities, on which it is held by old treaties to pay perpetual dividends to the Indians. It is also pledged to pay, for various terms of years, annuities of money and supplies to several tribes, with no funded capital or principal. The annual payment of these obligations, either in money or goods, requires a complicated system of agents, contractors, advertising, inspectors, and freight carriers, from which it has been impossible to exclude gigantic and petty fraud, corrupting the whole service, and causing wrongs to and complaints from the Indians. We thus pauperize the Indians, make it more difficult to engage them in self-support and industry; and we have also made bad bargains, as by giving away purchased land to railroad companies, and to settlers for homesteads, at less than cost, we are annually increasing our Indian debt and losing our money.
4. These Indian reservations, scattered over our domain, are for the most part exempted from general and local jurisdiction by law; and, if we take cognizance of offences in them, it must be by arbitrary and inconstant methods, confusion again coming in through the conflict between State or Territorial and the General Government. Thus, in effect, we have licensed lawless communities, with rights of immunity and the risks of a Pandemonium.
​From the formation of the Government, as we have seen, our relations with the Indians were recognized as of sufficient importance to engage distinct legislation and attention, but not, however, for requiring administration by a separate department. This administration was committed to the charge of the Secretary of War. A small number of superintendents and agents, resident among the Indians or providing the supplies for them, reported to the Secretary, though they were not appointed by him. These officials were military men and civilians; the latter being a majority. The Act of Congress of 1834 so far modified this arrangement as to give to the Secretary of War the supervision and direction of these superintendents and agents, the majority of whom were still civilians. In 1849 this Indian Bureau, so called, was, by Act of Congress, taken from the charge of the War Department and incorporated as a Bureau for Indians into the new Department of the Interior then created. In July, 1867, Congress devised a body of Peace Commissioners, composed of eight members, — half of them military officers, half civilians; they were to make an annual report to the President. Three special objects defined the province of this Commission, — to remove the causes of war; to secure the frontier settlements, and the safe working of the Pacific railroads; and to suggest a plan for reclaiming and civilizing the Indians. Their measures were to be all peaceful, if possible; but under certain contingencies the President was authorized to supplement or reinforce their measures by calling out four mounted regiments to conquer peace.
The first difficulty which the Commission encountered at the start was, to secure interviews with chiefs and warriors of hostile tribes roaming over vast regions of wilderness, parts of which even the trappers had not penetrated, while small war parties from these tribes were depredating on the frontiers, killing white men, capturing women and children, raiding on railroad workmen, — often by concert, on the ​same day, at points hundreds of miles distant, — interrupting mail-coaches, burning stations, destroying crops, fences, barns, and houses, driving off cattle, and murdering and scalping lonely travellers in the woods. All transit through the regions to be visited by the Peace Commissioners was perilous. Their dilemma was, that if they went without a military escort they would be slaughtered, while such an escort might thwart their peaceful errand. Fortunately they had authority to call for help on the commanders of posts, and on the superintendents and agents resident among the reservations under the Civil Commissioner. They had the security also — one much respected by Indians — of an armed steamer for carrying supplies. The Commission contrived to obtain some limited councils with the savages. They were smarting under the breach of our treaty covenants with them, and alleged that they were starving because of the scarcity of game and the withholding from them of the promised arms and ammunition. This first essay in the policy of attempting “to conquer by kindness” ended by a free distribution among the savages of the coveted arms and ammunition; with which those who regard with disgust and contempt this “Quaker” policy charge that the Indians at once equipped themselves afresh for their wild ravages on the frontiers.
The Peace Commissioners, at a meeting in Chicago in 1868, adopted a resolve advising Congress to restore the Indian Bureau to the War Department. This was directly in opposition to their judgment the year before. Thus has been opened the controversy, still so vigorously working, between philanthropy and war policy, — though by no means dividing all philanthropists or all military officers to either side upon it, — as to which of the two methods will be the more effective, or even the more humane.
With the purpose of possessing myself with all the means, in facts and arguments and tests of experiment for forming an instructed and candid opinion upon the main ​points involved in this controversy, I have labored through the perusal of every volume, public document, report, and plea that I could bring within my reach upon either side of it. Had I stopped midway in that laborious process, I should probably have been more disposed than I am now to pronounce decided judgments and opinions concerning it; as I have noticed that many persons do, as the results of something less than a full survey of all the perplexities, the intricacies, and the inconsistent representations which grievously complicate the discussion. Nor is it only because the authorities to which one would be likely to defer are often strongly prejudiced and partisan in spirit; very often the essential facts in an important point or stage of an inquiry are as positively denied by one party as they are asserted by another. The leading principle of most service to an unbiassed and impartial inquirer is that which was set down in an early page of this volume, — that those who for different ends and purposes of their own have been brought into different relations with the Indians see them with very different eyes, and report and present them very differently.
In endeavoring to reach a perfectly candid and impartial view of the issue so warmly contested between the respective advocates of the policy of conducting the business of our Government, in its charge of the Indians, by the War Department or by a Peace Commission, we have to consider both the arguments and pleas advanced on either side, and the results of actual experiment. The War Department having had the charge of the Indian Bureau, the reasons which led to the transfer of its administration to the Department of the Interior may be stated as, in substance, the following: Our small national army has enough to do within its own special province, without being burdened with the charge of such responsible and complicated business as is found to be involved in our relations with the Indians. Neither the officers nor the men have special ​qualifications for that business. Experience has proved that our army would need to be largely increased for any efficient management of Indian affairs; and this provision of a large standing army would be costly, and on many accounts highly objectionable. The war policy has been found vastly more costly and far less satisfactory than the peace policy, though the latter has been so far very burdensome and chargeable.
