Seth King Humphrey

“ The boomer turns from the shivering form to the little half-mile of land dancing in the hot sun before his feverish eyes, and mutters, "Mine, mine!"
Which of these two is the more miserable victim of the Government's gambling scheme?
Evening comes, and with it the wind dies down. The dry air quickly cools. The great rush has left its members scattered over the prairie—far too many of them for the rewards it had to offer, but the interminable fights, disputes, and lawsuits over the spoils are for other days. ”

“ Filled with a love of country—almost worshipping the high mountains, bright flashing streams, and rich fertile valleys of Idaho—they have inherited and transmitted to their children a name for bravery, for truthfulness, and honor of which they may indeed be proud. The unfortunate war into which they were driven in 1877 with the United States is far from being a blot on their escutcheon, and all brave, high-minded people the world over will honor them for their gallant defence of their homes, their families, and their hunting-ground. ”

“ There is no quick remedy in an appeal to the people. The remedy must go deep into grounded notions of what constitutes freedom and what really is government by the people; then it may reach that institution of perverted functions, Congress.
The prime requisite for the advancement of the public good is to instil in the public mind a deep, persistent distrust of the National Congress. Only by stirring to the depths can there come lasting good. ”

“ And fifty years from now, when the more venturesome among the Noble Free—free from every restraint not imposed by themselves upon themselves, free to pursue happiness to the limit of their own desires—shall have exercised their God-given rights for a half-century in the new island country of the Pacific, will the United States Government be recording the woes of little native bands in the mountains and canyons of the Philippines, "eking out a miserable existence in a half-civilized condition"? ”

“ Happily, the unanimous refusal of the Indians to sell or remove from the remnant of land which the United States has solemnly guaranteed to them, leaves no room for any question of that kind. The arguments used in favor of their removal will apply with equal force to any other place to which they might be sent; and even if they did not, these poor people, relying on the promises of their 'Great Father' for protection, prefer to keep their little homes and die by the graves of their fathers, and nothing remains but to do them simple justice and protect them in their rights. ”

“ Under the very system of government which is supposed to secure to all men an active participation in its benefits, the Indian's vital interests—establishment upon good land, with protection and equality of opportunity during his long endeavor to adopt the new civilization—are hopelessly entangled with the merely sordid, commercial side of national legislation. In all the conglomerate mass that makes up the nation, he is the only human factor without representation by vote ”

“ I point you, commencing with Lewis and Clark in 1804 to the present day, to the accounts of all travellers across the continent; and with one accord they point to the Nez Perces and Flatheads as two bright, shining points in a long and weary pilgrimage across a prairie desert and rugged mountain barrier, alive with savage hordes of Indians, where they have been relieved and aided when most in need; and instances sufficiently numerous to swell a volume exist, that render it needless for me here to refer to them. But I make one more appeal in behalf of these people. ”

“ On the one side we have the representatives of this wasted race coming into this national tribunal of ours asking for justice and liberty to enable them to adopt our boasted civilization and to pursue the arts of peace, which have made us great and happy as a nation. On the other side we have this magnificent, if not magnanimous, Government, resisting this application with the determination of sending these people back to the country which is to them less desirable than perpetual imprisonment in their own native land. ”

“ Neither is the tale to be burdened with a recital of individual atrocities perpetrated by irresponsible white settlers, and by renegades who so largely constituted the ragged, cutting edge of our civilization,—a profitless harrowing of the sensibilities, unless one delights in instances of uncontrolled depravity. It is with the Indian coming into his rights as a man through the fundamental art of agriculture,—how his rights in the real ownership of land have been conserved, and how violated, under regularly constituted authority ”

“ I did not expect to be talked to again about my country by the whites. I will withhold my country from the whites, nor will I let them take it from me. We are not to be trampled upon and our rights taken from us. The right to the land was ours before the whites came among us; white men set such authority aside. If that course were adopted neither would have chiefs— neither would have rest. It ought to fill you with fear. Wrong has been done us. We will not shed blood. ”

“ Horsemen, buggies, buck-boards, wagons, as far either way as one can see—and prairie schooners, too, lumbering and pitching in the rear. Away over the rolling prairie they speed, disappearing finally on the distant hills like a lot of scared jackrabbits, now well strung out. Suddenly a trained race-horse goes down—he has learned his first lesson in badger holes. A bullet from his master's gun ends the animal's suffering, and with him goes his master's last chance. ”

“ To the Indian it is of incalculable cost. Every year's advance of our frontier takes in a territory as large as some of the kingdoms of Europe. We are richer by hundreds of millions; the Indian is poorer by a large part of the little that he has. This growth is bringing imperial greatness to the nation; to the Indian it brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary. ”

“ Make your words strong, but with a good heart, for the Great Father must not be displeased with what the Indians say. Speak from your hearts for this piece of ground, for the words of the white man are many, and the words of the Indian few! ”

“ It is a shame which the American nation ought not to lie under, for the American people, as a people, are not unjust. If there be one thing which they believe in more than any other, and mean that every man on this continent shall have, it is fair play. And as soon as they fairly understand how cruelly it has been denied to the Indian, they will rise up and demand it for him. ”

“ So the Indian story threads its way through the various public documents, from eighteen hundred and fifty-five to nineteen hundred and five. It is the object of this book to pick out the official narratives of a few Indian tribes and present the Indian in his unromantic reality,—not the Indian in paint and feathers chasing the buffalo, nor the Indian of Cooper, but a forlorn individual wrested from old conditions and brought face to face with new; a being bearing the impress of a common Maker at the absolute mercy of those who profess that "all men are created equal." ”

