# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX.
THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AND THE INDIANS.
On the establishment of the National Government, the Indians became at once the objects of anxious concern and of provisional legislation. Then began the long series of schemes and measures, of tentative devices and processes, of immediate and prospective arrangements, and of efforts and enterprises, alternating between humane and peaceful and severe and military operations, which the ever-changing elements and aspects of the problem have presented to our statesmen and citizens. The Constitution recognized and confirmed all the treaties made with the Indians under the Confederation as the supreme law of the land; and gave to Congress the regulation of trade with them, and to the Executive and Senate the power to make future treaties. The several States were to have the management and control over the Indians within their respective bounds, unless Congress, in the exercise of its superior prerogative, might see cause to overrule their measures. Of course, as might have been expected, trouble, controversy, and direct antagonism, from the very first, arose from the constant obtrusion of questions and issues of a distracting character starting from a conflict between the claims of the States and of Congress when their purposes clashed.
In opening the discussion of this theme, which presents so much matter for variances of opinion even among intelligent and right-hearted men, and also for critical and censorious judgment, we must remind ourselves of the ​embarrassments and perplexities under which our Government became charged with its responsibilities to the natives. We must even pause for a moment upon that word “government.” The confederation of the colonies was not a government; and, so far as any of its measures in dealing with the Indians implied or required the possession or exercise of authority to give them effect, this prime condition failed. We were left, at the acknowledgment of our independence, in a state of exhaustion and poverty, with no immediate or effective means of relief. Our British enemies had subjected us to a terrific Indian warfare, and, so far from pacifying our red allies towards us, left them to annoy and harass us after the treaty of peace. One of the first makeshifts of our initiatory national organization for replenishing an exhausted treasury, was by following up pioneer settlers, who were rushing into the ceded lands of the Ohio valley and of the Northwest, and exacting of them payment for grants. These pioneers raised quarrels with the Indians, and then called upon the shadowy Government to send troops to their aid, and to try to make treaties with the red men. Altogether the situation was a very complicated one, not promising any better results than such as followed.
The first Congress committed to the Secretary of War the management of Indian affairs; and General Knox, the first of these officials, recommended the anticipatory purchase of large tracts of Western lands and the removal of the Indians from them before the whites would be ready or desirous of occupancy. Congress also voted $20,000 to defray the expenses of negotiations with the Indians. But tribes both at the North and the South were then making trouble, regardless of their treaties. Instigated and supplied with arms by the British on the Northern frontier, they kept up a steady and destructive warfare. In our war with the Creeks, in 1793, we used Indian allies against Indians. Our treaties with England and Spain, in 1794 and 1795, for the most part cut the natives off from receiving ​foreign aid, and left them for a time wholly to us. If space permitted, very many details might be specified, all indicating aggravations of what might have been the simple responsibility of our Government and the mode of exercising it towards the Indians, had it presented itself wholly free from such complications. Even then the responsibility would have been a very exacting one. But it has never since been wholly freed from these original complications.
There is a widely prevalent opinion, — often avowed as a confession, an admission, or a complaint, and generally acquiesced in, — that our Government, as a government, has been unjust, inhuman, grasping, relentless, and perfidious in its treatment of the Indian tribes with which it has successively come into contact, either in negotiations or in hostilities. That there are obvious and various grounds for this opinion, more or less just, cannot be denied. How far any direct charges, founded on specified instances or cases of such injustice or cruelty, may be met with relief or palliation, would involve a discussion requiring much knowledge and much candor.
Having myself shared in this general opinion of the culpability, misconduct, and even reckless and wantonly intentional injustice of our Government, I am gratified in being able to avow that all the increased knowledge which I have sought and reached on a most complicated and perplexed subject has very much modified the first impressions with which I turned to its full examination. Certainly I feel warranted in making the emphatic assertion that there is no evidence that our Government is justly chargeable at any period with intentional fraud or with heedless indifference to its responsibilities in this matter.
These severe reproaches against our Government, it is to be considered, are made to cover the whole century of its existence and administration, and are said to be as just and applicable in these last past years as ever. In view of them, let me distinctly affirm, that, having myself accepted them ​previous to a thorough investigation as wholly warranted, I have no intention whatever of entering any other plea for reducing these reproaches than such as is furnished by a fair statement of the facts. It would indeed be painful and humiliating to be compelled to admit, that, in a country like this, strewn all over with the noble institutions of philanthropy, with hospitals for every ill of humanity, sending out funds and laborers for all other sorts of heathen, relieving local disasters by flood, fire, famine, and pestilence by the joint contributions of private benevolence; a country that has proved the asylum of the needy and oppressed from all other civilized lands; and, more than all, a country which hung itself in sackcloth, and bore every form of costly sacrifice to rid itself of slavery, — it would, I say, be hard to yield the avowal that we had, through our Government, combined — with a set purpose of inhumanity, cruelty, and fraud — against our predecessors on the soil. Not denying that there has been very much done and winked at that looks like this, I affirm that at least the intention, the purpose charged against us exceeds the range of truth.
I can say more than this; namely, that I am persuaded that every candid person who will acquaint himself to any reasonable extent with the enormous mass of our national State papers, our official documents, and our general literature on this whole subject, will find abundant evidence that our Government, from the first and always up to to-day, as well as the great mass of our people, have had the most humane feelings and the most generous intents and purposes towards the Indians. Mistakes, vexations, difficulties, and complications of all sorts and kinds, either inherent in or incident to the practical workings of the case, or arising from inconsistency or inconstancy of means and method, will in great part account for the failure of designed right and good, and the substitution of what has been wrong and calamitous. We may justly use terms severe and condemnatory in word and tone, to ​characterize the lack of wisdom, of calm, methodical, judicious administration of Indian affairs by our Government; and we may use the most scorching invectives against many of the agents and agencies to which it has entrusted functions most outrageously abused, — but we can acquit our Government of all intentions of inhumanity.
That certainly has been a direful work which has been going on upon this continent during the period of our existence as a nation. A very dark catalogue of narratives — equally perhaps for either party — makes up the history of controversy and strife between the civilized and the barbarous races here. But none the less are we to distinguish amid the elements of the strife those which are to be referred to designed injustice and those which were incident to the inevitable complications of the problem. Our Government started under three most embarrassing and mischievous difficulties in its relations with the Indians; for none of them was it responsible, but each and all of them brought upon us an Indian war.
First, the sullen and grudging spirit in which Britain acknowledged the independence of her colonies led her to perpetuate an after strife and irritation against us. She retained for many years the Western posts which she had covenanted to surrender; she left her impoverished Indian allies unpaid on our hands, while nominally making them and their lands over to us as a part of our conquest and inheritance; and she continued in all our early troubles to ply and pay and arm the savages against us, in our frontier troubles. This entailed warfare was the hardest for us to bear, and we have not yet closed it.
Second, the Indians did not understand that they themselves were included in the close of warfare and in the terms of our peace with Great Britain. Dangerous neighbors were left us among them and the French in the Western territory, which the latter still retained. Our enemies kept up an open communication between Canada ​and the Gulf of Mexico, to our annoyance and grievous loss.