It was further urged that the tendency of the war policy is to perpetuate hostilities with the Indians, and the military management has always proved a failure. The killing of each single Indian has caused the sacrifice of twenty-five white men. The war with a few hundreds of Florida Indians, running through seven years, cost us the lives of one thousand five hundred of our soldiers and thirty millions of money. The method is inhuman and unchristian, as it aims to demoralize and destroy the whole Indian race, and is utterly inconsistent with all the objects and ends which a wise and just judgment should aim to pursue. The presence of military forces among the Indians always exasperates them, and sets them alike on the defensive and the offensive. The influence of a camp of soldiers, with stragglers and groups of natives hanging around it, is abominably corrupting, attended as it is with all forms of demoralization, drunkenness, and licentiousness, infecting the Indians with the worst vices and diseases of civilization. If we look to the military and to war measures in our future relations either with the semi-civilized, the subjugated, or the still wild tribes, we shall well-nigh bankrupt our treasury and commit ourselves to an endless series of fights. Such are the chief arguments which, when followed into details and specifications, presented most formidable objections to the exclusive management of the Indians by the war policy.
In thus setting down in plain and strong statements the objections which have found expression to a main reliance ​upon a military policy in the management of the Indians, simple fairness demands the suggestion here of a qualifying remark. In some quarters unmeasured severity of criticism, even abuse and contempt, have been visited not only upon our Government war policy, but upon the officers, the men, and the conduct of our army in its military operations. This is alike cruelly unjust and ungrateful. The army is the agent and servant of our Government; it acts under orders. It has performed arduous and heroic service, under stern and fearfully exacting and most perilous conditions, enduring every form of hardship, privation, and extremity. It has numbered among its officers men with the breeding, training, and spirit of gentlemen, with humane and Christian hearts; often acting under the stern compulsion of duty, against their own inclinations and convictions. They have maintained discipline over men otherwise untractable, have led them courageously through ambushes and massacres, and have held them in check when restraint was necessary. The army has been the pioneer and security for the advance of civilization. Not a railroad could now traverse the old American Desert, not even a wagon-road, a mail-route, nor a safe foot-trail, without the convoy of that army. The occasion for dispensing with military methods in the management of the Indians is well defined in the future. It will come when the Indians cease to be fighters.
Supposing now that all the arguments and results of trial and experiments adduced against the war policy justified the initiation of the Peace Commission under the Department of the Interior, we listen to what is to be urged against this substituted policy and its workings. The present Indian Bureau, while charging that the war management was and always must be a failure, admits that its own has by no means been wholly successful. If we try, for the sake of impartiality, to stand free of championship of either party, we have to remind ourselves that the peace ​policy has not been set in such complete administrative authority as to have the ultimate disposal, in ways consistent with its own principles, of all the cases and causes of trouble with the Indians. A gap was left, with an undefined range of authority and responsibility, between the Indian Bureau and the War Department. The Bureau was not sternly restricted to peaceful measures by being told that the Indians were henceforward under its sole charge, whether they proved troublesome or manageable, and that no recourse should for the future be had to military force. On the contrary, it was expressly provided that the military should under some conditions be available and put to service when the Indian Bureau, baffled in its efforts, should fall back upon it.
And so it is pleaded that the Indian Bureau has in effect been a mere clerkship, alike while it was under the Department of War and since it has been under that of the Interior; that it has been subject to a superior, to whom it was bound to report and to look for its limited and cramped powers; and that for a full and fair trial it ought to have been an independent department.
While the friends of the peace policy allow that it has proved a partial failure, its most decided opponents insist that it has proved a complete failure; that its agency has been mischievous and calamitous, vitiated by corruptions, frauds, mismanagement, wasteful outlays and reckless extravagance on the part of greedy and profligate subordinates, contractors, expressmen, and distributors; that it has aggravated all our controversies with the Indians, pauperized them, and made them mercenary and treacherous, while furnishing them with arms and supplies to be used against us; and finally, that the blundering and discomfitures of the peace policy have ended in making it necessary to call in the help of the army, and that too at a great disadvantage arising from the presumption that it was to be dispensed with, and the suspension of its discipline and activity, and its real humiliation.
​This formidable list of allegations against the peace policy does not lack definiteness in its specifications or proofs. That policy is based upon the generous if not lavish distribution of supplies, clothing, cattle, rations, and money to vast hordes of worthless paupers, who, if they cannot hunt, will do nothing but laze about and steal, the whole expense being a burden on the industry and toil of our own hard-working people; and this too, while we are warned by the complaints of the poor and the unemployed in our most thriving communities not to assume such a huge responsibility. Again, the furnishing of these supplies tempts a vast number of cunning, greedy, and fraudulent contractors, hucksters, middle-men, and rascals of every grade and hue, to practise all sorts of frauds both on the Government and on the Indians. Honest and high-principled men in authority use all their wisdom, sagacity, and keenness to prevent these enormous and outrageous frauds, and occasionally a culprit is detected, though escaping without being deprived of his gains or punished except by loss of office. Still, there is such opportunity, such facility, such mighty temptation for practising and covering up these frauds and evading justice, that it is generally allowed that abuse is incident to and inherent in the system itself.
