The importance of the subject will justify us in dwelling so long upon it. Of the expenditures made within the last twenty years under treaty stipulations, probably not one-half has been directed to uses which the government would have chosen, had it been free to choose. It is most melancholy thus to see the scanty patrimony of this people squandered on worthless objects, or dissipated in efforts necessarily fruitless. The action of Congress at its last session, in authorizing the diversion of sums appropriated under treaty stipulations to other specific uses, at the discretion of the President and with the consent of the Indians, is a step in the right direction. But the time has come for a complete and comprehensive fiscal scheme, looking to the realization from Indian lands of the largest possible avails, and their capitalization and investment upon terms and conditions which will secure the future of the several tribes, so far as human wisdom may be able to feet this.

In addition to the lands held by the eighty thousand Indians who have already been spoken of as amply endowed, there are one hundred thousand square miles of territory yet secured by treaty to Indian tribes aggregating one hundred thousand persons. Besides these, forty thousand Indians enjoy, by executive order, the occupation of other sixty thousand square miles of territory, which, or the substantial equivalent of which, should be secured to them by law for their ultimate endowment. It is to these lands that such a fiscal scheme as has been indicated should be applied. The reservations assigned to tribes and bands are generally proportioned to the needs of the Indians in a roving state, with hunting and fishing as their chief means of subsistence. As the Indians change to agriculture, the effect is to contract the limits of actual occupation, rendering portions available for cession or sale, which with proper management may be so disposed of, without impairing the integrity of the reservation system, as to realize for nearly every tribe and band a fund equal, per capita, to that of many of the civilized tribes of the Indian Territory. But this cannot be done by helter-skelter or haphazard administration. The subject must be taken up as a whole, broadly considered, and intelligently treated, and the scheme which shall be adopted thereafter be regarded as not less sacred than the compromises of the Constitution, or than existing treaty obligations.

For the tribes and bands having no reservations secured to them, separate provision should be made. These number about fifty thousand persons, deduction being made of such as already have their lands in severalty, or as are hopelessly scattered among the settlements. Many of these tribes and bands might, with the assistance of the government, advantageously "buy themselves in" to the privileges of tribes already provided for, without involving any further donation of lands.

Where it is found impracticable thus to place the unprovided bands, the government should secure their location and endowment separately. Their right is no less clear than the right of other tribes which had the fortune to deal with the United States before Congress put an end to the treaty system. We have received the soil from them; and we have extinguished their only means of subsistence. Either consideration would be sufficient to require us, in simple justice, to find them a place and ways to live.

* * * * *

The foregoing constitute what we regard as the essential features of an Indian policy which shall seek positively and actively the reformation of life and manners among the Indians under the control of the government, as opposed to the policy of hastening the time when all these tribes shall be resolved into the body of our citizenship, without seclusion and without restraint, letting such as will, go to the dogs, letting such as can, find a place for themselves in the social and industrial order, the responsibility of the government or our people for the choice of either or the fate of either being boldly denied; suffering, meanwhile, without precaution and without fear, such debasement in blood and manners to be wrought upon the general population of the country as shall be incident to the absorption of this race, relying upon the inherent vigor of our stock to assimilate much and rid itself of more, until, in the course of a few human generations, the native Indians, as a pure race or a distinct people, shall have disappeared from the continent.

The reasons for maintaining that nothing less than a system of moral and industrial education and correction can discharge the government of its obligations to the Indians, or save the white population from an intolerable burden of pauperism, profligacy, and petty crime, have been presented sufficiently at length in this paper. The details of management and instruction need not be here discussed: most of them are within the administrative discretion of the department charged with Indian affairs; and, where power is wanting to the department, the good feeling of Congress may be safely trusted to give the necessary authority. But the points which have been presented are of vital consequence, and must, if the evils we apprehend are to be prevented, at an early date be embodied in legislation which shall provide means and penalties ample for its own enforcement.

Are the Indians destined to die out? Are we to make such provision as has been indicated, or such other as the wisdom or unwisdom of the country shall determine, for a vanishing race? Or are the original inhabitants of the continent to be represented in the variously and curiously composed population which a century hence will constitute the political body of the United States? If this is to be in any appreciable degree one of the elements of our future population, will it be by mixture and incorporation? Or will the Indian remain a distinct type in our museum of humanity, submitting himself to the necessities of a new condition, adapting himself, as he may be able to do, to the laws and customs of his conquerors, but preserving his own identity, and making his separate contribution to the life and manners of the nation?

The answers to these questions will depend very much on the course to be followed in the immediate future with respect to the tribes not yet embraced within the limits of States of the Union. If, for the want of a definite and positive policy of instruction and restraint, they are left to scatter under the pressure of hunger, the intrusion of squatters and prospectors, or the seductions of the settlements, there is little doubt that the number of Indians of full blood will rapidly diminish, and the race, as a pure race, soon become extinct. But nothing could be more disastrous than this method of ridding the country of an undesirable element. Not only would it be more cruel to the natives than a war of extermination; but it would entail in the course of its accomplishment a burden of vice, disease, pauperism, and crime upon a score of new States, more intolerable than perpetual alarms or unintermitted war.

But if, on the other hand, the policy of seclusion shall be definitely established by law and rigidly maintained, the Indians will meet their fate, whatever it may be, substantially as a whole and as a pure race. White men will still be found, so low in natural instincts, or so alienated by misfortunes and wrongs, as to be willing to abandon civilization, and hide themselves in a condition of life where no artificial wants are known, and in communities where public sentiment makes no demand upon any member for aught in the way of achievement or self-advancement. Here such men, even now to be found among the more remote and hostile tribes, will, unless the savage customs of adoption are severely discountenanced by law, find their revenge upon humanity, or escape the tyranny of social observance and requirement. Half-breeds, bearing the names of French, English, and American employees of fur and trading companies, or of refugees from criminal justice "in the settlements," are to be found in almost every tribe and band, however distant. Many of them, grown to man's estate, are among the most daring, adventurous, and influential members of the warlike tribes, seldom wholly free from suspicion on account of their relation on one side to the whites, yet, by the versatility of their talents and the recklessness of their courage, commanding the respect and the fear of the purebloods, and, however incapable of leading the savages in better courses, powerful in a high degree for mischief.

The white men, who, under the reservation system, are likely to become affiliated with Indian tribes as "squaw men," are, however, probably fewer than the Indian women who will be enticed away from their tribes to become the cooks and concubines of ranchmen. One is surprised even now, while travelling in the Territories, to note the number of cabins around which, in no small families, half-breed children are playing. However moralists or sentimentalists may look upon connections thus formed by men who are in effect beyond the pale of society and of law, they constitute already a distinct feature of border life; nor is any statute likely to prevent Indian women occasionally thus straying from their own people, or to compel their return so long as they are under the protection of white men.

But, while the seclusion of the two races upon the frontier is certain to be thus broken in instances which will form no inconsiderable exception to the rule, the substantial purity of blood may be maintained by an early adjustment of reservations, the concentration of tribes, and the exercise of disciplinary control by their agents over the movements of wandering parties. Whether, in such an event, the Indians, thus left to meet their fate by themselves, with reasonable provision by the government for their instruction in the arts of life and industry, will waste away in strength and numbers, is a question quite too large to be entered upon here. Popular beliefs and scientific opinion undoubtedly contemplate the gradual if not the speedy decline of Indian tribes when deprived of their traditional freedom of movement, pent up within limits comparatively narrow, and compelled to uncongenial occupations. But there is grave reason to doubt whether these causes are certain to operate in any such degree as to involve the practical extinction of the race within that immediate future on which we are accustomed to speculate, and for which we feel bound to make provision. On the contrary, there are many considerations and not a few facts which fairly intimate a possibility that the Indian may bear restriction as well as the negro has borne emancipation; and, like the negro, after a certain inevitable loss consequent upon a change so great and violent, adapt himself with increased vitality to new conditions. It is true that the transition, compulsory as to a great degree it must be, from a wholly barbarous condition of life, which remains to be effected for the eighty to one hundred thousand Indians still outside the practical scope of the Indian service, is likely to further reduce, for some years to come, the aggregate number of this race; but it is not improbable that this will be coincident with a steady increase among the tribes known as civilized.

* * * * *

In the foregoing discussion of the policy to be pursued in dealing with the Indians of the United States, there has been no disposition to mince matters, or to pick expressions. The facts and considerations deemed essential have been presented bluntly. Some who cannot bear to hear Indians spoken of as savages, or to contemplate the chastisement of marauding bands, may blame our frankness. But we hold fine sentiments to be out of place in respect to a matter like this, which in the present is one of life and death to thousands of our own flesh and blood, and in the future one of incalculable importance to a score of States yet to be formed out of the territory over which the wild tribes of to-day are roaming in fancied independence. The country has a right to the whole naked truth,—to learn what security our fellow-citizens have for their lives, and also to learn what becomes of the seven millions of dollars annually collected in taxes and disbursed on Indian account.