Third, the Spaniards on the South and in the Mississippi Valley still retained dominion over large reaches of soil, and we had from them a continuous series of vexing and disturbing controversies, with battles interspersed running down to our Mexican War.
These facts are to be considered because they prevented our starting freely and fairly in our career, as regarded our relations with the aborigines, responsible only for our own public acts and measures. By what is called the Law of Nations — though it can hardly be by the law of Nature — our Government might claim, that, as Great Britain asserted a right of sovereignty over the Indians and their territory within certain bounds on this continent, we, having conquered in the great war of Independence, acceded to that British right, and so that the Indians became our subjects, and their land ours.
But these difficulties, impairing the freedom with which we might have started in our career as an independent people, and in perfectly unprejudiced relations with the natives, are comparatively of trivial importance, when we come to recognize on the one side the inherent difficulties of the original problem, with all the remarkable development of unforeseen, incalculable, and marvellous complications which have gathered around it for a century; and, on the other, that our Government started in its dealing with the subject without any well-considered plan, principle, policy, or even theory: so that its course has been one of surprises, of hap-hazards, of temporary makeshifts, of adjustments to changing circumstances, of pledges given and broken, of evasions of some obligations by assuming others more burdensome, and indeed of those unhappy faults of blundering which, though they are said to be worse than crimes, lack the quality of intention. Our Government never has adopted or given the sanction of ​law, from its formation to this day, to any theory as to the tenure by which any band of the aborigines held territory here. We shall soon notice how vacillating, inconstant, and self-stultifying has been the course of our Government from the lack of such a theory held and consistently followed. The development of wealth and enterprise on our domain has been such in its rapidity and amazing results, that the keenest and most kindled imagination could not have brought it into dreams or visions. The rushing in of millions of immigrants from foreign lands, year by year, with increasing volume and force of tide; the steady pressure of restless adventurers, unsuccessful and discontented in the half-developed centres of civilization, to seek unlimited space of new territory, never entered into the calculations of our statesmen, who thought that we should hear no more of Indians if we could once get them to settle on the other side of the Mississippi. President Van Buren bore the epithet of “slyness,” but he certainly won the repute of sagacity. There is no reason to doubt his integrity of purpose when, in 1838, he sought to persuade the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees to move to lands in Arkansas, to be covenanted to them in exchange for those occupied by them in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and assured them that as the former lands, though admirably suited for Indians, would be of no use to white men, they would never again be disturbed. The title of “The Great American Desert” is still ringing in the ears of men as familiar to them in their youth, who have since seen it parted into flourishing States and Territories, furnishing millionnaires with fortunes scraped from its surface or its depths. It is but fair to admit that a policy of government, such as it was, adopted without any prescience of these developments, would find that it had been blundering, though not necessarily mean and unjust in intent, in making, evading, or breaking contracts with Indians. And in reference to a large and grievous class of wrongs which ​have been inflicted upon the natives, we shall have occasion to observe that they are to be charged to the account of what, on the side either of good or evil, we are wont to admit, that the people are stronger than the Government. Had the fact been the reverse of this, and had the Government been stronger than the people, the sum and quality of our difficulties might have been different, but perhaps not more tolerable, in another form. These considerations are in all fairness to be taken into account when we examine, whether cursorily or thoroughly, the often humiliating and often discreditable course of policy which the United States Government has pursued with the Indians as a people, or with particular tribes of them.
Neither can there be any doubt that the Indians have in many ways, as a race, — with the largest comprehension of their tribes, and with reference to the amount of general good, — received a sum of benefits from our Government and its people. And this may be affirmed without the slightest hiding from our view what they have suffered from us. It might be a question not readily disposed of if asked, whether there would have been any less actual fighting, loss of life, cruelty, and all the miseries of warfare on this continent during the last hundred years, if the whites had had no part in the strife. There never has been a Quaker or peace tribe of Indians discovered on this continent. Fighting among themselves appears always to have been a chief end of their existence. Probably their having found a common enemy in the whites has checked in some measure their habit of internecine war. War, too, with some foe, has always been, so far as we know, the foremost and engrossing passion of Indians. They were trained for it; and if they did not enjoy it, they found an intense stimulus and satisfaction in its practice. Their great men were their warriors. We have given them another enemy, but we taught them no new lesson of blood.
It is certain that the mass of Indians who have come into ​contact with the whites, and have not actually been killed by them, have received from them many appreciable additions to their resources and comforts. The quantities of goods, of useful and desirable articles, that the Indians have been most greedy to receive, which have been carried into their country and distributed among them, are enormous. In fact, for more than an hundred and fifty years the Indians have come to be more and more dependent upon clothing, utensils, and food furnished by the white men. Edged tools, the axe, the knife, the hoe, the spade, cooking utensils, even the single article of matches, all to be used in peaceful ways, have vastly helped to the comfort of the Indian. As the game has diminished in many vast regions of space, the Indians, who had largely depended upon the old fur-trappers and traders, have come to be suppliants to the generosity of our Government. Indeed, our soldiers now have to meet their red foes armed with the very-best weapons and ammunition which our armories and arsenals can supply. I have made an approximate estimate, from a wide examination of Government documents and accounts, of the outlay of money and supplies from the national treasury for help of various kinds for the Indians. But I refrain for two reasons from setting down the gross sum in dollars and cents. For, first, the accounts are perplexed by interest on annuity funds, and by reconsideration of some sums once pledged, as well by various special grants on emergencies. And, second, it being understood that large portions of these treasury benefices are scattered by waste and fraudulent agents, while the proximate amount of the largesses would indicate the generosity of the Government, it would not be the real measure of the good secured to the Indians. More to the point is the reminder that all this outlay in money and goods — spent for the service of wild, restless, lazy hordes, roaming over immense extents of territory which they claim as their heritage, but do not improve — is drawn by taxation from the thrift, ​hard labor, economy, and savings of an industrious, toiling population, and from enterprises of commerce and manufacture. Further reference to these economical and practical matters will come before us when we deal with the present bearings of the Indian question.
We are concerned now with the perplexities and embarrassments which have from the first thwarted the good intentions of our Government in its policy of dealing with the natives.
It had been the custom of British officers and commissioners in our colonial times to give to Indian chiefs with whom they had friendly relations medals, often of silver, with the figure of the reigning British sovereign, and various symbols and emblems upon them. Our Government found it wise to imitate this effective appeal to the vanity of the savage, who regarded the trinket as a token acknowledging a sort of equality between him and his brother monarch across the sea, only we had no royal personage here to represent sovereignty. Our President, as soon as we had one, had to serve the purpose. Commissioners had been appointed by Congress in 1786 to gather up these medals from the chiefs, and to substitute republican for royal devices. The first of our medals was that given by Washington to the famous Chief Red Jacket, on his visit to Philadelphia in 1792 on a peace embassy. It was a large, well-wrought, oval plate of silver, showing on the obverse the full-length figure of Washington, in uniform, bare-headed, extending a calumet to the mouth of an Indian, who smoked it as he stood by a pine-tree, at the root of which lay a tomahawk; on the background was a scene of husbandry, with a man ploughing; on the reverse of the medal were the arms of the United States. Red Jacket was very proud of this medal; and though he often pledged it for whiskey, it escaped the melting-pot, and was recently in the possession of the well-known General E. S. Parker, an educated Seneca Indian, who was on General ​Grant's staff, and his military secretary during our Civil War. Our Government has followed up this policy of providing medals to be struck for presentation to representative Indian chiefs, in treaties, and on their visits to Washington. These Government or Peace medals bear on the obverse the effigies of the President for the time being. The same die for the reverse common to most of them presents the hand of a military officer and of an Indian chief clasped in amity. All our presidents have shared in this peaceful service with the exception of Harrison, whose single month of office may have precluded him from the honor. It seems strange, however, that he who, with Jackson, was largely helped to our highest office through fame and success as an Indian fighter, should not have been commemorated in silver and bronze on a peace medal.