The pensioned and pauperized savages, it is further urged, become greedily dependent on these Government supplies. If they are withheld, or delayed, or the frauds in them make them worthless, the savages are furnished with a good plea justifying them in an outbreak, a pillaging expedition, a murderous raid, — the wily old chiefs on visiting terms at the agencies, alleging that they cannot restrain their young men from such outbursts and expeditions. On the plea of the scarcity of game and the inefficiency of their native weapons, the best modern arms and ammunition are furnished them by our Government. Over and over again has it been affirmed by our most honored army officers, that these arms have been almost immediately turned against ​the whites in border raids or battles. On the whole, men who have had large converse with the Indians, and who allow themselves to speak freely as they feel, denounce in plain terms this peace policy, as simply a mewling, canting philanthropy, by which kind-hearted civilians are beguiled, which the Indians mock and laugh at, and which must be wholly discredited and at once abandoned for stern and resolute measures of force. Of course these largesses, doles, and supplies given to the Indians as annuitants or paupers would be distributed as pledged to them if the War Department had them fully in charge. But it is urged that the peace policy carries this, in itself objectionable waste of supplies, beyond all reasonable bounds, and is inaugurating a system which will too heavily burden the industry and thrift of the country. The economy of the peace policy should be devoted to making the Indians wholly self-dependent.
There are many intensely earnest and complicated controversies in active agitation among men, especially on political and social issues, in which the humblest and some of the wisest of us are helped to form our own opinion simply by trying to learn on which side are to be found, prevailingly, those whom we call the wise and the good, the fair-minded, the single-hearted, the unselfish, the calm, discreet, and dispassionate. The test fails us in trying so to dispose of the war policy and the peace policy issue in dealing with the Indians. Those who claim our attention as experts on this great issue are not to be morally classified according as they stand for the one or the other side in the controversy. We find the extreme views on this intricate question advanced and maintained by those as to whose characters, intelligence, and humanity we can draw no line of division or preference. It may therefore be allowed to some of us, at least, to choose a medium or reconciling method, and to approve a combination of some elements of both policies. Our aim shall be benevolent, practically ​wise, efficient, and hopeful of every end of peace and justice. But it shall be resolutely and forcibly insisted on and advanced, so as to allow of that element of a war policy (which we may admit is coercion), compulsion. If under some circumstances we may rightfully use the forces of war, we certainly may put to service the constraining forces of peace.
We have had in quite recent years a series of frightful and awful catastrophes in our Indian warfare which we call massacres, that word being appropriated to acts of savage cruelty perpetrated by the red men. Try to probe to the bottom the truth, as to cause, occasion, provocation, responsibility, in any one of those appalling feats of desperation. Take the relations of frontier settlers, of railroad working parties, of miners, of emigrants in transitu, of the occupants of army posts, of military officers, and of investigating committees at Washington. And remember that the Indian side of the story is seldom reported to us; and when it is, is apt to come in different and disputed versions. The variance between the accounts which we receive of these aggressions of the Indians reaches even to the extent of referring them in their occasion or impulse to the wanton provocation of the military officers on the one hand, and on the other to the folly or mismanagement of the peace policy. An impartial investigator of the facts in any such case might be disposed to decide that any excess of force which was employed by the armed party might have been put to good use as energy, compulsion, and coercion on the side of philanthropy.
The basis of the actual relation of our Government to the Indians we find to be that of full, even arbitrary, power to dictate a policy, to choose and impose the terms by which we will henceforward deal with them. It is well for us to start with this conscious possession of power, for with it goes as full responsibility in its exercise. And how shall we use it? We have a full — and if not an unquestioned, ​still an irresistible — freedom to assume towards the Indians the place and prerogatives of absolute superiority and authority. We have, then, to set before us an aim or object, which, in view of all known facts, we can adopt as possible and practicable, and follow up steadily and consistently till we realize it. And what shall it be? As answered by living and plain-spoken men of our own generation, as by those of previous generations all the way back to the settlement of the country, — though with more emphasis to-day, — this question is met by an alternative. One answer is, The Indians must be exterminated, root and branch; the country must be rid of them. The other answer is, The Indians must be reclaimed, civilized, educated, brought to the full status of white men as self-supporting, industrious, independent citizens.
