The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1891-09-20

other dav and the railroads going
through the territory gave excursion
rates. The cowboys along the hne at
tended. and happened to be travelling IN
one of the trains by which they returned.
! have never seen more drunken, dlsrep-
utable and disorderly crowd. The men
were wild with liquor, and red-faced cow
bows with h,g hats on their heads jumped
up and down yelling and growing ike
ROSTERS. and swearing they could whip
any BANKED man In the car. One Of the
worst of these men was deputy marshal,
whose hair was like tow and whose face
was as red as beet. de came from Mus
kogee, and he IS eVidentiy GOOD feiloW
when he is sober, but he is q devil
ish mean one when he is drunk.
This man staggered to and fro,
making a letter of his tracks, which
ran from one end of the car to the other.
Every now and then he would clap his
elbows to his side, hop up and down, and
crow ike a rooster. There were others
with him quite as bad: and there were q
couple of half-breed Indian girls who
were drunk, and now and then you would
see a man Jerk a revolver from his hip
and brandish il around, and at times
there were half dozen revolvers out. 1t
was by no means safe, and I was glad
when we finally stopped at Wagner.
where was to stay over night. Here
stopped at hotel called the Valley house,
kept by drunken landlord named Har-
ris. and was given a room just over the
Office, where | could hear Harris and the
cowboys carousing far into the morning.
THE NEGROES OF THE INDIAN TERRITORY.
There are many negroes still in the In
dian territory and you find many of the
Greeks who have intermarried with the
negroes. The Choctaws have also many
people Of mixed Indian and negro blood,
and the Chickasaws had big cotton planta-
tons before the war and had many slaves.
These Cherokees here are the proudest Of
all these Indian tribes. They are the aris-
tocrats of the Five Nations. They seldom
intermarry with the negro, and they have
separate schools for them. There are
stores here run by the Indians quite
as good as those of the white
men in the towns along the rail-
road, and I am surprised to see
what big stocks of goods they
carry and what variety of articles they
use. The dry goods stores contain all
kinds of ladies' dress goods, and these
women here do not confne themselves
by any means to calico. Such as l have
seen wear as good clothes as you will
ind worn by the women of any town of
this size in the United States, and they
dress in exactly the same way. Most of
the families Of Tahlequah have sewing
machines, and nearly every house has a
piano or organ. They use cooking stoves
and have exactly the same kind of house.
hold furniture that you will find in
an American village. The men dress
IN the same way, and of the Cherokees
only the fewest cling to their old habits,
and there are none, 1 think, but who wear
citizens clothes. Some of the poorest In
dams, and these are generally full-blooded
ones, live in log cabins and these do moth
ing but fish and cultivate a little ground
for their own corn. These, l understand,
are chiefly in the eastern part of the nation,
where there Is some mountainous country.
AS far as can learn the Indians would
get along better if the whites were kept en-
tirely out of the territory. The most of
these come to rob the Indians, and they
are, as a rule, shiftless, INSCRIPTIONS and
bad citizens. The Indians themselves
know that they must be eventually swal-
lowed up by the whites, and though they
will not confess this, they say that if It
does come, the government must pay the
Indians for their lands and allow each one
fee simple title to a farm. The
Indian territory has now only about
$1,000 Indians. Still the country
is much bigger than New York and
Massachusetts, and it is nearly the
same size as Kansas. 1t would support a
population of five or six millions, and it
contains the best lands in the United
States. FRANK G. CARPENTER.