Another part of the policy of our Government in dealing with the Indians, steadily continued from the visit of Red Jacket in 1792, has been to invite and conduct to the national capital, from time to time, chiefs and delegations of various Indian tribes. These sons of the forest have been guided and escorted from their retreats, through our highways and watercourses, with the tokens of advancing civilization as they passed on. They have been courteously and hospitably entertained; and, gazed upon with staring curiosity by street crowds, they have been formally received, on a day appointed, by the “Great Father,” at the White House. They appear in all their grotesque finery of feathers and paint, with a strange blending of wilderness and civilized garb, expressing no wonder, assuming the bearing of sheiks and sultans, and showing their common humanity most in their greed and beggary. They are allowed to course the streets, to visit public buildings, and their desire to possess the goods and the trinkets which they see in the shops is generally gratified on the plea that they wish to have them to carry home to their squaws. Their return freight puts them in rivalry with the satirized “Saratoga trunks.”
​The object of these visits and entertainments is, of course, to impress the savages with a sense of the resources of civilization and of the power of our Government. The effect, however, has often been thought a dubious one. The pride and taciturnity of the savages lead them to suppress what may be their real feelings. They receive and accept everything as a matter of course, as simply due to their rank and antecedents. Doubtless they are more bewildered than impressed. Their interpreters are the most important personages of the escort, and probably the channel through which speeches and replies flow, impregnates them with artificial material. It is suggestive to think how much of misunderstanding and deception may have been caused alike to Government and to Indians by unqualified or untrustworthy interpreters. These visits of the nobles of the forest have been reciprocated by return visits of Government officials to the savages at home, on errands to which we are soon to refer. It might seem strange that a whole century of such intercourse has accomplished so little towards the results of peaceful and friendly relation which it has been designed to secure. It would be difficult to prove that it had really brought about any direct conciliation or assimilation of parties or their interests. The more the whites see of real Indians the less attractive is the spectacle, and the full-grown Indian always prefers his savagery to civilization.
In reviewing the whole course of our Government, for a now nearly completed century, in its dealings with our native tribes, we find that it has always had in view three leading objects or designs, which have from the first prompted and directed its action. These are: —
1. To keep an ever-shifting frontier space between the Indians and the whites; securing this by moving the former farther and farther westward as the latter advanced on new territory for actual settlement.
2. To prevent or suppress all border quarrels and ​conflicts as they threatened or broke out; the measures for effecting this interchanging and alternating, as circumstances favored or decided, between peaceful negotiations, presents, bribes, and annuities, and a resolute use of military power.
3. To improve, reclaim from barbarism, and elevate the natives, and to make them fit for citizenship.
There is no inconsistency, no necessary clashing, between these objects. On the contrary, they seem and really are harmonious; mutually helpful parts of a hopeful and promising plan for serving the interests of all concerned, and for advancing the most desirable ends of humanity, civilization, and a common prosperity.
But none the less have practical and very serious difficulties and perplexities, and some very lamentable mistakes and calamities, been encountered by the Government in its purposes and efforts to secure these three objects. It was requisite for success that all these three designs and intents should have been kept in view in every stage of a protracted and complicated responsibility. But circumstances, and, as we may say, emergencies and surprises, have from time to time induced the Government to lay the whole stress of its interest and activity upon a single one of those objects, to the neglect or the sacrifice of the others. Hence has come inconstancy of purpose, change of policy, vacillation of aim, reconsideration of measures, and what has in fact amounted to a thwarting and undoing of its own plans and work. At one time the rapid removal of the Indians has been the chief end in view, and measures to effect it have engrossed attention. Then, in frequent alternations of debate and congressional action, reliance has been placed now on a peace policy, which, being pronounced by military men and frontier settlers a proved failure, next yields to a stern recourse to arms. And, to crown the confusion of the matter, there are many who claim it to be a certified fact that the Indians cannot be civilized.
​It is but fair to allow and assert that our Government has from the first given at least equal heed and care for humane as for hostile dealings with the Indians. Congress in 1793 provided securities against impositions practised upon the Indians by individuals in bargaining for their lands, and forbade all private contracts of this sort. It also sought to protect the Indians from all outrages by the whites, and to give them the protection of the civil law. Washington was authorized to send among some tribes cattle, farm implements, teachers, and the means of civilization. The whole series of treaties had incidentally or emphatically in view the securing to the Indians the peaceful and inalienable possession of their lands, and the helping them through annuities and the influence of education and practical instruction in agriculture, the inclosing of grounds, and the building of houses, mills, schools, and churches, to adopt civilized habits. Yet the law of 1796 which excluded all the whites from Indian territories was said to be prejudicial and mischievous, as, while it kept out order-loving and well-disposed whites, whose presence among them would have been of great benefit to the Indians, it failed to restrain the intrusion of the worst class of lawless and reckless adventurers. An Act of the same year authorized Washington to establish a system of trade, through stations, goods, and agents among the Indians, the Government furnishing the capital and managing the business through its employés. This proved to be a most losing experiment, year by year more impracticable and costly; but it was continued under trial till 1822, when it was abandoned.
Up to Jefferson's administration, the nation congratulated itself that the peace policy had greatly advanced the Indians, those of them especially who came nearest in proximity to the whites. The President himself expressed that opinion. But, strangely enough, he himself proposed, as a change of plans, the removal of the Indians as a body as ​far as possible from the whites, across the Mississippi. Yet in his own purpose this measure, though it seemed to be made advisable because of the irrepressible encroachments of the whites, was honorably proposed in the interest of the natives. The fact that the Indians have been so often moved in bodies has confirmed the popular assumption that no real permanent tenure of land was secured by mere roamers, who in leaving one tract for another left nothing behind them of property or improvement. General Washington in all his messages or speeches addressed to Congress, with an ever-wise regard for equity and humanity in all things, as the necessary pledge of all prosperity and security, made emphatic references to the kind treatment due to the Indians. He proposed and recommended successive measures in their behalf, as experience and reflection suggested them to his own mind. The following sentence is characteristic in tone and spirit of all his communications. It occurs in his speech to the second Congress, in 1791:
“A system corresponding with the mild principles of religion and philanthropy towards an unenlightened race of men, whose happiness materially depends on the conduct of the United States, would be as honorable to the national character as conformable to the dictates of sound policy.”