Of course, most persons start with a shock of horror at the bare suggestion of the alternative, that our Government, directly or by any covert purpose and action, should contemplate the extermination of the Indians. They would say that the very mention of it is abominable, as of a barbarous and inhuman outrage, diabolical even in its enormity. Humanity, the law of Nature, if not of nations, protests against it. In this last sentence, as worded, I have allowed the if, — as to whether the law of nations, so called, would positively bar the alternative of the extermination of the Indians. And I have recognized that dubiousness in view of the known fact that there are some among us who insist that, by the laws or principles which regulate national life, — the interests of government for a great homogeneous people, — the extermination of an alien race is an alternative that may be admitted into a perfectly comprehensive view. In fact, this way of disposing of the Indian question has found among us some outspoken advocates, and it has doubtless many on its side who entertain it with misgivings as more than probable. The outspoken sympathizers with this plan of extinguishing the Indians are found to express ​their view as a stout and resolute conviction, after a long and thorough acquaintance with the whole subject, and a sharp scrutiny of the tendency and inevitable result of all existing influences. Very many military men most skilled in the nature and habits of the Indians, and best acquainted with the probabilities of the future for them, have boldly spoken the word, The fate of the Indian race is extermination, or at least extinction. We are all familiar with the brief sentence of one of our foremost generals, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” We are at liberty, however, to put a gloss upon the sentence, as meaning that the Indian quality must be killed out of a savage before he can be called “good.” Besides those who so startlingly but frankly avow this stern and dire conclusion, there are many more who hold it as a secret persuasion of what is inevitable. Though such persons may really prefer and plead for the gentle, forbearing, fostering efforts of a peace policy, they all the while have a misgiving, or inner assurance, that it will be vain; that the Indian, as he cannot be humanized and civilized, must yield to extinction of race. The reasons offered for this hopeless view of the fate of the Indian have been recognized in another connection. This is not the place to discuss it or to argue about it. Yet reference may here be made incidentally to one element which would come into a full discussion. One of the reasons offered for the hopeless inefficiency of the peace policy is the enormous expense, already felt as a burden to the nation, of supporting hundreds of thousands of Indians as paupers of the most abject and profitless sort, and who are not likely to be anything other than paupers, steadily deteriorating and becoming more clamorous, lazy, drunken, and dangerous. The nation, it is said, is becoming weary of this waste, with its complicated system of agents, superintendents, guardians, teachers, and fraudulent traders, and with an ultimate necessity of calling in the military when the philanthropist and missionary are baffled. Now, as to this matter of ​expense for a war policy or a peace policy, we may as well have in view the cost of the former. Competent persons certify us, and past experience warrants them, that military operations against the Indians cost ten times more than a peace policy. And the estimate has been fairly made, that the extermination of the Indians by warfare would tax this nation more heavily in money and in the lives of white men than did the war of the Secession. The common impression among those who have not informed themselves on the subject is, that in the two and a half centuries of the hostilities between the white man and the red man here, the number of the Indians killed has been in excess of the whites. This is wide of the truth. The lowest estimate I have ever found among experts is, that ten white men have fallen for each single Indian: some have even put twenty or twenty-five instead of ten.
The money cost of our Government wars with the Indians is doubtless set within bounds, when it is estimated at five hundred million dollars. In the first ten years after our Independence, a million a year had been expended in expeditions and commissions. The Seminole war cost twenty-five millions. The Cheyenne war, thirty millions. The bills for the Sioux war are not yet all paid, as it is still only in a state of truce. Indeed, the sum of thirty millions of dollars was probably exceeded in the Seminole war, which, though fought against only two or three thousand savages, was protracted through seven years, and engaged a force of fifty thousand of our soldiers. Some of the cost for opening military roads and maintaining forts and stations of course accrues to the benefit of civilized uses, and we are to regard the outlay as well spent in bringing territory under our knowledge and control. The expenses of the War Department since our nationality was established amount in round numbers to a thousand million dollars, exclusive of the Civil War. Of this sum about a hundred million was spent in the war of 1812 and the Mexican war. ​What has become of the nine hundred millions? The civil disbursements for the Indians, in bounties, presents, pensions, rations, and trust funds, all told for a century, are estimated at one hundred and seventy-five million dollars. Of this sum, fifty millions were spent under the sixty years management by the War Department. Under the new management, for thirty years the outlay has been one hundred and twenty-five millions. The average expense which the Government incurred for the Indians in its first score of years was ninety-five thousand dollars; for each of the last score years the average has been four and a half millions. Four and one half millions is annually disbursed in stipulated pensions, and one and a half millions for running contracts not limited.
Estimating the war outlay on the Indians at five hundred millions, and the civil outlay at two hundred, we find that seven hundred million dollars is a moderate summing up of our charges in appropriating or conquering a portion only of the continent which his Holiness the Pope gave to his Catholic Majesty for — nothing.
But enough has been said as to the alternative in our policy of the extermination of the Indians. We are not to discuss it, nor to entertain the question. If our nation even only covertly and contingently had it in view, we should not dare in these days so much as to devise or conduct our measures with reference to its likelihood or its possibility. Humanity insists that the Indians have rights, and among them the right of life, with its succession and entail. The nation must face, it intends to face, it always has intended to face, this duty of humanity towards the Indians. It is to be a costly, a perplexing, often a most discouraging task. We may as well face that fact too. Before the nation has come to a settlement in behalf of its Indian wards, and has got release from its bonds as guardian, it will have settled all the old scores for the alleged stealing of the Indian's territory. The cost will be larger than would have been ​any fair purchase-price from the first, — just as the cost of our nation's fight for freedom would twice over have bought all slaves at their market value, and would have set them up with houses and farms. Yet we have to contemplate for long years to come a drain upon our resources in addition to the appropriations for army and navy, for postal service and internal improvements, and all other specifications on the budget, an annual outlay, likely for many years to augment rather than to diminish, for teachers, implements, instrumentalities and agencies of every kind for turning some two hundred thousand barbarians into — whatever it may prove that we can make of them.