If the case has been fairly presented, it will doubtless appear to our readers, that, so far as the hostile and semi-hostile Indians are concerned, the government is merely temporizing with a gigantic evil, pocketing its dignity from considerations of humanity and economy, and awaiting the operation of causes both sure and swift, which must within a few years reduce the evil to dimensions in which it can be dealt with on principles more agreeable to the ideas and ways of our people.

For the rest, it will be seen that the United States have, without much order or comprehension, but with a vast amount of good-will, undertaken enterprises involving considerable annual expenditures for the advancement of individual tribes and bands, but that the true permanent scheme for the management and instruction of the whole body of Indians within the control of the government is yet to be created. Let it not for a moment be pretended that the prospect is an agreeable one. Congress and the country might well wish to be well rid of the matter. No subject of legislation could be more perplexing and irritating; nor can the outlay involved fail for many years to be a serious burden upon our industry. But the nation cannot escape its responsibility for the future of this race, soon to be thrown in entire helplessness upon our protection. Honor and interest urge the same imperative claim. An unfaithful treatment will only make the evil worse, the burden heavier. In good faith and good feeling we must take up this work of Indian civilization, and, at whatever cost, do our whole duty by this most unhappy people. Better that we should entail a debt upon our posterity on Indian account, were that necessary, than that we should leave them an inheritance of shame. We may have no fear that the dying curse of the red man, outcast and homeless by our fault, will bring barrenness upon the soil that once was his, or dry the streams of the beautiful land that, through so much of evil and of good, has become our patrimony; but surely we shall be clearer in our lives, and freer to meet the glances of our sons and grandsons, if in our generation we do justice and show mercy to a race which has been impoverished that we might be made rich.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] From "The North American Review," April, 1873.

[B] The writer does not intend to say that the citizens of the border States are always just or reasonable in their disposition towards the Indians. It cannot be denied, that, in the exasperation of conflict, they often commit atrocities rivalling those of the savages; that, moreover, under the smart of wrong, they are very often indiscriminating in their revenge, and do cruel injustice to peaceful bands; and that, with the recklessness characteristic of border talk, they indulge to a vast extent in denunciations of horrible sound. To this is added, that in such communities are found more than the usual number of persons of a natural malignity of disposition, often refugees from criminal justice, who delight in committing outrages upon the exposed and helpless members of an inferior race. The opinion which the writer has given above is entirely consistent with the present admissions. The animosities felt and expressed are not towards the Indians as Indians, but arise out of the sense of injuries suffered, and the apprehension of further suffering. Were the Indians once rendered, by the extension and strengthening of our settlements, powerless for harm, the easy tolerance, the rough good-nature, and the quick condonement of wrong, which characterize pioneer communities, would speedily reconcile the whites to their presence, and establish relations not wholly unworthy of both parties.

[C] The relations of the Arickarees—or, as they are commonly called, even in official reports, the 'Rees—to the government, form one of the most instructive chapters of Indian history. In 1838 the agent for the Upper Missouri Indian agency, in his annual report to the Department of Indian Affairs, used the following language in respect to this tribe:—

"The Riccaras have long been notorious for their treachery and barbarity, and, within my own recollection, have murdered and pillaged more of our citizens than all the other tribes between the western borders of Missouri and the heads of the Columbia River."—Report on Indian Affairs, 1838-9, p. 65.

This is language which one might expect from the agent of some exceptionally troublesome band of Sioux. But, to the contrary, in another portion of his report (Ib. p. 64) the same agent says, "No Indians ever manifested a greater degree of friendship for the whites in general, or more respect for our government, than the Sioux." This report was made thirty-four years ago, the limit of one human generation. To-day the Sioux are among the most dangerous and troublesome Indians on the hands of the government, while the Arickarees are our fast friends and allies. Lieut.-Gen. Sheridan, in 1871, writing of these Indians, now located at Fort Berthold, says, "They have always been civil and well disposed, and have been repaid by the government with neglect and starvation. Of all Indians in the country, they were the best entitled to be looked after, and made happy and contented." Something, clearly, has made this difference; and an inquirer would doubtless find here an explanation of no small part of the difficulties which the United-States Government has experienced in dealing with the Indian tribes.

[D] To take one of the most recent examples: Col. Baker's attack upon a Piegan camp in 1869, even though it should be held to be justified on the ground of necessity, must be admitted to be utterly revolting in its conception and execution. Yet no merited chastisement ever wrought more instant and durable effects for good. The Piegans, who had been even more wild and intractable than the Sioux, have since that affair been orderly and peaceable. No complaints whatever are made of their conduct; and they are apparently as good Indians as can be found among the wholly uncivilized tribes.

[E] The Report on Indian Affairs for 1872 shows that, in addition to physicians, clerks, cooks, herders, teamsters, laborers, and interpreters, there are employed at all the agencies eighty-two teachers, eighty farmers, seventy-three blacksmiths, seventy-two carpenters, twenty-two millwrights and millers, seventeen engineers, eleven matrons of manual-labor schools, and three seamstresses.—Report, pp. 68-71.

[F] We are speaking of the tribe socially, not politically. Factions and faction wars are known to the Indian as well as to his betters.

[G] Report on Indian Affairs, 1872, p. 84.

[H] The popular and doubtless the correct use of the word "Iroquois" confines it to the Five Nations (subsequently the Six Nations) of New York, which during the third quarter of the seventeenth century destroyed or dispersed successively the Hurons or Wyandots, the nation called (for the want of a more characteristic name) the Neutral Nation, the Andastes of the Susquehanna, and the Eries. These four large and important peoples were closely kindred to the Five Nations; and the term "Iroquois" was long applied to this entire family of tribes. Later in the history of the continent, it embraced only the Five (or Six) Nations for the best of good reasons, as this formidable confederacy had practically annihilated all the other branches of the family. The career of the Iroquois was simply terrific. Between 1649 and 1672 they had, as stated, accomplished the ruin of the four tribes of their own blood, containing in the aggregate a population far more numerous than their own. A feeble remnant, a few score in number, of the Wyandots, now survive, and are represented at Washington by an exceptionally shabby white man, who has received the doubtful honor of adoption into the tribe. These are all the recognizable remains of a nation once estimated to contain thirty thousand. The names of the Eries, the Andastes, and the Neutral Nation do not appear in any treaty with the United States. Many, doubtless, from all these tribes fled to Canada. Considerable numbers were also, according to the custom of the Five Nations, adopted by the conquerors to make good the waste of war.

Nor did the Iroquois wait to complete the subjugation of their own kindred, before turning their arms against their Algonquin neighbors. The Delawares (Lenni Lenape, or Original Men) were subjugated almost coincidently with the Hurons; and the same year which brought the downfall of the Andastes witnessed the expulsion of the Shawnees from the valley of the Ohio. Re-enforced in 1712 by the Tuscaroras, a warlike tribe from the South, the Five Nations (now become the Six Nations) carried their conquests east and west, north and south. The tribes confronting the invaders in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were continually disturbed and distracted by their incursions. Taking the part of the English in the wars against the French, they shook all Canada with the fear of their arms, while to the west they extended their sway to the Straits of Michilimackinac and the entrance to Lake Superior. The height of their fame was at the close of the Old French War in 1763. Their decline and downfall, as a power upon the continent, followed with the briefest interval. Reduced by incessant fighting to seventeen hundred warriors, they took the part of England against the Colonies in 1775. The glorious and the terrible incidents of the Indian campaigns of the Revolution are familiar as household words. The peace of 1783 found the Iroquois broken, humbled, homeless, helpless, before the power of the United States, whose pensioners they then became and have since remained. The bulk of these tribes still reside in New York, while fragments of them are found in the extreme West, having removed under the treaty of 1838.

Such, in brief, is the history of the Iroquois. They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent, and were themselves used up, stock, lash, and snapper, in the tremendous flagellation which was administered through them to almost every branch, in turn, of the great Algonquin family. It will not do to say, that, but for the Iroquois, the settlement of the country by the whites would not have taken place; yet assuredly that settlement would have been longer delayed, and have been finally accomplished with far greater expense of blood and treasure, had not the Six Nations, not knowing what they did, gone before in savage blindness and fury, destroying or driving out tribe after tribe which with them might, for more than one generation at least, have stayed the western course of European invasion.