“ The spectacle of Round Valley is not an unusual one. Nothing short of a general and bloody riot, threatening destruction under conditions manifestly beyond all local control, will induce the America people to tolerate the interference of the Federal Government, so grounded are they in the belief that their full measure of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" can come only through the sacred right of each and every community to be a "law unto itself" in its local affairs. ”

“ Directly in this natural gateway to the Black Hills were some fourteen thousand Sioux, under Spotted Tail, the most diplomatic Indian politician of his time, and Red Cloud, an acknowledged leader in the great Sioux nation.
"No passing through," said they; "until another bargain is made with the Great Father, this is Indian country." Then the cry of the Vociferous Few went up to Washington,—the old, old cry for Indian removal,—and again the Government heard "the voice of the people."
The Black Hills must be cleared of Indians; so must the gateway on the south. ”

“ With a Government at its beck and call, pledged to execute the expressed will of the people, it was not in human nature for these people to wait long. New bargains were made with the Indians, and cessions of land secured—always their best land, and at one-half to one-tenth of its real value. Reservations were diminished or done away with altogether, and tribes consolidated, and once more there was public land—not land in the wilds, to be earned by the subduing of it, but good land, and well within the boundaries of civilization. ”

“ The commissioners came, and the Indians gathered at the agency from all parts of the reservation. Times without number before, commissioners have come, and as many times Indians have gathered to meet them,—shrewd and forceful men, with purpose determined, to bargain with those who know little else than love of native land. Little wonder that the Indian moves each time to a less coveted country, and wonders why the Great Spirit of his fathers has forsaken him.
But in this particular instance the expectant whites reckoned without one man; it is necessary to go back a little. ”

“ The final measure of a congressman's political usefulness is his ability to secure a fair share of governmental favors for his district, and for his political supporters. Harbor and river improvements, fortifications, dry docks, arsenals, federal buildings, irrigation plants, and ten thousand and one desirable federal offices,—all these are within the gift of Congress, and every congressman has a right to indulge the hope that, with reasonable endeavor on his part, these favors will be dealt out to him in fair proportion to his political representation. ”

“ Public opinion, whenever it has been sufficiently aroused to take notice of Indian affairs, has invariably been with the Indians. But it can be charged to the extremely popular system of government which holds every national official with his ear to the ground, listening to popular clamor. Rule by "the voice of the people" is well enough when all the people are interested, but a disinterested, contented people will not take the trouble to rule anything ”

“ When they surrendered to superior force they did it in the most solemn manner and under the most solemn promises of protection and a return to their own country. That that promise has not been kept is an historical fact, and never has been explained. Might never made right, and the power to punish can never excuse its exercise wrongfully. As the years go by the eyes of this people are turned to the Northwest, and their yearning hearts pulsate naught but Idaho. ”

“ What better can a people expect of legislators whom it virtually holds to the business of legislation by private agreement, than that they will also make private agreements on their own individual accounts? Congressmen have only to maintain a reasonable showing of returns to their constituents from the system of legislative barter, to effectually kill the kind of public sentiment that lacks the inspiration of some selfish interest. In effect, the people are without representation in Congress as regards their moral convictions. ”

“ Thus it happened that the Indians, who had, according to generally accepted views as to the rights acquired by long-continued occupancy and cultivation, the best right of all Indians to the land of their ancestors, were to receive from the Government not even the color of recognition. In all the great book of Indian treaties, there is not one treaty or agreement with the Mission Indians. ”

“ The entire band, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are quiet, peaceable, and orderly people. They receive what is provided for them with apparent thankfulness, ask for nothing more and give no trouble whatever. They are extremely anxious to return to their own country. They regard themselves as exiles. The climate does not seem to agree with them, many of them have died, and there is a tinge of melancholy in their bearing and conversation that is truly pathetic. ”

“ HERE is the spectacle: a government founded on the principle of equal rights to all men, securing to its own citizens equality of opportunity and fair play, while it persistently denies both to the Indian. ”

“ It cannot afford to sacrifice political capital by administering a richly deserved rebuke in one quarter, unless it thereby makes an equal or greater gain in another quarter. To be sure, the public generously applauds a righteous act in the Indian country, but the public remembers for a day, while the interested few remember until election day. To this psychological fact may be charged most of the vicious legislation which afflicts the American people. ”

“ Deny this as they may, or seek to excuse it on the ground of the Indian's incompetence, it is to their lasting dishonor that for their own personal gain a people boasting the equality of all men should have steadily denied to the Indian the one thing by which he might hope to come into an advantageous relation with the superior race,—recognition under the law. ”

“ The miserable story of the California Indians had dragged itself through twenty-five years; every measure of relief had been blocked in Congress by the interested few,—the Vociferous Few in the Indian country. "This class of Indians," concludes the Commissioner, "seems forcibly to illustrate the truth that no man has a place or a fair chance to exist under the Government of the United States who has not a part in it." A more illuminating commentary on the Indian's unhappy status in the land of the Free can hardly be written in one sentence. ”

“ The typical frontiersman was a survival of strenuous conditions; a man of forceful action, with an insatiable desire for more land, and the best land, and land always just over the border laid down in the latest covenant with the Indian, even though covered with the crops of Indians turned to the white man's way. His development of the new country was significant of strength and virility; it extended the bounds of civilization, and, in his rough way, he knew of civilization's debt to him and his kind. ”

“ Joseph now says that the greatest want of the Indians is a system of law by which controversies between Indians, and between Indians and white men, can be settled without appealing to physical force. He says that the want of law is the great source of disorder among Indians. They understand the operation of laws, and if there were any statutes the Indians would be perfectly content to place themselves in the hands of a proper tribunal, and would not take the righting of their wrongs into their own hands, or retaliate, as they now do, without the law. ”