Incident to the possession of the full power of superiority and authority which our Government has and may exercise towards the Indians, we have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by compulsion, to dictate terms and conditions to them; to use constraint and force; to say what we intend to do, and what they must and shall do. If we are the wiser, this is our right; if our intentions are kind and just, this is our obligation; if the cost of success or failure falls upon us, this is our assurance and venture. This rightful power of ours will relieve us from conforming to, or even consulting to any troublesome extent, the views and inclinations of the Indians whom we are to manage. A vast deal of folly and mischief has come of our attempts to accommodate ourselves to them, to humor their whims and caprices, to indulge them in their barbarous ways and their inveterate obstinacy. Henceforward they must conform to our best views of what is for their good. The Indian must be made to feel that he is in the grasp of a superior, whose aim is to bring out his own manhood, and to give him self-reliance. In our loose and lenient way of exercising authority over the Indians, even when they consent to submit to it, we seem to have forgotten what a large and essential part of control and government in the most civilized communities is of the very essence of compulsion, almost of ​arbitrariness. Let a citizen of one of our oldest and most prosperous towns or villages reflect how his natural liberty is circumscribed; how his inclinations, habits, acts, and range of self-indulgence are under surveillance; how the police and the tax-gatherer scan him, and how the law often bleeds him. One half of all our citizens at one time, and the other half at another time, utter chronic complaints of oppression and tyranny. We need have no scruples, therefore, as to the use of positive and constraining authority over the Indians. Of the need of this we find assurance when we take into view the following statement. Large numbers of Indians now under our control, according to the season of the year and other circumstances, present themselves to us in these three very different characters: First, as under our discipline, training, and instruction, through farmers and teachers residing with them, to make them self-dependent; second, as swarms of vagabond paupers coming to the distributing agents for a year's dole of clothing, food, arms, ammunition, and implements; third, as having wastefully exhausted their supplies, and, when the season favors, rushing out with the arms which we have given them, in war or predatory parties. Here we have the same interesting and versatile fellow-citizens acting yearly in the roles of pupils, paupers, enemies, or prisoners of war. We must insist upon their keeping one of those three characters the year through, and we must decide which it shall be. It is no longer binding upon us to feed them in idleness through three quarters of the year on their reservations, and then to allow them to rush out on pretence of hunting, but really to prowl and plunder. A large proportion of their lands is of the very finest dower of the continent, with loam a yard deep, with succulent grasses on which cattle may graze all the year, with heavy timber, with noble millstreams, with native fruits and roots, and with a glorious climate. When one thinks of the generations of our old New England stock, who contrived to live and prosper over ​our ridges of sand and gravel, and our rocky pastures where the hungry ribs of the earth seem actually to have broken through its skin, we are provoked at the thought of having our teeming regions of the West turned into a mighty poor-farm. The memory and traditions of the first settlements of rugged New England are still too fresh, — indeed the present hard-won subsistence of those who still plough and hoe its stingy farms are too real to them, — to reconcile them to the policy of a tax from the nation's revenue for maintaining the thriftless roamers of the West.
There is one very serious consideration bearing upon this momentous question of our immediate future relations with our Indian tribes, which so far as I have been able to note has not received its due, if indeed any, attention in our Congressional debates or in the discussions in our journals. I have already stated the fact that Great Britain has dominion over more territory on this continent than is controlled by our own Government. Great Britain was once our enemy. She certainly cannot have forgotten that; possibly she may have repented of it. The far-sighted and sagacious Dr. Franklin, in the treaty arrangements for closing up our war of Independence, distinctly recognized the inevitable fact, that territorial possessions on this continent by Great Britain would always be of the nature of a menace to us; at any rate would afford a harborage, a place of deposit, a base of operations, for any enemies of ours, whether her allies or not. Twice in the century of our history has that foresight of Dr. Franklin been certified, — in our war with Britain of 1812, and in our Civil War. And what has been the aspect of the case quite recently? Sitting Bull probably understands it better than some of us do. Our remaining Indian tribes not yet gathered into treaty reservations, or objecting to be sent south into the Indian territory, tend to cluster in our northwest border, just where we bound upon the vast expanses of the wilderness held by Great Britain. If we still pursue our war measures ​with the Indians, many of them when hard pressed will find a refuge, a breathing spell, and — we may as well speak out what we know — aid and comfort on the other side of the geometrical boundary line. There they will recruit; and thence, at their pleasure, they will renew their raids. Our redress, through protests, diplomatic processes, and “distinguished considerations,” will first be sought through functionaries of the Dominion Government, and ultimately of the Crown. We may make a bugbear of this if we choose, or we may reduce the aspect of things to the dimensions of simple, sober reason. In either case, it certainly does warn or advise us to keep all the Indians for whom we are responsible under our own management and oversight, without outside stimulus or reinforcement. This is another recommendation of the peace policy, for taming and reducing the savages to fixed residence, to individual rights in the soil, independently of their tribal relations, and to thrifty habits of agriculture and industry.