[I] The impudent character of these invasions will be best shown by a recital of the facts in two cases occurring within the year. In 1870-71 the Osages living in Kansas sold their lands under authority of the government, and accepted a reservation, in lieu thereof, in the Indian Territory. Scarcely had they turned their faces towards their new home when a sort of race began between them and some hundreds of whites, which may be described, in the language of boys, as having for its object "to see which should get there first." In October, 1871, the agent reported that five hundred whites were on the Osage lands, and actually in possession of the Osage village, while the rightful owners were encamped outside. Orders having been issued from the War Department for the removal of these intruders, political pressure was brought to bear upon the executive to prevent the orders from being carried into effect. This effort failing, delay was asked, in view of the hardships to be anticipated from a removal so near winter. This indulgence having been granted, the number of the trespassers continued to increase through the winter, in spite of the notice publicly given of the intentions of the government: so that in the spring of 1872 the military authorities found fifteen hundred persons on the Osage lands in defiance of law. On this occasion, however, the land-robbers had failed in their calculations. The government was in earnest; and the squatters were extruded by the troops of the Department of the Missouri.

The other instance referred to is that of an expedition projected and partially organized in Dakota, in 1872, for the purpose of penetrating the Black Hills, for mining and lumbering. Public meetings at which Federal officials attended were held, to create the necessary amount of public enthusiasm; and an invasion of Indian territory was imminent, which would, beyond peradventure, have resulted in a general Sioux war. In this case the emergency was such that the executive acted with great promptness. A proclamation was issued warning evil-disposed persons of the determination of the government to prevent the outrage; and troops were put in position to deal effectively with the marauders. This proved sufficient; and the Black Hills expedition was abandoned.

[J] Report on Indian Affairs, 1872, p. 440.



INDIAN CITIZENSHIP.[K]

The proper treatment of the Indian question requires that we deal with the issues arising out of the peculiar relations of the aboriginal tribes of the continent to the now dominant race, in much the same spirit—profoundly philanthropic at bottom, but practical, sceptical, and severe in the discussion of methods and in the maintenance of administrative discipline—with which all Christian nations, and especially the English-speaking, nations, have learned to meet the kindred difficulties of pauperism. It is in no small degree the lack of such a spirit in the conduct of Indian affairs, which has rendered the efforts and expenditures of our government for the advancement of the race so ineffectual in the past; and for this the blame attaches mainly to the want of correct information and of settled convictions respecting this subject, among our people at large. So long as the country fluctuates in an alternation of sentimental and brutal impulses, according as the wrongs done to the Indian or the wrongs done by him are at the moment more distinctly in mind, it cannot be wondered at that Congress should be reluctant to undertake the re-organization of the Indian service on any large and lasting plan, or that the Indian Office should hesitate to cut out for itself more work than it can look to make up in the interval between sessions.

What, to take a recent and memorable instance, would have been the fate of any scheme of Indian legislation which was at its parliamentary crisis when the murder of Gen. Canby occurred? The work of years might well have been undone under the popular excitement attendant upon that atrocious deed. Yet it would be quite as rational to denounce the established systems for the care and control of the insane, and to turn all the inmates of our asylums loose upon the community because one maniac had in an access of frenzy murdered his keeper, as it would have been to abandon the established Indian policy of the government, the only fault of which is that it is incomplete, on account of any thing that Capt. Jack and his companions might do in their furious despair. The more atrocious their deed, the more conspicuous the justification of the system of care and control from which this one small band of desperadoes had for the moment broken free to work such horrid mischief. Yet there is much reason to believe, that, had the Indian service at that time depended, as every service must once a year come to depend, on the votes of Congressmen, it would have failed, temporarily at least, for the want of them. Nor is it only acts of exceptional ferocity on the part of marauding bands, which have sufficed to check all the gracious impulses of the national compassion. The reasons which have existed in the public mind in favor of the Indian policy of the government have not always been found of a sufficiently robust and practical nature to withstand the weariness of sustained effort, and the inevitable disappointments of sanguine expectation; and thus the service has at times suffered from the general indifference scarcely less than from the sharpest revulsions of public feeling.

Much has been said within the past three years, of the Indian policy of the administration; and, if by this is meant that the policy of the government in dealing with the Indians has become more and more one of administration, and less and less one of law, the phrase, with the exception of an article too many, is well enough. As matter of fact, the sole Indian policy of the United States deserving the name was adopted early in the century; and it is only of late years that it has been seriously undermined by the current of events; while it is within the duration of the present administration that the blow has been struck by legislation, at the already tottering structure, which has brought it nearly to its fall.

To throw upon a dozen religious and benevolent societies the responsibility of advising the executive in the appointment of the agents of the Indian service is not a policy. To buy off a few bands, more insolent than the rest, by a wholesale issue of subsistence and the lavish bestowal of presents, without reference to the disposition of the savages to labor for their own support, and even without reference to the good or ill desert of individuals,—this, though doubtless expedient in the critical situation of our frontier population, is the merest expediency, not in any sense a policy. Yet the two features specified have been the only ones that have been added to the scheme of Indian control during the continuance of the present administration; while, on the other side, an irreparable breach has been effected in that scheme by the action of powerful social forces, as well as by the direct legislative contravention of its most vital principle.

From the earliest settlement of the country by the whites, down to 1817, the Colonies, and afterwards the thirteen States, met the emergencies of Indian contact as they arose. The parties to negotiation were often ill-defined, and the forms of procedure much as happened. Not only did each Colony, prior to 1774, conduct its own Indian relations, generally with little or no reference to the engagements or the interests of its white neighbors; but isolated settlements and even enterprising individuals made their own peace with the savages, or received the soil by deed from its native proprietors. Nor on the part of the Indians was there much more regard for strict legitimacy. Local chieftains were not infrequently ready to convey away lands that did not belong to them; and when a Colony grown powerful wished a pretext for usurpation, almost any Indian would do to make a treaty with or get a title from. It is scarcely necessary to say of negotiations thus conducted, that they embraced no general scheme of Indian relations; that they aimed invariably at the accomplishment of immediate and more or less local objects, and often attained these at the cost of much embarrassment in the future, and even at the expense of neighboring settlements and colonies.

Throughout the history of Colonial transactions, we find few traces of any thing like impatience of the claims of the Indians to equality in negotiation and in intercourse. Neither the power nor the character of the aborigines was then despised as now. Strong in his native illusions, his warlike prestige unbroken, the Indian still retained all that natural dignity of bearing which has been found so impressive even in his decline. The early literature of the country testifies to the disposition of the people to hold the more romantic view of the Indian character, even where the animosities of race were deadliest; nor does it seem that the general sentiment of the Colonies regarded the necessity of treating on equal terms with the great confederacies of that day as in any degree more derogatory than the civilized powers of Europe in the same period esteemed the necessity of maintaining diplomatic relations with the great Cossack power of the North. Indeed, the treaty with the Delawares in 1778 actually contemplated the formation of a league of friendly tribes under the hegemony of the Delawares, to constitute the fourteenth State of the confederation then in arms against Great Britain, with a proportional representation in Congress. And this was proposed, not by men accustomed to see negroes voting at the polls, and even sitting in the Senate of the United States, but by our conservative and somewhat aristocratic ancestors.

But after the establishment of our national independence, incidental to which had been the destruction of the warlike power of the "Six Nations," the nearest and most formidable of all the confederacies known to Colonial history, we note a louder tone taken—as was natural enough—with the aboriginal tribes, a greater readiness to act aggressively, and an increasing confidence in the competency of the white race to populate the whole of this continent. Earlier Indian wars had been in a high sense a struggle for life on the part of the infant settlements: they had been engaged in reluctantly, after being postponed by every expedient and every artifice; but the conquest of the territory north-west of the Ohio appears to have been entered upon more from a statesmanlike comprehension of the wants of the united and expanding republic, than from the pressure of immediate danger. It was but natural that the concentration of the fighting power of the States, the consciousness of a common destiny, and the cession of the western territory to the general government, should create an impatience of Indian occupation which neither the separate Colonies nor the States, struggling for independence, had felt. Yet even so we do not find that, from 1783 to 1817, the United States did much more than meet the exigency most nearly and clearly at hand.

In the latter year, however, the negotiations for a removal of the Cherokees west of the Mississippi, although commenced under strong pressure from the much-afflicted State of Georgia, and at the time without contemplation of an extension of the system to tribes less immediately in the path of settlement, mark the beginnings of a distinct Indian policy. In 1825 the scheme for the general deportation of the Indians east of the Mississippi was fairly inaugurated in the presidency of Mr. Monroe; Mr. Calhoun, his secretary of war, proposing the details of the measure. In 1834 the policy thus inaugurated was completed by the passage of the Indian Intercourse Act, though large numbers still remained to be transported West.