Many sentences of similar tenor and tone might be quoted from the communications of his successors in office. No one would have the hardihood to affirm that they were insincere. And if the high magistrates who uttered these sentiments were compelled under the stress of circumstances to permit measures directly inconsistent with them, something is to be allowed to the intractability of the Indians.
Alexander Hamilton, from his first participation in the direction of the public affairs of our nation, always held and advanced wise and humane views in regard to the Indians. He wrote: —
​“Their friendship alone can keep our frontiers in peace. It is essential to the development of our fur-trade, — an object of immense importance. The attempt at the expulsion of so desultory a people is as chimerical as it would be pernicious. War with them is as expensive as it is destructive. It has not a single object, for the acquisition of their lands is not to be wished till those now vacant are filled; and the surest as well as the most just and humane way of removing them is by extending our settlements to theirneighborhood. Indeed, it is not impossible that they may be already willing to exchange their former possessions for more remote ones.”
Accordingly, as chairman of a committee in 1783, he reported that “the general superintendence of Indian affairs under Congress be annexed to the Department of War,” that “offensive hostilities” be suspended, and that four districts — by the points of the compass — be established in the United States, with an agent for each, to transact Indian affairs. The plan was not adopted, because the Governors of Territories had the power under the War Department.
Tecumseh, with the help of his famous brother, the “Prophet,” essayed to repeat the experiment made, before he was born, by the great chief Pontiac. But he laid even a broader basis for his enterprise. This was to unite the Western, Southern, and Northern tribes, with the open sympathy and the covert aid of the British in Canada, to drive the whites back from the frontiers, and to make the Ohio a permanent boundary between them and the Indians. We know what significance Tecumseh and our President Harrison gave to the word “Tippecanoe.” Tecumseh's enterprise was already flagging from its first earnestness and hopefulness, when the opening of our war with Britain, in 1812, gave it a formidable aspect. It is curious to note how the savages had learned from our colonies the value and strength of union in a confederacy. Tecumseh's able ​spirit seized the purpose of imitating it among the red men. In the many councils and conferences between Tecumseh and his associated chieftains and General Harrison, the forest champion took and resolutely held two positions, identified, as he said, with the rights of the Indians: First, Harrison having complained of him for trying to unite the tribes in a league, Tecumseh acknowledged the fact, and maintained his right to do so. The Indians might combine and confederate in a common cause as justly as the white men had done. Harrison was the agent for what he called “the Seventeen Fires” united in council, — the States of the Union. “Why might not the Indian tribes unite their council fires?” asked Tecumseh. Again, Harrison insisted on the fact that the territory in dispute had been already ceded by the Miamis to the United States. Tecumseh replied that a few Indian tribes had no right to sell lands which belonged as a whole to the whole Indian race. The whole land being the common inheritance of the aborigines, the Miamis could not alienate one portion, the Delawares another, and so on. The Great Spirit, he said, had given the whole to the red man, and put the whites on the other side of the big water. The whites had no right to come here and gradually dispossess the Indian race by cozening grants of land from single tribes. General Harrison stood stoutly in his answer against Tecumseh's plea. He denied that the Indians ever were or could be regarded as one nation. He urged that the land in dispute had been purchased from the Miamis, who had long possessed it, and that the Shawnees, whom Tecumseh represented, were intruders from Georgia, whence they had been driven by the Creeks, and that they had no right to interfere with the Miamis in the disposition of their own territory. Here we have, put into a practical form, the fundamental question as to the tenure of Indian tribes in unimproved regions, free to be coursed over. Tecumseh's grievance was that in Jefferson's administration the ​favorite hunting-grounds on the Wabash had been ceded by the Miamis to our Government. He maintained that no single tribe had absolute ownership of any space, and that the chiefs of a tribe had no prerogative of acting for the whole tribe in alienating land. Harrison defended Fort Meigs in two hard-pressed sieges. It has been affirmed that but for Tecumseh our war with Britain then might have left us in possession of Canada. But it was wise that our Government did not at that time involve itself in any further complications as to territory. It is observable, however, that each successive contest with the aborigines which brought under question their land-tenure, never induced or forced our Government to adopt a definition in terms as to what precisely that right was, — a definition to be established as a precedent, and to be recognized under shifting circumstances in its application, whether in any particular case it favored the whites or the Indians.
The fearful massacre at Fort Mims, in Alabama, then a part of the Mississippi Territory, Aug. 30, 1813, threw the whole South into a panic. There were then twenty stockade forts within a stretch of seventy miles. The scattered settlers rushed into these slender defences. There were five hundred and fifty-three whites, with their friends, in Fort Mims; and of these, four hundred were butchered. The Indians were aided by the Spaniards in Florida. The Creeks were then in our pay. The more stoutly and courageously, and for the time successfully, the Indians fought to keep their hold upon any region of territory, the more clearly did our people think themselves justified in contesting it. Savage warfare employed such arts and barbarities as to certify the right and obligation of civilization to bring it to a close. If wild occupancy of land did not secure a tenure, still less did the peculiar method of the Indian in fighting for it confirm any natural right of his to defend it as his own. Indeed one is well-nigh led to imagine that if the Indians had from the first never raised a weapon ​against the whites, but had tamely, like sheep, moved off as they were approached, they would have shamed Europeans into yielding through magnanimity what the overcoming of resistance has led them to claim as their rights over the savages.
President J. Q. Adams, in his message of 1828, states emphatically what had been the theory acted upon by the Government since established by the Constitution: “The principle was adopted of considering the Indians as foreign and independent powers, and also as proprietors of lands. As independent powers, we negotiated with them by treaties; as proprietors, we purchased of them all the land which we could prevail on them to sell; as brethren of the human race, rude and ignorant, we endeavored to bring them to the knowledge of religion and of letters.”
The decision of the Supreme Court, in 1832 (Worcester vs. Georgia), confirmed this view as to the treaty-making power and as to the foreign nationality of the Indians. But it has proved of no avail, either as holding our Government to any consistent course of policy, or as adding to the security of the Indians in any of our negotiations with them. Had the inquiry at any time been fairly pressed by an intelligent Indian upon any one of our statesmen, “Do you admit that my tribe owns the unbounded region over which we roam and hunt, precisely as your people individually own their house-lots and farms?” the answer, if candid and manly, would need to have been, “No; I do not.”
The following passage in the recently published diary of John Quincy Adams, is of interest here. It is a record of a Cabinet meeting under his Presidency, Dec. 22, 1825, — the business relating to the affairs of the Creek Indians and Georgia: —
“Mr. Clay [Secretary of State] said that it was impossible to civilize Indians; that there never was a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization. It was not in their nature. He believed ​they were destined to extinction, and, although he would never use or countenance inhumanity towards them, he did not think them, as a race, worth preserving. He considered them as essentially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race, which were now taking their place on this continent. They were not an improvable breed, and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world. In point of fact they were rapidly disappearing, and he did not believe that in fifty years from this time there would be any of them left.
“Governor Barbour was somewhat shocked at these opinions, for which I fear there is too much foundation.”