Positively and sternly, if need be, and with the help of all its appliances of authority and force, must Government put and keep the savage tribes under conditions in which they must work for their own subsistence by manual labor and ingenuity. The soil and water of their own reservations, not the United States Treasury, must furnish them a livelihood. Added to all the old-time grievances which the natives have had against the whites for appropriating their lands, for crowding and slaughtering them, there has been a new, and at present a very piteous and abject, one, — that the Government does not generously and promptly feed and clothe and arm them so that they may subsist in idleness. To all its pledged covenants for annuities and rations with the treaty tribes, the Government of course must be true; saving only, under the stern pressure of circumstances, a Government right of revising the form and material under which promised help or remuneration shall be furnished. But this exaction of residence and ​labor on their reservations must be the prime and overruling condition. And actual compulsion will be justifiable in the process, as much with reference to the real security and welfare of the Indians as for any ends of our own. Nor must we fear lest this course be inconsistent with an approved peace policy. The laxness of the peace policy — its slack and halting and indulgent weakness — is not only a plausible, but it is a reasonable and forcible, ground for insisting, as many do, upon some indispensable element of the war policy. The Indians compel their squaws to work, and the squaws obey. No women on the face of this earth — in factory, mine, kitchen, or field — are more laboriously tasked with burden and toil than are those squaws. The very sight of one of them — haggard, bent, and shrivelled before middle life — tells the whole tale. If the men would labor as they compel the squaws to labor, on their rich and easy soil, with timber and much game still at hand, they would not need the dole of Government rations, though they do need our implements and tools.
Now, just as the men compel the women to work, so let Government stiffly impose the same obligation on the men. On this whole broad continent, now belted round with the processes and fruits of civilization and coursed by the highways of transit and traffic, no barbarous hordes can expect to cover themselves in its inner depths in savagery, indolence, or thriftlessness, drawing a precarious subsistence from skimming the earth's surface products, while the wild beasts, as they annually waste under the chase, might give them a hint that they too must vanish as wild men.
It is preposterous to suppose that some two or three hundred thousands of these idle-roving bands should from year to year be fed and armed and clothed and petted in their wastefulness and improvidence at the charge of the laboring classes of the civilized. Absurd as a spectacle, and outrageous as an imposition on the toilers of our country, is the transporting of grains and meats and guns and ​blankets, and even of the luxuries of our cities, over the wilderness highways, to be distributed at the agencies to these arrogant paupers, on the plea that their ancestors once roamed free there.
Wise and able men have sometimes found it a serious task to prove the divine right of society, of civilization, of government; but we need not assume, take for granted, and claim deference for the divine right of savagery. At some point in the line of generations this entail of barbarism must be arrested. There is no reason why the successive offspring of our wild hordes should accede to the immunities of their ancestors when the condition of this continent was as wild as their own. The civilizing and humanizing of grown-up savages is declared, yes and proved, to be utterly hopeless and impossible. Even their children brought up in schools and villages will generally take to the woods at the first opportunity; for the flavor and zest of the wilderness are in their blood and tissues and spirits. So the grandchildren, the third generation, alone furnish material for hopeful reclaiming. But the ground of the hope depends upon their grandparents working on their own lands and making the first stages of transition from beastliness.
And there is another, a most cogent, reason why Government should compel the Indians to seek subsistence by labor on their reservations. If not the only, still by far the most effective, security which the Indians can have of retaining these reservations against the encroachments of the whites, now complained of as the chief justification of fresh hostilities, is in putting into them the added value and certified right of improvement, of betterment; the clearing, the dwelling, the well, the fence, the growing crop, — the home. The white man respects these tokens of ownership and possession. If not sacred, they are warnings to him against intrusion and violation. The Mormon settlements, with all their odious institutions, have found ​their chief security in their industry and thrift. All the pleadings that can be uttered in the name of an ancient right or on the score of humanity will never persuade the white man of average intelligence who improves his patch of land, under taxation which increases exactly as he improves it, that beyond a certain boundary-line men and women may live in idleness on vast spaces of rich soil, and call for all supplies to be sent to them free of charge.
Experience and the best practical wisdom which they can bring to bear on the subject have led the heads of our Indian Bureau to suggest for the future a radical change in the disposal by our Government of the matter of Indian reservations. The principle underlying the provision of reservations, from the first recourse to them, was this: the solemn covenanting with the Indians — one or more tribes of them — to secure to them forever portions of all the territory on this continent, in consideration of our having seized other parts of it. On the supposition that the hordes which the white men found in roaming, nomadic occupancy here were the lawful holders of a perpetual fee in the territory, there would be something farcical in an intruding people covenanting back to them a fragment from the spoils of the whole. It is more reasonable, therefore, to suppose that the whites, not believing that the savage roamers had a legal and inextinguishable claim to the whole or even any part of the territory, thought they were making a generous settlement of any doubt there might be in the case, by bounding a region here and there, and assuring it to the Indians. The pledges of these reservations use the phrase “for ever.” The tendency of modern thought and speculation is to regard nothing as eternal except eternity itself.