The features of this policy were first, the removal of the tribes beyond the limits of settlement; second, the assignment to them in perpetuity, under solemn treaty sanctions, of land sufficient to enable them to subsist by fishing and hunting, by stock-raising, or by agriculture, according to their habits and proclivities; third, their seclusion from the whites by stringent laws forbidding intercourse; fourth, the government of the Indians through their own tribal organizations, and according to their own customs and laws.

This policy, the character and relations of the two races being taken into account, we must pronounce one of sound and far-reaching statesmanship, notwithstanding that an advance of population altogether unprecedented in history has already made much of it obsolete, and rendered necessary a general re-adjustment of its details.

The first event which impaired the integrity of the scheme of President Monroe was the flight of the Mormons, under the pressure of social persecution, across the Plains in 1847. The success of this people in treating with the Indians has often been noted, and has been made the occasion of many unjust reflections upon the United States, as if a popular government, giving, both of necessity and of choice, the largest liberty to pioneer enterprise, could be reasonably expected to preserve peaceful relations with remote bands of savages as effectively as a political and religious despotism, keeping its membership compact and close in hand. But, while the Mormons have certainly been successful in maintaining good terms with the natives of the plains, it is not so certain that their influence upon the Indians has been advantageous to the government, or to the white settlers not of the church. It clearly has been for their interest to attach the natives to themselves rather than to the government; it clearly has been in their power to direct a great many agencies to that end; and it will probably require more faith in Mormon virtue than the majority of us possess to keep alive much of a doubt that they have actually done so. We certainly have the opinion of many persons well informed that it has been the constant policy of the Latter-Day Saints to teach the Indians to look to them rather than to the government as their benefactors and their protectors; to represent, as far as possible through agents and interpreters in their interest, the goods and supplies received from the United States as derived from the bounty of the church; to stir up, for special purposes or for general ends, troubles between the natives and the encroaching whites, east, west, and south; and, finally, so to alienate from the government and attach to themselves the Utes, Shoshones and Bannocks, as to assure themselves of their aid in the not improbable event of a last desperate struggle for life with the power of the United States.

The next event historically which tended to the disruption of the policy of seclusion was the discovery of gold upon the Pacific slope, which in three years replaced the few insinuating priests and indolent rancheros, who had previously formed the white population of the coast, with a hundred thousand eager gold-hunters. That the access of such a population—bold, adventurous, prompt to violence, reckless, and too often wantonly unjust and cruel—should stir up trouble and strife with the sixty thousand natives, upon whom they pressed at every point in their eager search for the precious metals, was a thing of course. The Oregon War followed, and occasional affairs like that at Ben Wright's Cave, leaving a heritage of hate from which such fruits as the recent Modoc War are not inaptly gathered.

In 1855-6 occurred the great movement, mainly under a political impulse, which carried population beyond the Missouri. In two or three years the tribes and bands which were native to Kansas and Nebraska, as well as those which had been removed from States east of the Mississippi, were suffering the worst effects of white intrusion. Of the Free-State party, not a few zealous members seemed disposed to compensate themselves for their benevolent efforts on behalf of the negro by crowding the Indian to the wall; while the slavery propagandists steadily maintained their consistency by impartially persecuting the members of both the inferior races.

Thus far we have shown how, instead of the natural boundary between the races which was contemplated in the establishment of the Indian policy of the government under Pres. Monroe, two lines of settlement had, prior to 1860, been pushed against the Indians,—one eastward from the Pacific, one westward from the Missouri, driving the natives in many cases from the soil guaranteed to them by treaty, and otherwise leaving them at a hundred points in dangerous contact with a border population not apt to be nice in its sense of justice, or slow to retaliate real or fancied injuries; while, during the same period, a colony of religious fanatics, foreign to the faith, and very largely also to the blood, of our people, was planted in the very heart of the Indian country, with passions strongly aroused against the government, and with interests opposed to the peace and security of the frontier.

But it was not until after the Civil War that the progress of events dealt its heaviest blow at the policy of Indian seclusion. In 1867-8 the great plough of industrial civilization drew its deep furrow across the continent, from the Missouri to the Pacific, as a sign of dissolution to the immemorial possessors of the soil. Already the Pacific Railroad has brought changes which, without it, might have been delayed for half a century. Not only has the line of settlement been made continuous from Omaha to Sacramento, so far as the character of the soil will permit; but from a score of points upon the railroad population has gone north and gone south, following up the courses of the streams, and searching out every trace of gold upon the mountains, till recesses have been penetrated which five years ago were scarcely known to trappers and guides, and lodgement has been effected upon many even of the more remote reservations. The natural effects of this introduction by the railroad of white population into the Indian country have not yet been wholly wrought. There are still reservations where the seclusion of the Indians is practically maintained by the ill-repressed hostility of tribes; some, where the same result is secured by the barrenness or inaccessibility of the regions in which they are situated; but it is evident that the lapse of another such five years will find every reservation between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains surrounded, and to a degree penetrated, by prospectors and pioneers, miners, ranchmen, or traders. Against the intrusion of these classes, in the numbers in which they are now appearing in the Indian country, the Intercourse Act of 1834 is wholly ineffective. It was an admirable weapon against the single intruder: it avails nothing against the lawless combinations of squatter territories.

While the movements of population have thus in great part destroyed, and threaten soon utterly to destroy, at once the seclusion in which it was hoped the native tribes might find opportunity for the development of their better qualities, and the natural resources to which, in the long interval that must precede the achievement of true industrial independence by a people taught through centuries of barbarous traditions to despise labor, the Indian might look for subsistence, Congress in 1871 struck the severest blow that remained to be given to the Indian policy, in its fourth great feature,—that of the self-government of tribes according to their own laws and customs,—by declaring that "Hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty."

In the face of three hundred and eighty-two treaties with Indian tribes, ratified by the Senate as are treaties with foreign powers, this may perhaps be accepted as quite the most conspicuous illustration in history of the adage, "Circumstances alter cases."[L] Since Anthony Wayne received the cession of pretty much the whole State of Ohio from the Wyandots, Delawares, and Shawnees, times have indeed changed; and it is fitting that we should change with them. The declaration of Congress is well enough on grounds of justice and national honor; but it none the less aims a deadly blow at the tribal autonomy which was made a vital part of the original scheme of Indian control. The declaration cited does not in terms deny the self-sufficiency of the tribe for the purposes of internal self-government; but the immediate necessary effect of it is further to weaken the already waning power of the chiefs, while Congress yet fails to furnish any substitute for their authority, either by providing for the organization of the tribes on more democratic principles, with direct responsibility to the government, or by arming the Indian agents with magisterial powers adequate to the exigency.

Under the traditional policy of the United States, the Indian agent was a minister resident to a "domestic dependent nation." The Act of March 3, 1871, destroys the nationality, and leaves the agent in the anomalous position of finding no authority within the tribe to which he can address himself, yet having in himself no legal authority over the tribe or the members of it. It is true, that, as matter of fact, agents, some in greater and some in less degree, continue to exercise control after a fashion over the movements of tribes and bands. This is partly due to the force of habit, partly to superior intelligence, partly to the discretion which the agent exercises in the distribution of the government's bounty; but every year the control becomes less effectual, and agents and chiefs complain more and more that they cannot hold the young braves in check.

The above recital, however tedious, has been necessary in order to set fairly forth the actual condition of the scheme of seclusion, which is still, in profession and seeming, the policy of the government. It must be evident from the recital, that the purposes of this policy are not being answered, and that the increasing difficulties of the situation in the wider and closer contact of the two races will soon compel Congress to review the whole field of Indian affairs, and establish relations, which, if they cannot in the nature of things be permanent, will at least have reference to the facts of the present, and the probabilities of the immediate future. Whenever Congress shall take up in earnest this question of the disposition to be made of the Indian tribes, its choice will clearly be between two antagonistic schemes,—seclusion and citizenship. Either the government must place the Indians upon narrower reservations, proportioned to their requirements for subsistence by agriculture, and no longer by the chase,—reservations which shall be located with the view of avoiding as much as possible the contact of the races, and working as little hindrance as may be to the otherwise free development of population; and around these put up the barriers of forty years ago, re-enforced as the changed circumstances seem to require: or the government must prepare to receive the Indians into the body of the people, freely accepting, for them and for the general community, all the dangers and inconveniences of personal contact and legal equality. No middle ground is tenable. If substantial seclusion is not to be maintained, at any cost, by the sequestration of tribes and by the rigid prohibition of intercourse, it is worse than useless to keep up the forms of reservations and non-intercourse. Many tribes are already as fully subject to all the debasing influences of contact with the whites as they could be if dispersed among the body of citizens; while yet they are without any of the advantages popularly attributed to citizenship.