More than the fifty years which Mr. Clay allowed for the disappearance of the Indians have now expired. Still there are “some of them left.” But the experience of all the intervening years in our dealings with them; the steady opposition of one or another tribe as reached by the successive advances of civilization; the discomfiture and failure of such efforts as have been made in their behalf through treaties, agencies, pensions, and missions; the opening of new hostilities with them in each decade of time; the events of this passing year, and, it may be added, the well-nigh universal opinion founded upon these facts, — authenticate the concise judgment of President Adams on the frank avowal of Mr. Clay, “I fear there is too much foundation” for these views.
Our national archives, Congressional and Departmental, our religious and philanthropic historical documents, will indeed, as before stated, furnish overwhelming evidence of an unbroken series of efforts, thoughtfully and humanely planned, earnestly endeavored, patiently pursued, and labored for with enormous cost, to protect, to benefit, and elevate the Indians. With no considerable exceptions to the sweep of the sentence, we have to say that they have all been thwarted. There are those who feel that a deep burden of reproach rests upon our nation on this account. The large majority of our people, however, have always ​reconciled themselves to this sad fortune of the aborigines, as of destiny, in conformity with the opinion of Mr. Clay.
If it be urged that all the measures taken by our Government avowedly for the protection of the Indian tribes have invariably been conditioned upon their removal from coveted domains, farther into the West, only to be crowded yet backward when their reservations are reached, — the answer will be a prompt one in these days, when the whole history of evolved life, vegetable, animal, and human, on this globe, is read by philosophy as “a survival of the fittest.” Mr. Edward Everett, in his address at Deerfield, commemorative of the massacre at “Bloody Brook,” boldly vindicated the course of the white man towards the savages as conformed to a providential design and sanction. He urged that if the habitable spaces of this globe are to be the scenes of culture, prosperity, thrift, and happiness for communities of human beings in fields and homes, then it was right that the savages roaming over this new continent should yield it to the needs of those who could make a better use of it.
To all pleas as to the enormous and complicated perplexities with which our Government has had to deal, from its first attempts to dispose of the Indian problem, the easy reply is offered, that the problem would have been a perfectly simple and lucid one, if it had been left to the solution of natural justice and common humanity. And as a comment on this reply it is added, that abstractly and rhetorically the rights and claims of the Indians have been recognized, perhaps often in excess of just reason and extent; but that when they have stood in the way of the advances of civilization, or have conflicted with the greed and washes of the whites, — the whites being the sole judges in the case, — then the recognized rights of the red man have turned to mere mist.
There certainly has been much allowed and done that has this aspect. But we must look below this aspect. In ​conflict with my own former impressions, I have been brought to admit that the intent and purpose of the United States have always been to recognize the supreme obligations of humanity towards the Indians, to protect them, and to be even lavishly generous towards them. Efforts and outlays in these behalfs are testified to in our State papers and in the records of Congress. Inquiries and investigations, commissions, councils, invitations, and visits of Indian chiefs and warriors to Washington and other cities, protracted debates in Congress, and the appropriation of large sums of money, are evidences of right purposes; and they have not been hypocritical. Philanthropic and religious men have been sent with large gifts at the public expense to give a continual hearing to Indian grievances, and even to humor, as well as to conciliate, those who exposed them. Tentative and experimental schemes and shifts, ingenious and temporizing, have been put on trial. And, finally, military forces have been sent among the Indians, not by any means merely to kill them, but also to defend them from each other, and to protect them against wrongs from the white man. Yet none the less, practically and in effect, all these wise and kind intents and efforts have been thwarted, and we have to allow that the Indians have received from us treatment outrageous, iniquitous, and perfidious.
Still we have to say that the inherent difficulties of the problem have baffled the most consummate statesmanship. The sagacity and grasp of mind exercised by our statesmen in our Constitution, and more than one display of wisdom and shrewdness in our diplomacy, have won the encomiums of the civilized world. But this one problem — how to deal rightly and wisely with our joint inheritors of territory broad enough for us all — has not yielded to the mastery of our statesmanship. Are the difficulties in the case inherent and insuperable; or have we invented and intensified them ourselves?
​The course of our Government, for the full hundred years, in its dealings with the Indians, has been mischievously tentative, experimental, inconsistent, and wavering, — adopting now one theory and course of action, and following one or another method to secure it; then substituting a different idea or aim; next abandoning them, and reverting to its former view, or devising a third; and, finally, confessing itself baffled, as if it knew not what might wisely and rightly be aimed for, or had undertaken a task for which it was incompetent.
It is no longer than twelve years since, in 1871, that our Government recognized the fact that a radical and fatal error, fundamental and comprehensive in all its elements of mistake and harm, had up to that date vitiated all its policy towards the Indians. It is yet to be tested whether the terms in which the recognition of that error was made, and the perpetuity which was assured by those terms to some of the troublesome contracts under that policy, will avail to set the matter in the right way for the future. An Act of Congress in 1871 forbade the recognition any longer of Indian tribes or nations as independent powers in the sense of being capable of forming treaty relations with us; while the same Act did not invalidate, but confirmed, the lawfulness and force of all existing treaties. Now, is this recent legislation to be taken as an admission of a radical error in the action of our Government up to that year in having regarded the Indians as independent powers with whom, as with European and other nations, we might make treaties; or as simply a recognition of a change in the status of the Indians which had been brought about by time and circumstances? Probably we may refer the enactment for its grounds and reasons to both of these explanations.
The Hon. E. S. Parker, before referred to, himself an Indian of marked abilities, in his report as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in 1869, addressed to the Hon. J. D. ​Cox, Secretary of the Interior, advised that all future covenants and arrangements with the Indians, about their reservations and the aid to be furnished them, should not be of the nature of treaties; as a treaty involves the principle of a compact between sovereign powers, each having authority and force to compel a fulfilment of obligations. But the Indians are not sovereignties with such strongly organized governments as to be able to enforce covenants. They have been led by these treaty dealings with them as independent nations to regard themselves as such, and so to believe that our Government has recognized them as having an absolute fee in the lands for which we have treated with them; whereas the Government has really regarded them as wards of the nation, having simply a possessory title to territory.
These sentences expose to us the very roots of the error under which our Indian policy has, till so recently, proceeded and been guided. Never until now — if even now — has our Government defined, judicially and positively, what is the legal status of an Indian, or of an Indian tribe possessing territory within our domain. For lack of such an authoritative definition, our own policy has been inconstant and inconsistent, having no guiding principle, and so to all effects it has been faithless and unjust. At the same time the Indians themselves, interpreting our covenants with them as acknowledging certain claims and rights of theirs, which in reality we did not recognize, have justly charged us with breach of faith towards them. In fact, without any legally defined status, the Indians have impersonated to us a very large variety of characters, all of them depreciatory to themselves, and admitting of wrong and encroachment on our part, as under none of those characters did we recognize them as appearing in that which we had ourselves assigned to them as independent peoples. The same Indian tribes have been to us alternately wards of the nation, independent proprietors, subject vassals, allied and inconstant friends, ​outlaws, and avowed implacable enemies, to be dealt with as wild beasts and then paupers. We have made with them solemn covenants, pledging to them their territory as reservations, and we have broken these covenants as wisps of straw. We have agreed to defend their lands against encroachments by the whites; and then when settlers, surveyors, miners, and railroad engineers have invaded them, we have sent our armies to protect, not the Indians, but the white men. Our national Government has made treaties with tribes, reserving to them territories that soon after were found to lie within the bounds of newly created States, which at once claimed supreme rights of domain. And the Indians have been as much mystified as were foreigners in our late civil war, to dispose of the perplexities arising from a conflict between National and State sovereignty. Meanwhile much is to be allowed to the ever-changing aspects and bearings of the questions at issue, and to the coming in of new and unforeseen elements which have perplexed it. The shifting of the frontiers of civilization, by a much more rapid advance through emigration and occupation than was ever dreamed of, has crowded the Indians ; and the discovery of enormous mining wealth, of comparatively little use to the savages, in their reservations which we had made over to them simply as hunting-grounds, has seemed to justify a reconsideration of the bargain. The plea is, “We had given the Indians hunting-grounds; we never intended to make over to them our gold mines.”