The precedent for Indian reservations was very early, and first, set by the Massachusetts Colony Court. As a general rule, we may say that the Indians who have had reservations assigned to them have been broken and defeated ​tribes, humbled by the whites or by other tribes. Their obligation to, and semi-dependence upon, us often led to their answer to our call to furnish us scouts, trailers, and other allies in our hostilities with other tribes. In the original design and planning of these reservations — except in the case of such town-lots as Massachusetts assigned to the Indians under training, and the circumscribed territory which New York set apart for the Six Nations; in fact, in all the reservations for the Indians made by our Government — the intention was to leave the natives free to their own habits and mode of life; to subsist, if they pleased, without labor, by hunting and fishing; keeping aloof from the whites, or maintaining traffic with them in peltries. Of course, this plan required vast expanses of territory, which we thought we could afford to dispense with, as we had so much that we were not likely to need for centuries to come. Once it was proposed that there should be one enormous reservation, to gather in all the tribes. Fifty years ago Mr. Calhoun advised that there should be two, a Northern and a Southern. As it is, we have them now scattered all over the West, South, and North in patches, — if we may call such stretches of space (some of them unsurveyed and unexplored) “patches.” The Indian Territory on which the first reservation was made, in 1831, lies south of Kansas, north of Texas, and west of Arkansas. It has upon it reservations for a score or more of tribes or parts of tribes. Its area is over sixty-four thousand square miles, — over forty-one millions of acres. One railroad now penetrates it, and two others skirt it. The States around it are flourishing and populous; but this magnificent region — rich, well watered, and timbered — is practically secluded as a waste, and as profitless as if it were a desert. Each human being on it has an average space of one square mile; New York has ninety-four persons on each one of its square miles, and Massachusetts has more than one hundred and eighty persons; Belgium supports three hundred and fifty persons, and the ​continent of Europe seventy persons to a square mile. An acre of the Indian Territory has a productive power of that of ten average acres of Massachusetts soil. Of the seventy thousand persons inhabiting it, scarcely half are of pure Indian blood. No white man can reside there unless he has for a wife an Indian squaw, and so secures the noble title of “a squaw man.” There are four thousand whites and six thousand negroes, formerly slaves to the Indians. The mongrel breeds are steadily increasing and the pure race dying out. Practically there is no local law in the Territory, and the United States jurisdiction is little more than nominal. It is hardly strange that, under these circumstances, Congress should have appointed a Senatorial Commission with reference to organizing a new Territory from this abused waste (the name proposed being Oklahoma), special care being had for securing to the occupants, by a breaking up of tribal relations, homestead farms in perpetuity and money annuities.
There are also reservations in the States of New York (the oldest dating from 1794), North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Wisconsin, California, and Oregon; and in the Territories of Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. These reservations, including the Indian Territory, cover an area of about two hundred and forty-three thousand and ninety-one square miles, or nearly one hundred and fifty-six million acres.
It is estimated that one sixth of our Indian population is of mixed blood; and that of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, only one half are wholly of the pure race. By our last census we had one hundred and fifty whites, and twelve negroes or mulattoes, to each Indian.
We are experiencing, in our joint interests as a nation and in those of a common civilization, the embarrassments attending this system of reservations. The single States ​and Territories in whose bounds they lie are subjected by them to all sorts of annoyances, complications, and practical evils. It is found to be utterly impossible to restrict the Indians to them. In some treaties a conditional privilege has been covenanted to the occupants of hunting beyond them; in others this liberty has been restrained. But neither the limited right nor the positive restriction avail to keep the most active and restive of the Indians from lawless and dangerous roaming, provoking hostilities.
In the mean time we have found that it is inexpedient and impracticable, if not actually impossible, to isolate and segregate from civilized privileges and uses such vast expanses of rich and desirable territory. Our own restless, enterprising, adventurous, and rapidly thickening population will not be kept out of them. The discovery of mineral wealth in them operates like a clarion blast to summon armed companies of miners and of purveyors to their wants. Then, too, the maintenance of Government posts and agencies makes necessary roads, mail-routes, and stations; and the railroad becomes of itself a primary law of Nature, carrying with it a right of eminent domain.
And just coincident with the pressure of these urgent reasons conflicting with the theory and the working of Indian reservations, philanthropical and economical considerations, having in view simply the best good if not the preservation from extinction of the natives themselves, come in to indicate the necessity of a radical change of policy. The steady failure of game and of the other conditions requisite for the continuance of the wild life of the Indians in their tribal relations is reducing them to a miserable, idle, and vegetative state, under which they rapidly deteriorate and become utterly demoralized as vagrants and paupers. If we wish to reclaim or save them, and relieve our own burdens in their support, we must feel fully justified in a recourse even to many breaches of covenant of our own pledged faith. The conditions under which we ​made those covenants have essentially changed, — changed for both parties; changed, too, not by any scheming or planning of our own to furnish us with pretences for trifling with them, but by the incalculable and irresistible working of agencies and circumstances that have made it not only inconvenient but wholly impracticable for the covenants to remain in force. The Indians expected to live upon the reservations by hunting, without labor. We covenanted the lands to them for no other purpose, ignorant of their buried wealth, not foreseeing the absolute necessity that we should have to pass through them. The Indians cannot live as it was expected by themselves and by ourselves that they would live, and our people cannot be restrained from availing themselves of new conditions. The case thus becomes essentially one of those to be referred to chancery jurisdiction; the terms of a trust, in its direction, conditions, and uses, having become antiquated and obsolete, an alternative method must be indicated as near as possible to absolute justice in new terms.
The policy now proposed is to have a few very large reservations, divided into several small contiguous ones for different tribes, — even of those which have been hostile to each other, — with an ultimate view that the large reservation shall at some time become a State in the Union, of which the smaller ones shall be counties.