It requires no deep knowledge of human nature, and no very extensive review of Congressional legislation, to assure us that many and powerful interests will oppose themselves to a re-adjustment of the Indian tribes between the Missouri and the Pacific, under the policy of seclusion and non-intercourse. Railroad enterprises, mining enterprises, and land enterprises of every name, will find any scheme that shall be seriously proposed to be quite the most objectionable of all that could be offered: every State, and every Territory that aspires to become a State, will strive to keep the Indians as far as possible from its own borders; while powerful combinations of speculators will make their fight for the last acre of Indian lands with just as much rapacity as if they had not already, in Western phrase, "gobbled" a hundred thousand square miles of it.

In addition to the political, industrial, and speculative interests which will thus oppose the restoration of the policy of Indian seclusion from the shattered condition to which the events just recited have reduced it, three classes of persons may be counted on to lend their support to the plan of introducing the Indians, who have thus far been treated as "the wards of the nation," directly into the body of our citizenship. We have, first, those who have become impatient of the demands made upon the time of Congress and the attention of the people in the name of the Indians, and who wish, once for all, to have done with them. Such impatience is neither unnatural nor wholly unreasonable. It must be confessed that no good work ever made heavier drafts upon the faith and patience of the philanthropic. What with the triviality of the Indian character, the absurd punctilio with which, in his lowest estate, he insists on embarrassing the most ordinary business, and his devotion to sentiments utterly repugnant to our social and industrial genius; what, again, with the endless variety of tribal relations and tribal claims, and the complexity of tribal interests, aggravated by jealousy and suspicion where no previous intercourse has existed, and by feuds and traditions of hatred where intercourse has existed,—the conduct of Indian affairs, whether in legislation or in administration, is in no small degree perplexing and irritating. The Indian treaties prior to 1842 make up one entire volume of the General Statutes, while the treaties and Indian laws since that date would fill two volumes of equal size. It cannot be denied that this is taking a good deal of trouble for a very small and not very useful portion of the population of the country: and it is not to be wondered at that many citizens, and not a few Congressmen, are much disposed to cut the knot instead of untying it, and summarily dismiss the Indian as the subject of peculiar consideration, by enfranchising him, not for any good it may do to him, but for the relief of our legislation.

Next, we have that large and increasing class of Americans, who, either from natural bias, or from the severe political shocks of the last twelve years, have accepted what we may call the politics of despair, by which is meant, not so much a belief in any definite ill fortune for the Republic, as a conviction that the United States are being borne on to an end not seen, by a current which it is impossible to resist; that it is futile longer to seek to interpose restraints upon the rate of this progress, or to change its direction; that the nation has already gone far outside the traditional limits of safe political navigation, and is taking its course, for weal or woe, across an unknown sea, not unlike that little squadron which sailed out from the Straits of Saltez on the 3d of August, 1492. Many of the persons now holding these views were formerly among the most conservative of our people; but emancipation, negro suffrage, and the consolidation of power consequent upon the war, have wholly unsettled their convictions, leaving them either hopeless of the Republic, or, as temperament serves, eager to crowd on sail, and prove at once the worst and the best of fortune. In this despair of conservative methods, some of these men have acquired an oddly objective way of looking at their country, which to every man ought to be a part of himself, and have apparently as much of a curious as of a patriotic interest in watching the development of the new forms and forces of national life. Men of this class (and they are not few) are not likely to hesitate in extending to the Indians citizenship and the ballot. A little more or less, they think, can make no difference. After negro suffrage, any thing.

Finally, we have a class of persons, who, from no impatience of the subject, and from no indifference to the welfare of the aborigines, will oppose the policy of seclusion, as an anomaly not to be tolerated in our form of government. These are men who cannot bear, that, from any assumed necessity or for any supposed advantage, exception should be made of any class of inhabitants, or in respect to any portion of territory, to the rule of uniform rights and responsibilities, and of absolute freedom of movement, contract, and intercourse, the whole nation and the whole land over. Were the Indians ten times as numerous, were their claims to consideration stronger by no matter how much, and were the importance to them of seclusion far more clear than it appears, these political philosophers would steadily oppose the scheme. They might regret the mischiefs which would result to the Indian from exposure to corrupting influences; they might be disposed to favor the most liberal allowances from the public treasury, in compensation to him for his lands, and for his industrial endowment: but they would none the less relentlessly insist that the red man should take his equal chance with white and black, with all the privileges and all the responsibilities of political manhood.

In view of the likelihood that the expediency of Indian citizenship will thus become at an early date a practical legislative question, it seems desirable in the connection to state the constitutional relations of the subject. The judicial decisions are somewhat confused, although, from the date (1831) of the decision of Chief-Justice Marshall in the Cherokee Nation vs. the State of Georgia (5 Peters, 1), to that (1870) of the decision in the Cherokee Tobacco (11 Wallace, 616), there has been a marked progress (note especially the decision of Chief-Justice Taney in the United States vs. Rogers, 4 Howard, 567) towards the stronger affirmation of the complete and sufficient sovereignty of the United States. Yet in December, 1870, the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, Carpenter presenting the Report, after an incomplete, and in some respects an inaccurate and inconsequential[M] recital of judicial opinions, made the following startling announcement:—

"Inasmuch as the Constitution treats Indian tribes as belonging to the rank of nations capable of making treaties, it is evident that an act of Congress which should assume to treat the members of a tribe as subject to the municipal jurisdiction of the United States would be unconstitutional and void."

That this is not good law need not be argued, inasmuch as the decisions previously cited in the United States vs. Rogers and in the Cherokee Tobacco, assert the complete sovereignty of the United States in strong terms[N]; in the latter, the doctrine being explicitly affirmed, that not only does the capability of making a treaty with the United States, which has been held to reside in an Indian tribe, not exempt that tribe from the legislative power of Congress, but that not even a treaty made and ratified, among the stipulations of which is such an exemption, even were that exemption the consideration for cessions the benefit of which the United States has enjoyed and continues to enjoy, can hinder Congress from at any time extending its complete legislative control over the tribe. Considerations of good faith may influence individual Congressmen in such a case; but the constitutional competence of Congress in the premises is declared to be beyond question.

Nor is the extraordinary proposition of the Committee's report better in reason than in law. The argument is in effect this: The United States makes treaties with foreign nations; the United States cannot legislate for foreign nations; the United States may make treaties with Indian tribes: ergo, the United States cannot legislate for Indian tribes. This course of reasoning implies that the sole objection to the United States legislating for foreign nations is, that they makes treaties with them: whereas there are several other good and sufficient objections thereto. It also implies that the sole consideration for the United States treating with Indian tribes, called by Chief-Justice Marshall "domestic dependent nations," is, that they cannot legislate for them: whereas the real consideration has been one of practical convenience, not of legislative competence.

We shall best set forth the constitutional relations of this subject by presenting the premises, whether of fact or of law, upon which all the judicial decisions relative thereto have been founded.

1. As matter of fact, the European powers engaged in the discovery and conquest of the New World left with the Indian tribes the regulation of their own domestic concerns, while claiming the sovereignty of the soil occupied by them. The Indian tribes thus continued to act as separate political communities.[O]

2. The Constitution of the United States excludes from the basis of Congressional representation "Indians not taxed," without further defining the same.

3. The Congress of the United States has, with a few recent exceptions, treated Indians in tribal relations as without the municipal jurisdiction of the United States.

4. The Senate of the United States has confirmed nearly four hundred treaties, negotiated by the executive, under the general treaty-making powers conferred by the Constitution, with tribes which embrace about three-fifths of the present Indian population of the United States. The House of Representatives has, from the foundation of the government, as occasion required, originated bills for the appropriation of moneys to carry out the provisions of such treaties.

This comprises all that is essential in this connection. The indicia gathered from particular acts of the government, or from the phraseology of individual treaties, really add nothing to the above.

We believe the following propositions to be consistent with the facts of history and with the latest judicial decisions.

1. The exclusion by the Constitution of "Indians not taxed" from the basis of representation was in no sense a guaranty to the Indian tribes of their political autonomy, but was a provision in the interest of an equitable apportionment of political power among the States, some States having many Indians within their limits, others few or none.

2. The self-government enjoyed by the Indian tribes under the Constitution of the United States, as under the European powers, has always been a government by sufferance, by toleration, by permission. The United States, for their own convenience, have allowed this self-government, because to reduce the savages to the condition of submitting to civilized laws would have involved a great expense of blood and treasure; while through the tribal organization a much better government, for the purposes of the civilized power if not for the welfare of the Indians themselves, could be obtained, than through an administration which should disregard that organization. But this toleration of savage self-government worked no prejudice to the sovereignty of the United States.

3. The decay of a tribe in numbers and in cohesion, no matter to what extent carried, does not bring the members of such tribe within the municipal jurisdiction of the State wherein they are found, so long as the tribal organization continues to be recognized by the National Government. See the Kansas Indians, 5 Wallace, 737.