But the fundamental error in our policy, the root of most of the evil, of wrong towards the Indians, and of acts of perfidy on the part of our Government, — the error, as it is now admitted to have been, with which we started, — was that of entering into treaties with Indian tribes as independent powers or nations. In reality we never really so regarded them; and the only relief we can find from the charge of intentionally deceiving the Indians, in assuming or pretending so to view them, is in uttering the ​afterthought of wisdom, — we did not clearly think about or understand what we were doing. A treaty between two nations (and both parties must be nations, sovereigns, in order that they may make treaty relations) proceeds upon certain understood and implied facts, — that both parties stand for the purpose on an equality of rights and dignities; that they thoroughly understand what they are doing; that they have in view joint or mutual advantages, and recognize mutual responsibilities; and that a breach of covenant by either party will justify remonstrance and the use of force, which the other party is supposed to have at command for righting or avenging itself. Now all the forms and pretences of dealing with Indian tribes as independent sovereignties, able to enforce the conditions of a covenant, have been merely farcical. Our authorities have known from the beginning, when authenticating such treaty documents, that the whole proceeding was a ludicrous travesty of the dignified and cautious processes by which we have made our treaties with, for instance, Great Britain, France, and Russia, — nations that could either hold us to terms, or to a reckoning. We may invest with all possible awe and dignity a scene in the forest where white commissioners are holding a council with chieftains of a savage tribe, as the pipe of peace goes round with the grave and taciturn braves; the treaty may be engrossed, signed, and sealed with forest hieroglyphics, — but it is all a mere sham; and it is difficult to believe that the white parties to it did not feel it to be so at the time. No effort of imagination in the civilized party could run any parallel or similitude between the making of a treaty at Ghent, Paris, London, or Washington, as between real nationalities, and the treaty in the woods with grimly painted and greased, blanketed and feathered barbarians, apostrophizing sun and moon in their rhetoric, grunting out their assent or dissent, with an eye to the coming feast and the distribution of the presents. The robed and wigged dignitaries of a court ceremonial ​would only make the show more ludicrous. The very names on these Indian treaties, illustrated with bows, hatchets, bears, birds, snakes, and other emblematical devices, — names such as Tall Wolf, Red Nose, Big Head, Porcupine Bear, Looking-Glass, Big Thunder, and Yellow Smoke, — suggest a travesty. The Indians did not suppose that the treaties gave or originated their titles to land, but simply recognized their prior, existing, original rights. And so when the United States asked the privilege of opening military or emigrant routes through these lands, the Indians were confirmed in their view by the agreement of the Government to pay for this privilege.
Such treaties have been made with mere fragments of different, defeated, and allied tribes; with tribes setting up rival claims to the same territory; with tribes that have but for a very short time got possession of strange territory by conquest or roaming. Yet they have all been treated with equal mock dignity as foreigners, independent nationalities; we all the while knowing that in our sober view they were nothing of the sort. In order that a nation may have a footing for entering into treaty relations with one sovereign power, it must be equally free, unless it waives the right, to make treaties with other like powers. Now it would be no unfair teat of what we conceive to be the nature of our treaties with our Indian tribes, to ask how we should feel and what we should do, if those red sovereigns entered into similar covenants, say, with Great Britain, France, or Russia.
A volume of one thousand and seventy-five royal octavo pages, from the Government printing-office in Washington, published in 1873, bears the title, “A Compilation of all the Treaties between the United States and the Indian Tribes now in Force as Laws.” It is a most remarkable and suggestive, though a strangely perplexing, volume. Its contents are not arranged chronologically in the order in which the treaties were made, but alphabetically, by the ​names — often unfamiliar and uncouth — of the bodies of Indians with which the covenants were confirmed. Another “List of all Indian Treaties and Agreements made,” etc., appears in the annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, for 1881, arranged in the same alphabetical order, with dates. There are six hundred and forty-two such covenants referred to by title in this latter summary. The volume first mentioned gives the full text of the treaties, with the places where formed, ratified, or proclaimed, with revisions and supplementary articles, and several lists and schedules of allotments of land or money distributions to individual Indians, their families or representatives. One would need an elastic patience to read this volume. But the turning over its pages cursorily will alike bewilder, astonish, and instruct. The utter impracticability, not to say impossibility, of keeping the covenants under the conditions pledged to meet the emergencies and crises which our Government has been dealing with for a full century in its relations with the Indians, will be so obvious to the reader that he will be ready to condone some of the wrong incidental to breaches of them. Apart from all that we have to marvel over and to regret on this score, the volume will in future years have an interest of an antiquarian and historical character, something like to that of Homer's list of ships. Some of the names of Indian bands are already obsolete. It may therefore be of use in coming years for communities in flourishing and populous States in the north and west of the country to recall the tribal designations of some of the bands having covenanted titles to parcels of their territory.
Infinite and harassing, and incapable of adjustment, have been the embarrassments into which our Government has been drawn by its treaties with parties not having the status for enforcing or even making treaties. In the treaty with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, in 1866, Congress ​covenanted for the rights of people of African descent residing among them. These rights the councils of the Indian nations refused to yield or sanction. So Congress was called upon to appropriate three hundred thousand dollars to remove elsewhere the proscribed race. Probably this assertion of a prerogative and breach of compact by those Indian councils comes the nearest of any instance in our history to an effective assertion and defence of its claimed sovereignty by any Indian tribe. Congress stipulated with the people of Georgia to extinguish the Indian title to all lands in that State, and yet covenanted with the Creeks and Cherokees that they should hold their lands there forever. Now it is not strange that the arts of the white man in making, breaking, and trifling with Indian treaties should seem to warrant what a head of our modern peace commission tells us, thus: “Whatever our people may choose to say of the insincerity or duplicity of the Indians, would fail to express the estimate entertained by many Indians of the white man's character in this respect of broken promises, cunning, cupidity, and cruelty.”
But even the principle supposed to have been adopted and followed from the first by our Government in recognizing a right of occupancy and of perpetual use by any Indian tribe of territory actually inhabited and hunted over by them, has by no means been honored in all cases. This local native right would have been of some value to the Indian and some restraint upon the white man, had it really been respected in its terms and consequences as among civilized parties. It is notorious, however, that this right has never been able to stand against the white man's purpose and resolve to acquire any territory when he could plead his need or desire of it. The Indian's right to hold was subordinate to the white man's right to buy, — a right which involved the other right of compelling the Indians to sell, on terms, too, which in effect the purchaser himself dictated.
