Part 6
[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.