4. Congress is constitutionally competent to extend the laws of the United States at once over every Indian tribe within the Territories, if not within the States of the Union, even though treaties may guarantee to individual tribes complete and perpetual political independence; the breach of faith involved in the latter case being matter for possible conscientious scruples on the part of legislators, not for judicial cognizance. See 11 Wallace, 616; 2 Curtis, 454; 1 Woolworth, 155.

We have thought it important thus to review the doctrine of the Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because, from the high standing of the Committee, from the assumption which the Report[P] makes of completeness in the citation of "treaties, laws, and judicial decisions" pertinent to the subject, on the express ground of a desire to enlighten, not only Congress, but the country, in respect to our Indian relations, and from the wide circulation given to the Report, as compared with that obtained by an ordinary decision of the Circuit or Supreme Court of the United States, the Report has apparently come to be accepted by Congress and the country as an authoritative exposition of the history and law of the subject although, in the very month in which it was submitted to Congress, the Supreme Court, in the Cherokee Tobacco, pronounced a doctrine which cuts up that of the Report, root and branch.

Such being the constitutional competence of Congress to deal with the Indians, without restraint either from the self-government hitherto permitted them, or from treaties to which the United States are a party, it is for Congress to decide, firstly, what the good faith of the nation requires, and, secondly, what course will best accomplish the social and industrial elevation of the native tribes, with due consideration had for the interests of the present body of citizens.

How, then, stands the matter with the faith of the nation? By the Report on Indian Affairs for 1872, there appear (p. 16) to be in the neighborhood of 120,000 Indians with whom the United States have no treaty relations. These certainly can have no claims to exemption from direct control, whenever the United States shall see fit to extend its laws over them, either to incorporate them in the body of its citizenship, or to seclude them for their own good. There are, again, as nearly as we can determine by a comparison of treaties with the Reports of the Indian Office, about 125,000 Indians with whom the United States have treaties unexpired, but to whom no distinct guaranty or promise of autonomy has been made. Examination of these treaties reveals nothing which should prevent the United States from establishing a magistracy and a code of laws for the government of these tribes, according to principles suited to their present condition, yet tending to raise them to a higher social and industrial condition. On the other hand, the perpetual interdiction of all white persons upon the reservations of these tribes, except "such officers, agents, and employees of the government as may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law," would seem to preclude the possibility of these regions ever being opened to settlement, and the Indians thereon resolved into the body of citizens on equal terms. But, as matter of fact, not even such treaty provisions need, with intelligent and firm but kindly management, greatly or long embarrass the government in the adjustment of the Indian question according to either principle which may be adopted, seclusion or citizenship. Few of these tribes but are obliged, even now, to seek from the United States more aid than they are entitled to by treaty; while it is certain that in the near future most, if not all, will be thrown in comparative helplessness upon our bounty. The United States being the sole party to which they can cede their lands (8 Wheaton, 543), and the sale of the great body of these lands being their only resource, the government will have the opportunity, not only without fraud or wrong to this people, but for their highest good, and indeed for their salvation from the doom otherwise awaiting them, to cancel the whole of these ill-considered treaties, leaving the natives where they ought to be,—subject to direct control by Congress. We repeat, there need never be any difficulty in securing, at the right time and in the right way, the relinquishment of lands or privileges from the Indians. They are, unfortunately, only too ready to sacrifice the future to present indulgence; while the government on its part can always afford to pay them far more for their lands than their lands are worth to them. Under this relation of the parties in interest, and with the pressure of actual want, due to the inability of the natives properly to cultivate what they possess, the United States may at an early date, with good faith and judicious management, easily secure the relinquishment of every franchise that stands in the way of a satisfactory adjustment of the difficulty.

There is still a third body of Indians, about 55,000 in number, occupying chiefly the regions known as the Indian Territory, and representing the tribes which were the subjects of the colonization policy of Pres. Monroe, to whom the United States have plighted their faith that no foreign authority shall ever be extended over them without their consent. These are not beggarly and vagabond Indians, to whom the offer of subsistence would be sufficient to obtain the relinquishment of their franchises, or the cession of their lands. They are self-supporting, independent, and even wealthy. Their cereal crops exceed those of all the Territories of the United States combined. In the number and value of horses and cattle, they are surpassed by the people of but one Territory; in expenditures for education, by the people of no Territory.[Q] If these people ever relinquish their autonomy, it will be because they desire the privileges of American citizens. This may well be in the immediate future, and surely will be, sooner or later, unless they are made to fear the violence and greed of their white neighbors. Meanwhile, they should be honorably protected in the enjoyment of their treaty rights. They have already advanced so far in civilization as to secure their own future, as against any thing but squatter and railroad rapacity; and their fate does not properly form a part of the Indian problem of the present day.

Excepting thus the present inhabitants of the so-called Indian Territory, who ought to be excepted from any scheme that embraces the half-civilized and the wholly savage tribes, we have practically a clear field for any policy which Congress shall determine to be best suited to the serious exigency of the situation; for, however easy to dismiss the subject for a time with ridicule, the task of so disposing a nomad population of 200,000 to 240,000, as to reduce to a minimum the obstruction it shall offer to the progress of settlement and of industry, without leaving the germs of lasting evil to a score of future States, and at the same time to secure the highest welfare of that population,—this task is a most serious one, to which the best statesmanship of the nation may well address itself.

In characterizing the classes of persons who will naturally be found among the advocates of the policy of an immediate bestowal of citizenship upon the Indian tribes, whether they be willing or unwilling, whether for good or evil, we have in effect stated all the arguments in favor of that policy; for it is not probable, that, aside from those who would properly be placed under one or another of the classes indicated, there are a score of persons reasonably well informed in Indian affairs, who would so much as affect to believe that such a course would have other than disastrous consequences to the natives.

The considerations which favor the policy of seclusion with more or less of industrial constraint are so direct and familiar, and are sustained by so general a concurrence of testimony and authority, that they will not require us greatly to protract this paper in their exposition and enforcement. These considerations are four in number; three of them having especial reference to the interests of the Indians, the fourth bearing on the welfare of the States to be formed out of the territory now roamed over by the native tribes.

First: so long as an Indian tribe is left to its own proper forces and dispositions, free from all foreign attraction, it is not only easily governed, but the whole body obeys the recognized law of the community with almost absolute unanimity. No expressions would be too strong to characterize the social homogeneity of an Indian tribe, and the complete domination of the accepted ideas of right and wrong, of honor and baseness. Public opinion is there conclusive upon every individual; and the spectacle, seen in every town and village with us, of large numbers openly practising that which public opinion reprobates, or refusing to do that which public opinion prescribes, is wholly unknown. We do not say that this is the most desirable as the ultimate form of society; but this tyranny of sentiment may and should be made a most powerful auxiliary for good in the early stages of industrial and social progress for this people.

Second: it is unfortunately true, that, when the Indian is, by the powerful attraction of a race which his savage breast never fails to recognize as superior, released from the control of the public sentiment which he has been accustomed to obey, he submits himself by an almost irresistible tendency to the worst and not to the best influences of civilized society. While there are undeniably exceptions to this statement, it is supported by such a mass of melancholy evidence in the history of scores of tribes once renowned for all the native virtues, that no one has the right to advocate the introduction to such influences of uninstructed and unprovided tribes, unless he is prepared to contemplate the ruin of nine-tenths of the subjects of his policy.

Nor is it the worst elements of the Indian which thus submit themselves to the worst elements of the white community. The very men who bear themselves most loftily, according to the native standards of virtue, are quite as likely to fall, under exposure to white contact, as are the weakest of the tribe. Their familiar attractions all broken, their immemorial traditions rudely dispelled, their natural leadership destroyed, the members of a wild tribe, strong and weak together, become the easy prey of the rascally influences of civilized society.

Third: the experiment of citizenship, except with the more advanced tribes, is at the serious risk, amounting almost to a certainty, of the immediate loss to the Indians of the whole of their scanty patrimony, through the improvident and wasteful alienation of the lands patented to them, the Indians being left thus without resource for the future, except in the bounty of the general government or in local charity. On this point a few facts will be more eloquent than many words.