​There have, likewise, been cases in which this occupancy right of tribes to any coveted territory was wholly overlooked and coolly disregarded; no account whatever being made of it. This was signally true in the case of the tribes occupying the present Territories of Oregon and Washington. Our Government, in connection with public and private promoters of the enterprise, offered strong inducements to settlers to enter upon and occupy those lands, without even the slightest previous attempt to extinguish the Indian title, indeed without even a recognition of it. This was all the more to be deplored because the natives there had long been under the influence of the agents of the Hudson Bay Company, who trafficked freely with them, maintaining the most friendly intercourse. The Indians, therefore, were substantially British subjects. When suddenly they found Americans, of whom they were jealous and whom they despised, settling upon their best lands, they were naturally exasperated to acts of hostility.
As an illustration of the system under which treaties have been solemnly made with the pledged faith of the United States, and then by the connivance or assistance of the same supreme authority have been broken and substantially repudiated, may be instanced that with the Sioux, for the infraction of which the long drawn-out penalty is being still inflicted upon us in the threatenings of bloody and costly strife.
The Constitution pronounces all treaties to be the supreme law of the land. Our Supreme Court has pronounced them binding and inviolable, overruling anything in the constitution or laws of the single States. The famous ordinance of 1787, for the government of the territory northwest of the Ohio, covenanted that the utmost good faith should always be kept with the Indians, that their lands, property, rights, and liberties should be secured and respected, without encroachment or disturbance, and that from time to time just and humane laws should be ​made for their protection and welfare. President Washington and his successors, with the authority and ratification of successive Congresses, have again and again renewed this covenant.
The Sioux, who with affiliated tribes had occupied large portions of this territory, had long been regarded as a brave and noble race of red men of a superior grade, and as ever friendly to the whites, as the officers of the Northwest Fur-Company who had intimate relations with them had testified. They ranged from the British border on the north to Kansas on the south, and from the sources of the Mississippi to the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, through a rich and splendid country, for game, fish, and fruits. The tribes consented to regard themselves as within the territorial bounds of the United States, and claimed protection under our supremacy. After a succession of minor treaties had been made with them, the ripening of circumstances under what we call the exigencies and rights of civilization demanded a very serious and decisive negotiation with them. The constant pushing forward of the frontiers, the prospecting companies of miners, the emigrant trails to California and Oregon were opening an incessant encroachment on their territory, and a bloody war or a peaceful disposal of all matters of strife presented an alternative to our Government. A treaty was made at Fort Laramie, in 1851, between the United States and these tribes, under which it was covenanted that a region of about one hundred thousand square miles, — larger than the area of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, — including the largest and best part of Colorado, and parts of Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, should be secured to them, while the Government was to be allowed to make military and other roads, with stations for agencies on the territory, and to have its citizens protected in their transit. The Indians were to yield all claims to any other lands, except the retaining a right to hunt and fish in roaming freely over them. They were ​also to receive from the Government an annuity of fifty thousand dollars a year for fifty years. This last agreement, after the Indians had by their representatives confirmed the treaty, was altered without their knowledge or consent, when the Senate came to act upon it, the appropriation being by that body limited to ten years.
After the Rebellion there was a rush of unsettled and enterprising adventurers from our borders seeking the treasures of the mines of Montana and Colorado. No thought or regard whatever was had for the pledged rights of the Indians. Even before this general intrusion there had been many encroachments upon them, with the consequent disturbances and outrages. So that even in 1861 the Government had made a new treaty, greatly qualifying the conditions of that of ten years before. By this the bounds of the Indian reservation were reduced, and an annuity of sixty thousand dollars a year was promised them for fifteen years. But in vain was it sought to repress the encroachments of the white man, settler or farmer. Hostilities on both sides increased, and in 1864 occurred the horrid tragedy known as the Sand Creek Massacre. A mixed commission of army officers and civilians thought they had succeeded in their pacific work; but none the less a war ensued which cost our Government thirty millions of dollars; leaving the Indians unsubdued, and complaining (as well they might) of our perfidy and their wrongs. Still another treaty, made in 1865, stripped them of Colorado, and another region in Kansas was “set apart for the absolute use and undisturbed occupation of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes;” and for forty years a pension of forty dollars a year was to be paid to each of them. A part of this new reservation had already been assigned to the Cherokees. By an Act of Congress of 1834 all annuities promised to the Indians are made chargeable for any depredations committed by them on the frontier or travelling white men. Claims for damages on this score, ​followed by an injunction on the Indian annuity funds, are enormous in amount; and the adjustment of them, whether they are honest or fraudulent, is a matter of bitter quarrel and controversy. In some cases these claims, if allowed, would exhaust all the funds, and poverty and the sense of wrong would set the Indians on further raids.
Of the feelings with which some of the most intelligent of the chiefs were made parties to the cession of their lands, a graphic illustration is offered in the following extract.
Major-General George A. McCall, in his “Letters from the Frontiers” (1868), thus describes a scene at Fort Armstrong in General Gaines's negotiation with Keokuk and Black Hawk, in 1831: —
“The artful negotiator Keokuk called on the General, in all the finery of official dress, conspicuous in which was a necklace of the formidable claws of the grizzly bear, — which, by the by, it is whispered he procured with the silver bullet [purchased], — and in grandiloquent speech reported the success of his mission; and that Black Hawk would come in the next day and renew the treaty, relinquishing the territory latterly in dispute.
“At the appointed time Black Hawk appeared. There were in attendance about fifty chiefs and distinguished warriors; but all on this occasion were unarmed. All being seated in due form, the treaty, which in the interval I had been ordered to draw up, I read sentence by sentence [interpreted]. I called up Black Hawk to affix, in his official character, his sign manual to the paper. He arose slowly, and with great dignity, while in the expression of his fine face there was a deep-seated grief and humiliation that no one could witness unmoved. The sound of his heel upon the floor, as he strode majestically forward, was measured and distinct. When he reached the table where I sat I handed him a pen, and pointed to the place where he was to affix the mark that would sunder the tie he held most dear on earth. He took the pen; made a large, bold cross with a force which rendered that pen forever unfit for further use; then, returning it politely, he turned short upon his heel, and resumed his seat in the manner he had left it. It was an ​imposing ceremony, and scarcely a breath was drawn by any one present during its passage. Thus ended the scene, — one of the most impressive of the kind I ever looked upon. And with it terminated the duty which had led General Gaines to visit Fort Armstrong” (pp. 241, 242).
There has always been a variance and strife about the rights conceded to the Indians of hunting and roaming on unceded territory outside of their reservations. Though this right has been in terms stipulated, and Congress has even made provision of partial payment to Indians roaming, some military officers and agents have insisted that being found outside of the reservations is an indication of hostile intentions on the part of the roamers, and cuts them off from their claim in the distribution of the supplies. Nor are the perplexity and bitterness arising from this source relieved by the well-known fact, that, while the large body of a tribe may remain seemingly content on their reservations, parties of restless young warriors may mischievously break bounds, to raid and steal, furnished with the very guns, ammunition, blankets, and food just distributed from the agencies.