All the exigencies of the case point to the absolute necessity of bringing the Indians under humane and kind, and at the same time rigid and inflexible, control as subjects of civilized law. They are to be compelled to live and work after the manner of civilized people. They can no longer have such extensive wild reaches of territory; we must contract their bounds. They must no longer be nomadic, with hunting as their main dependence, and pilfering as holiday work, with horse-stealing and cattle-slaying for a trial of their prowess. Their tribal relations must be broken up, and we must recognize them as ​individuals; and then, as their territorial domains are circumscribed, their land can be distributed to individual occupants. As the question presents itself, how large a land allotment shall be made to each for concentration of work and for support, we may be guided somewhat by the Government measurement of a homestead lot for a white family, which is one hundred and sixty acres.
Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the Government, instead of distributing among the Indians the best breech-loaders and ammunition and metallic cartridges, must put in force the extreme measure of actually disarming them. Practically this will be no undue severity or hardship, as we ourselves are in effect disarmed, — the guns of our militia even not belonging to those who bear them. In Canada the Indians are to a large extent kept in control by an Indian police; and it has been advocated by wise and experienced advisers among us that we introduce a system by which the young Indian braves — armed or unarmed — should be organized for that service among our tribes.
While the most hopeful believers in the capacity of the Indians for civilization make these conditions to be primary, they maintain that we have a basis to work upon in the progress already made by portions of the tribes of Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Chickasaws, who in the first third of this century were such hardy fighters against us. It is somewhat wildly affirmed that just before our war of rebellion the Cherokees were the richest people per capita in the world. However this may be, they have largely abandoned roaming and the chase, have learned to become herdsmen and agriculturists, to build houses and put up fences, to have their individual farms and their private property, and to know some of the advantages of schools, churches, trades, and tools. Hence comes the suggestion that for the future the gifts of our Government to the Indians should no longer be in money, ​firearms, nor even food, but in farming stock, tools, and implements.
All this so far is recognized by us as learned from past experience, with its attempts and failures, and as suggested by the wisest advisers for the future. And the practical question is forced upon us, How shall we bring about this radical change in our Indian policy, and realize for the future security for ourselves and the harmlessness and welfare of the native tribes? The aim being economic, — one of comprehensive methods and results, engaging precisely the same agencies which insure thrift and prosperity to our civilized communities, — we must enlist in its furtherance all the legal, social, and educational appliances on which we ourselves depend. The end in view is pacificatory. The measures for securing it, even those which require force, compulsion, and coercion, must be in harmony with it. The Indians must be put under the control and protection of laws, and so in conformity with our own institutions they must be made citizens as soon as possible, making and administering their own laws. Till they are capable of this privilege and responsibility, they must come under our laws, being helped as much as possible to understand and approve them, — at any rate being held to obey them. So far as these laws of our communities — national, State, municipal, or social — require temporary modification or adaptation for any body of Indians, wise administration can meet the emergency. So long as we have savages to deal with we shall need the military arm, as we still need it against some classes and in some turbulencies of our civilized communities. Real paupers — from incompetency, disability, or misfortune — are not such unknown characters among ourselves as to make it necessary that we be taught or urged to our duty of common humanity towards what must necessarily be a very large class of such in many Indian tribes. But paupers among ourselves are cared for by the more thrifty of ​those in each local community; and as soon as possible the disabled, the aged, and the needy of an Indian community should look for their relief, not to the United States Government, but to their able-bodied fellows. The peace policy is put upon its vindication, not only against the war policy, but also against that fostering and entail of pauperism among the Indian tribes which is taking the manhood out of them, and burdening a hard-working people for whom the struggle for existence is already sharp enough.
It is a noteworthy fact, that, just coincident with the fierce working of our socialistic problems which has developed the communistic theory as the relief for all the evils of our civilized state, our wisest statesmen and philanthropists should find in this same communism — the very basis of Indian tribal life — the most formidable obstacle to the relief, the improvement, and the civilization of the savages. However wide and earnest and impassioned the differences as to a wise Indian policy entertained by those who discuss the subject, one point in which they all heartily accord is this, — the Indian will never be reclaimed till he ceases to be a communist. He must give up his tribal relations so far as they involve and cover a merging of all his individual proprietary rights to territory, for a joint and common privilege in a vast and unimproved domain. He will be a vagabond and a pauper so long as he is not an individual proprietor and possessor, with a piece of land held by him in fee, with tokens of his own interest and ownership. We are told that some of the tribes, under the influence of a few astute chiefs, protest against the assigning of portions of their reservations in severalty to families, guarded by the provision that for a term of years each such homestead shall be inalienable. The ground of the objection is that the tribal hold upon territory is more secure when it is held in common. This argument would be more plausible, and indeed really a strong one, were the reservations themselves secure in their tenure and permanency. But we have seen ​at what risks they are now held, in consequence, not of the alleged perfidious conduct of our Government, but through the working of irresistible forces in the development of circumstances. Therefore it may as well be frankly confessed that our Government cannot, if it would, secure to any tribe now under treaty a perpetual communal hold upon the far-stretching acres of its reservation. A right in severalty, followed by possession and improvement, is inviolable. That is a right which comes of civilization in its triumph over barbarism. To enjoy and secure that right not only implies civilization, but helps also to civilize. This prepares us to turn to the last and most attractive of the themes comprehended in our subject.