The United States have by recent treaties or legislative enactments admitted to citizenship the following Indians,—In Kansas, Kickapoos, 12; Delawares, 20; Wyandots, 473; Pottawatomies, 1,604: in Dakota, Sioux, 250: in Minnesota, Winnebagoes, 159: in Wisconsin, Stockbridges, to a number not yet officially ascertained: in Michigan, Ottawas and Chippewas, 6,039: in the Indian Territory, Ottawas of Blanchard's Fork, 150. Time has not yet been given for the full development of the consequences of thus devolving responsibility upon these Indians; but we already have information, official or semi-official, to the effect that the majority of the Pottawatomie citizens, after selling their lands in Kansas, have gone to the Indian Territory, and re-associated themselves as a tribe; that of the Wyandots, considerable numbers have attached themselves to the re-organized tribe in the Indian Territory; that of the citizen Ottawas of Blanchard's Fork, nearly all have disposed of their allotted lands, and are still cared for to some extent by the government as Indians; that of the Ottawas and Chippewas of Michigan, a majority certainly, and probably a large majority, have sold the lands patented to them in severalty,—in many cases the negotiation preceding the issue of patents, two parties of white sharpers contesting for the favor of the agent, in the way of early information as to the precise lands assigned, and the disappointed faction, in at least one instance, resorting to burglary and larceny for the needed documents.

It will be thus seen, that, of these Indians upon whom the experiment of citizenship has been tried, more than half, probably at least two-thirds, are now homeless, and must be re-endowed by the government, or they will sink to a condition of hopeless poverty and misery.

Fourth: the dissolution of the tribal bonds, and the dispersing of two hundred thousand Indians among the settlements, will devolve upon the present and future States beyond the Missouri an almost intolerable burden of vagabondage, pauperism, and crime. It is not even essential to the result of a dispersion of these tribes that the law should pronounce their dissolution as political communities. Unless the system of reservations shall soon be recast, and the laws of non-intercourse thoroughly enforced, the next fifteen or twenty years will see the great majority of the Indians on the plains mixed up with white settlements, wandering in small camps from place to place, shifting sores upon the public body, the men resorting for a living to basket-making, beggary, and hog-stealing, the women to fortune-telling, beggary, and harlotry; while a remnant will seek to maintain a little longer, in the mountains, their savage independence, fleeing before the advance of settlement when they can, fighting in sullen despair when they must. It is doubtless true that some tribes could still remain together as social, even after being dissolved as legal, communities; but the fate we have indicated would certainly befall by far the greater part of the Indians of the plains, were the reservation system broken up in their present social and industrial condition. To believe that a pioneer population of two, three, or four millions, such as is likely to occupy this region within the next twenty years, can, in addition to its own proper elements of disorder, safely absorb such a mass of corruption, requires no small faith in the robust virtue of our people, and in the saving efficacy of republican institutions.

This last consideration we have urged, not on behalf of the Indians, but in the interest of the present white communities beyond the Missouri, to whom such a dispersion of the tribes would be a far greater burden than the maintenance of the reservation system in its integrity could possibly be, and in the interest of a score of States of the Union yet to be formed out of that territory. Surely it is not in such cement that we wish to have the foundations of our future society laid.

We conclude, then, that Indian citizenship is to be regarded as an end, and not as a means; that it is the goal to which each tribe should in turn be conducted, through a course of industrial instruction and constraint, maintained by the government with kindness but also with firmness, under the shield of the reservation system. It is true that this system can no longer be kept up without sacrifice on our part. In the days of Pres. Monroe, the sequestration of the Indians involved only the expense of transporting eighty or ninety thousand persons to a region not settled, nor then desired for settlement. To-day there is no portion of our territory where citizens of the United States are not preparing to make their homes. To cut off a reservation sufficient for the wants of this unfortunate people in their rude ways of life; to hedge it in with strict laws of non-intercourse, turning aside, for the purpose, railway and highway alike; and, upon the soil thus secluded, to work patiently out the problem of Indian civilization,—is not to be deemed a light sacrifice to national honor and duty. Yet that the government and people of the United States cannot discharge their obligations to the aborigines without pains and care and expense, affords no reason for declining the task.

The claim of the Indian upon us is of no common character. The advance of railways and settlements is fast pushing him from his home, and, in the steady extinction of game, is cutting him off from the only means of subsistence of which he knows how to avail himself. He will soon be left homeless and helpless in the midst of civilization, upon the soil that once was his alone. The freedom of territorial and industrial expansion which is bringing imperial greatness to the nation, to the Indian brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary. Surely there is obligation found, in such considerations as these, to make good in some way to him the loss by which we so largely gain. Nor is this obligation one that can be discharged by lavish endowments, which it is of moral certainty he will squander, or by merely placing him in situations where he might prosper, had he the industrial aptitudes of the white man, acquired through centuries of laborious training. Savage as he is by no fault of his own, and stripped at once of savage independence and savage competence by our act, for our advantage, we have made ourselves responsible before God and the world for his rescue from destruction, and his elevation to social and industrial manhood, at whatever expense and at whatever inconvenience. The corner-stone of our Indian policy should be the recognition by government and by the people, that we owe the Indian, not endowments and lands only, but also forbearance, patience, care, and instruction.

It is not unusual to sneer at the sentimentality of "the Quakers" and other active friends of this race. But we may as well remember that posterity will grow much more sentimental over the fate of the Indian than any Quaker or philanthropist of to-day. The United States will be judged at the bar of history according to what they shall have done in two respects,—by their disposition of negro slavery, and by their treatment of the Indians. In the one matter, the result is fortunately secure; nor will it be remembered against us, in diminution of our honor, that we procrastinated and sought to evade the issue, and for a time made terms and compromised with wrong. In that, when at last we were brought face to face with the question, we did the one thing that was right, and in tears and blood expiated our own and our fathers' errors, the ages to come will give us no grudging and stinted praise. Would that we were equally sure that no stain will rest upon our fame for what shall yet be done or left undone towards the original possessors of our soil! What is past cannot be recalled; nor has any thing yet gone into history that need deeply dishonor us as a nation. Posterity will judge very leniently of all that has been done in heat of blood, in the struggle for life and for the possession of the soil by the early Colonists; it will not greatly attribute blame that, in our industrial and territorial expansion, and a conquest of savage nature more rapid than is recorded of any other people, savage man has suffered somewhat at our hands; it will not attempt nicely to apportion the mutual injuries of the frontier, to decide which was first and which was worst in wrong, red man or white; it will have ample consideration for the difficulties which the government has encountered in preserving the peace between the natives and the bold, rude pioneers of civilization. But if, when the Indians shall have been thrown helpless upon our mercy, surrounded and disarmed by the extension of settlement, and impoverished by the very causes which promote our wealth and greatness, we fail to make ample provision out of our abundance, and to apply it in all patience and with all pains, to save alive these remnants of a once powerful people, and reconcile them to civilization, there is much reason to fear, that, however successfully we may excuse ourselves to ourselves by pleading the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, impartial history will pronounce us recreant to a sacred duty.

FOOTNOTES:

[K] From The International Review, May, 1874.

[L] The doctrine of a vanishing Indian nationality was strongly insisted on by Mr. Justice McLean in his opinion in Worcester vs. the State of Georgia:—

"If a tribe of Indians shall become so degraded or reduced in numbers as to lose the power of self-government, the protection of the local law, of necessity, must be extended over them. The point at which this exercise of power by a State would be proper need not now be considered, if, indeed, it be a judicial question.... But, if a contingency shall occur which shall render the Indians who reside in a State incapable of self-government, either by moral degradation or a reduction of their numbers, it would undoubtedly be in the power of a State government to extend over them the aegis of its laws."—6 Peters, pp. 593-4.

If, as would appear, Mr. Justice McLean by this intends that a State may exercise such discretion so long as the United States continue to recognize the tribal organization, however feeble or corrupt it may in fact be, the doctrine is flatly contradicted by that of the Supreme Court in the Kansas Indians.—5 Wallace, 737.

[M] We are aware that this is a heavy charge; but it is justified by the facts. The recital is incomplete. The decision in the United States vs. Rogers is not referred to. This case is, as it was treated by the Supreme Court in the Cherokee Tobacco, of the highest importance.

The recital is inaccurate. An opinion is given at length as that of Kent in Jackson vs. Goodell, 20 Johnson, 193. This is a case in the Supreme Court of New York, Chief-Justice Spencer delivering the opinion, Kent having been previously appointed chancellor. The expressions quoted by the Committee are to be found in Goodell vs. Jackson, in error to the Court of Appeals, 20 Johnson, 693. The recital is inconsequential, as will appear by what is said further in the text.

[N] "We think it too firmly and clearly established to admit of dispute, that the Indian tribes residing within the territorial limits of the United States are subject to their authority; and where the country occupied by them is not within the limit of one of the States, Congress may by law punish any offence committed there, whether the offender be a white man or an Indian."—Taney, Chief-Justice.

In the Cherokee Tobacco, the court, quoting from Chief-Justice Taney the sentence just preceding, and a similar utterance of Chief-Justice Marshall, remarks, "Both these propositions are so well settled in our jurisprudence, that it would be a waste of time to discuss them, or to refer to further authorities in their support."

