The New York herald., 1878-11-05
Mistakes About the Indians.

y
made, he presently discovers that he needs
more counters than his fingers and toes.
1t has been a common frontier mistake to
believe that "there are no good Indians but
dead Indians !" one of our greatest mistakes
has been to think that the Indian naturally
likes to be robbed and swindled;a a great many
people have long been persuaded that it was
a mistake to transfer the Indian Bureau
from the War to the Interior Department
it is undoubtedly mistake to sell arms and
ammunition to the Indians and thus enable
them to fight our troops Secretary Schurz
has discovered that it is o mistake to allow
the warlike Indians to own herds of ponies,
and some day General Sheridan will dis
cover that it is q mistake not to kill every
doubtedly a mistake to make treaties with
an Indian tribe as though it were SOW
ereign nation, and it is also mistake to
treat the Indians as Indians at all, for they
ought to be made amenable to the general
laws precisely as other residents Of our Ter
ritories are.
But here comes Colonel Mallery, of the
United States Army, with proof of some
other and fundamental, errors into which
we have fallen about the Indians. In the
first place he asserts that it is mistake to
call the Indian "red man." Colonel NAL
lery having probably caused some Indians
to wash themselves discovered to his amaze
ment that after a thorough bath the North
American Indian is not red, but brown;
and he remarks that the Indians themselves
know this SO well that among the savage
tribes our own people General Sheridan
and Colonel Mallery for instance-are COM
monty called ''red men, J" as being at least
more red, through exposure to the sun and
fresh air, than the Indians, who guard their
compilations with vermilion and other
paints.
A more serious mistake which we have all
been making about the Indians, he says, is
to suppose they are rapidly dying out. In
fact, as he proves, there is the best reason
to believe that in spite of bad whiskey, fre
quent wars, the decrease in buffalo, the
rifle Of the frontiersman and the swim
dies of Indian agents the Indian
is slowly increasing on our hands. The
early settlers of different parts of our coun-
try who have left us accounts of the num-
Der of the Indian tribes they encountered
there is good reason to believe depended
largely on their imaginations for their facts
Thus Colonel Mallery cites the report of
Father Rasle, early in the seventeenth CEN
tury, who wrote that he had seen in one
place in Illinois twelve hundred fires
kindled for more than two thousand Indian
families, but other missionaries passing
that way soon after found no Indians at all
In fact. these fires were kindled by great
hunting expedition. and the Colonel re-
marks that ''these temporary fires no more
indicated the population of large district
than would the halt of great caravan
establish the population of the Sahara"
He shows by abundant evidence how greatly
the original Indian population of the coun-
try was overestimated, and even in the case
of the California Indians, who undoubtedly
suffered greatly from the brutality of
our early settlers in that State, he
has some remarkable figures, showing
that of twenty thousand, the actual
remain at least thirteen thousand. But this
is a case where in the common persuasion
the Indians have become almost extinct,
and where they have certainly been very
sham eiully maltreated.
The case of the Seminoles is another very
striking one. In 1922 they are reported to
have numbered three thousand eight hun
States went to war with them, and they
then numbered about fifteen hundred. The
government spent thirty millions in trying
| to kill or remove them; and in 1876 the
census showed that they had, in spite of the
| efforts of the United States, in forty years
| doubled their numbers.
| A potent cause of error in the earlier
| guesses at the numbers of the Indians,
which affected greatly all more recent esti-
mates, arose from the confusion concerning
| the names of the tribes. Travellers and set
lers reported tribes. gave their numbers,
and subsequent explorers or Investigators
reported that many Of these tribes were
| no longer to be found. OF course
| they had died of contact with the white
race. But the truth was that the earlier
reports were erroneous. They reported,
| in good faith, names of tribes which were
synonymes, or they bred confusion by mis-
| spelling names Of we'll known tribes Thus
the Mohawks we're reported also as Anies,
Manguawogs, Canungas, and by half dozen
other aliases. The Senecas were also Sin
mixes, Genessees, Chenandoans, Jenon-
towanos and Nundarawonahs The Dakotas
we're reported as Nadowessi, name sup
the Algonkin tongue, but held now more
probably to be a corruption from the French,
who called these people "Indiens du
nord-ouest," whence the Indians com.
pliantly called themselves .'Nadou-
| essie-n The same tribe or nation had