But the swiftly circulated reports of the treasures in the Black Hills — which lay within the limits solemnly pledged to the Indians, and which it seems they regarded with a superstitious reverence — stirred the passion and greed of adventurers. Of course the fabled wealth in them was destined to the uses of civilization, whatever claims the barbarian might set up. In utter contempt of all our Government covenants, the Indians saw a steady stream of adventurers and gold-hunters rushing through to Utah, Oregon, and California. The placers of the miners and the cultivated grounds needed for their supplies, with the groggeries, saloons, and gambling-halls of incipient cities and rows of dwellings, were occupied and crowded as by magic by those who regarded the Indians as but vermin.
​Meanwhile the Government, whatever its plighted faith, also felt that its paramount — saying nothing of its primary — obligations compelled it to stand for the rights and interests of civilization against barbarism, of white men mining instead of red men hunting. Government sent out surveying, exploring, and then military parties to penetrate and examine regions which were then unknown to the whites, which had been surveyed only by longitudinal and latitudinal measurements, and which it had been agreed that the white man should hold as forbidden to him. Of course the Sioux war in Minnesota, and then a general Indian panic and uprising, were the results. By making and breaking successive treaties, the United States first created and fostered in the minds of the Indians the preposterous notion that they held a limitless fee of possession in these enormous reaches of territory; and then after purchasing parts of them, and pledging the remainder to the Indians forever as still theirs, mocked at the Indians for thinking us in earnest, as if we really meant to countenance them in their foolish resistance to the progress of the age. In 1874, that hero in our Civil War, the youthful and lamented General Custer, destined to fall a victim in the war which he helped to open with the Sioux, was sent on an expedition to the Black Hills, and he accomplished it successfully, the Indians of course protesting and complaining, though not at once fighting. Acts of outrage, however, were done by roaming parties, and war was imminent. Major-General Stanley wrote from Dakota that he was “ashamed longer to appear in the presence of the chiefs of the different tribes of the Sioux, who inquire why we do not do as we promised, and in their vigorous language aver that we have lied.” Sitting Bull explained his refusal to come under any treaty relations by this vernacular sentence: “Whenever you have found a white man who will tell the truth, you may return, and I shall be glad to see you.” In 1875, a commission sent to treat for the surrender of the Black ​Hills was unsuccessful. Then, of course, followed the war, in which, perhaps more than in any other waged by us with the savages, we have been made acquainted with their reserved power, and with the depth of their conviction and resolve that they have some human rights. War is the recognized resource of white men under the infraction of a treaty. Why not then of red men? Had the mining region which tempted invaders been among the wilds on the other side of the British borders, and our citizens, bent on the development of all buried treasures in the interest of civilization, made their raids there, what would have followed? Formal expressed diplomatic “distinguished considerations,” and then, if these were unsatisfactory, fighting. But we say the Black Hills are within our own domains, and the Indians, — half citizens, half wards, — are really bound to make common cause with us in opening our common country.
If we may draw a reasonable inference from the tedious and prolix formalities and the stiff ceremonial of a council with Indian tribes for settling a peace, the cession of territory, or the negotiations of a contract, we should judge that while the white party cannot but have looked upon it rather from its ludicrous side, and held even its pledged obligations as likely to be but of a slight and temporary validity, the Indians themselves, though notoriously inconstant and treacherous to their own promises, did notwithstanding wish and intend that the business should have a very imposing and solemn dignity. The impatience and the banter which we expend upon the routine methods, the official intricacies, and the long-drawn delays in the disposal of affairs between civilized people and in the processes of each department of a government, might find full provocatives in the rehearsal of the proceedings of an Indian council. Red tape and circumlocution have full sway there. Commissioners and military officers who have transacted such business with a company of chiefs representing ​several tribes at one council have found their endurance taxed to the utmost, and the soldiers would at times have much preferred the excitement of a campaign.
The council must be deliberately agreed upon and prepared for with stately preliminaries. The squaws in the Indian villages must be set to work in making the wampum belts, with their symbolic colors, blendings, and hieroglyphics; and the whites must as busily, and with more cost, prepare and transport the presents. In many tribes a wampum belt is necessary in the statement or ratification of each rhetorical certification of the speech, and of each proposition or term in the covenant. There are solemn pauses and silences in which the parties might be supposed, by an onlooker, to be holding a Quaker meeting. There are the complimentary exchanges of handshaking with the greasy and grotesquely arrayed Stoics of the woods, with solemn and demure watchfulness against the wandering of eye or thought, to the let-down of stateliness or dignity. Then comes the squatting on the grass in concentric circles, or the stiff seating on the skin-covered bushes, — age and wisdom, and repute as a brave, giving title to sit in the innermost circle, while those who have yet to win their spurs as renowned warriors look over the heads of the inmost groups from outside. The passing round of the pipe is another wearying interval. When speech-making is reached, the work goes on with tedious slowness, no interruptions or interlocutions being sufferable. Never is the business finished at one sitting. The answering party must take a night for deliberating on the reply for the next, or some subsequent day.
Besides the original and radical error of our National Indian policy, — so long continued, and so impracticable as to compel us to violate our own covenants with them, — the policy of making treaties to last “forever” with them as independent, sovereign nations, we have made many other mistakes which have had very serious consequences. ​These mistakes have been related and incident to our primary error. They have directly operated to the injury of the natives, and are now found to offer vexatious difficulties in the way of the wiser methods which we are seeking to adopt. Among these errors three have been especially mischievous.
First, after having with much cost and management assigned a reservation to some troublesome tribe and planted it on the territory, we have been induced, by the advances of civilization and the trespasses of the whites upon it, to move off the tribe to another region. In some cases this has been done four or five times. The Indians have thus been kept in a restless and unsettled condition, which has in fact aggravated their roaming tendencies, and precluded their forming any local associations.
A second error has been in assigning to these treaty tribes, as reservations, altogether too extensive regions of territory, — so large, in fact, as to encourage the expectation that they may continue to live by their old methods of the chase, without labor. We have learned that any hopeful policy towards the Indians must look to the breaking up of their tribal relations, and leading each individual and family to a proprietorship of lots or parcels of ground. We have greatly hindered this result in assigning to a tribe so vast an expanse of wild land as to confirm their old habits of holding it in common and trusting their livelihood to its natural products.
The third of these errors is, that, in conformity with the terms of nearly all the older treaties, we have paid the Indians, for the cession of their lands, in money annuities, to pass into the hands of their chiefs, or to be distributed per capita, through the agents. These sums of money have been squandered thriftlessly, and have made the Indians the easy spoil of grasping traders in whiskey and gewgaws, encouraging them in laziness and profligacy. Nor has the result been much better when the annuities have been paid ​in food and clothing, turning the Indians into dependent paupers. The better and hopeful policy now requires that we restrict the Indians in space and assure to them permanent residence, to break up their roaming habits and to make them individual proprietors; and that we pay their annuities in farming and household implements, in buildings, schools, and land improvements.
* ↑ Works, i. 408.
* ↑ Vol. vii. p. 90.