[O] Throughout the whole course of this discussion on the constitutional relations of the Indians, we should indicate as subject to possible exception the tribes found upon soil ceded by Mexico. It is claimed, that, as Mexico never treated the Indians within its jurisdiction other than as a peculiar class of citizens, all the members of those tribes became citizens of the United States by virtue of the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848.

[P] "Although the Committee have not regarded the questions proposed for their consideration by this resolution as at all difficult to answer, yet respect for the Senate, which ordered the investigation, and the existence of some loose popular notions of modern date in regard to the power of the President and Senate to exercise the treaty-making power in dealing with the Indian tribes, have induced your Committee to examine the questions thus at length, and present extracts from treaties, laws, and judicial decisions; and your Committee indulge the hope that a reference to these sources of information may tend to fix more clearly in the minds of Congress and the people the true theory of our relations to these unfortunate tribes."—Report, p. 11. It would, perhaps, have been fortunate had the Committee found the questions difficult.

[Q] See Annual Report, Board of Indian Commissioners, 1872, p. 12.

Constant efforts are made to break the force of such comparisons as these, by asserting that the progress of the Indian Territory in industry and the arts of life is due to white men incorporated with the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws. If this be true, it would seem that white men, when brought under Indian laws, and adopted into Indian families, exhibit qualities superior to those which they develop when controlling themselves, and organizing their own forms of industry and of government. This suggests the inquiry, whether it might not be well to turn over two or three Territories that might be named, to the Indians, with liberty to pick out white men for adoption and for instruction, in the hope that these communities might in time be brought up to the condition of that of which the Indians have had sole control for forty years.



AN ACCOUNT

OF THE NUMBERS, LOCATION, AND SOCIAL, AND INDUSTRIAL CONDITION OF EACH IMPORTANT TRIBE AND BAND OF INDIANS WITHIN THE UNITED STATES.

[From the report of Francis A. Walker, U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the year 1872.]

The Indians within the limits of the United States, exclusive of those in Alaska, number, approximately, 300,000.

(a) They may be divided, according to their geographical location or range, into five grand divisions, as follows: in Minnesota, and States east of the Mississippi River, about 32,500; in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory, 70,650; in the Territories of Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, 65,000; in Nevada, and the Territories of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, 84,000; and on the Pacific slope, 48,000.

(b) In respect to the three lines of railroads—built or projected—between the States and the Pacific Ocean, viz., the northern, central, and southern routes, they may be divided, excluding those residing east of Minnesota and of the Missouri River south of Dakota, as follows: between the proposed northern route and the British Possessions, about 36,000; between the northern and central routes, 92,000; between the central and the proposed southern routes, 61,000; and between the southern route and Mexico, 85,000: making a total of 274,000.

(c) As regards their means of support and methods of subsistence, they may be divided as follows: those who support themselves upon their own reservations, receiving nothing from the government except interest on their own moneys, or annuities granted them in consideration of the cession of their lands to the United States, number about 130,000; those who are entirely subsisted by the government, about 31,000; those in part subsisted, 84,000,—together about 115,000; those who subsist by hunting and fishing, upon roots, nuts, berries, &c., or by begging and stealing, about 55,000.

(d) They may be divided again, with respect to their connection with the government, as follows: there are about 150,000 who may be said to remain constantly upon their reservations, and are under the complete control of agents appointed by the government; 95,000 who at times visit their agencies either for food or for gossip, or for both, but are generally roaming either on or off their reservations, engaged in hunting or fishing; and 55,000 who never visit an agency, and over whom the government as yet exercises practically no control, but most of whom are inoffensive, and commit no acts of hostility against the government.

(e) Again: it may be said, that, of the 300,000 Indians of the country, about 180,000 have treaties with the government; 40,000 have no treaties with the United States, but have reservations set apart by executive order or otherwise for their occupancy, and are in charge of agents appointed by the government; 25,000 have no reservations, but are more or less under the control of agents appointed for them, and receive more or less assistance from the government; the remainder consisting of the same 55,000 already twice described, over whom the government exercises, practically, no control, and for whom there are no treaty or other provisions.

(f) As to civilization, they may, though with no great degree of assurance, be divided, according to a standard taken with reasonable reference to what might fairly be expected of a race with such antecedents and traditions, as follows: civilized, 97,000; semi-civilized, 125,000; wholly barbarous, 78,000.

MINNESOTA, AND EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.

NEW YORK.

The Indians of New York, remnants of the once powerful "Six Nations," number five thousand and seventy. They occupy six reservations in the State, containing in the aggregate 68,668 acres. Two of these reservations, viz., the Alleghany and Cattaraugus, belonged originally to the Colony of Massachusetts, but by sale and assignment passed into the hands of a company, the Indians holding a perpetual right of occupancy, and the company referred to, or the individual members thereof, owning the ultimate fee. The same state of facts formerly existed in regard to the Tonawanda reserve; but the Indians who occupy it have purchased the ultimate fee of a portion of the reserve, which is now held in trust for them by the Secretary of the Interior. The State of New York exercises sovereignty over these reservations. The reservations occupied by the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Tuscaroras, have been provided for by treaty stipulations between the Indians and the State of New York. All six reserves are held and occupied by the Indians in common. While the Indian tribes of the continent, with few exceptions, have been steadily decreasing in numbers, those of New York have of late more than held their own, as is shown by an increase of one hundred in the present reports over the reported number in 1871, and of thirteen hundred over the number embraced in the United-States census of 1860. On the New-York reservations are twenty-eight schools; the attendance during some portions of the past year exceeding eleven hundred, the daily average attendance being six hundred and eight. Of the teachers employed, fifteen are Indians, as fully competent for this position as their white associates. An indication of what is to be accomplished in the future, in an educational point of view, is found in the successful effort made in August last to establish a teacher's institute on the Cattaraugus reservation for the education of teachers specially for Indian schools. Thirty-eight applicants attended; and twenty-six are now under training. The statistics of individual wealth and of the aggregate product of agricultural and other industry are, in general, favorable; and a considerable increase in these regards is observed from year to year. Twenty thousand acres are under cultivation: the cereal crops are good; while noticeable success has been achieved in the raising of fruit.

MICHIGAN.

The bands or tribes residing in Michigan are the Chippewas of Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River; the Ottawas and Chippewas; the Pottawatomies of Huron; and the L'Anse band of Chippewas.

The Chippewas of Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River, numbering sixteen hundred and thirty, and the Ottawas and Chippewas, six thousand and thirty-nine, are indigenous to the country. They are well advanced in civilization; have, with few exceptions, been allotted lands under treaty provisions, for which they have received patents; and are now entitled to all the privileges and benefits of citizens of the United States. Those to whom no allotments have been made can secure homesteads under the provisions of the act of June 10, 1872. All treaty stipulations with these Indians have expired. They now have no money or other annuities paid to them by the United States Government. The three tribes first named have in all four schools, with one hundred and fifteen scholars; and the last, two schools, with one hundred and fifty-two scholars.

The Pottawatomies of Huron number about fifty.

The L'Anse band of Chippewas, numbering eleven hundred and ninety-five, belong with the other bands of the Chippewas of Lake Superior. They occupy a reservation of about forty-eight thousand three hundred acres, situated on Lake Superior, in the extreme northern part of the State. But few of them are engaged in agriculture, most of them depending for their subsistence on hunting and fishing. They have two schools, with an attendance of fifty-six scholars.

The progress of the Indians of Michigan in civilization and industry has been greatly hindered in the past by a feeling of uncertainty in regard to their permanent possession and enjoyment of their homes. Since the allotment of land, and the distribution of either patents or homestead certificates to these Indians (the L'Anse or Lake Superior Chippewas, a people of hunting and fishing habits, excepted), a marked improvement has been manifested on their part in regard to breaking land and building houses. The aggregate quantity of land cultivated by the several tribes is eleven thousand six hundred and twenty acres; corn, oats, and wheat being the chief products. The dwellings occupied consist of two hundred and forty-four frame and eight hundred and thirty-five log houses. The aggregate population of the several tribes named (including the confederated "Chippewas, Ottawas, and Pottawatomies," about two hundred and fifty souls, with whom the government made a final settlement in 1866 of its treaty obligations) is, by the report of their agent for the current year, nine thousand one hundred and seventeen,—an increase over the number reported for 1871 of four hundred and two, due, however, perhaps as much to the return of absent Indians as to the excess of births over deaths. In educational matters these Indians have, of late, most unfortunately, fallen short of the results of former years; for the reason mainly that, their treaties expiring, the provisions previously existing for educational uses failed.

WISCONSIN.

The bands or tribes in Wisconsin are the Chippewas of Lake Superior, the Menomonees, the Stockbridges and Munsees, the Oneidas, and certain stray bands (so called) of Winnebagoes, Pottawatomies, and Chippewas.