Seth King Humphrey

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now if there is one principle of government that does not find a place in the boasted declarations of the Free and Equal, it is that of taxation without representation. How will a scheme so un-American be received at the seat of Government? ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the great, voting public's interest in the Indian has been sentimental, not material,—often at a high pitch over some newly revealed injustice, but always effervescent, and rarely persisting until election day; and Congress—created by votes, perpetuated by votes, recognizing sentiment only as expressed in votes—has always in Indian affairs more or less narrowly represented the interests of the voters on the frontier, uninfluenced by public sentiment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While the good Puritans appear to have yearned for the salvation of the Indian's soul, they labored more effectively for the possession of the Indian's land; and with a quick perception of their prime motive the Indian soon brought himself to see, above all else in the new civilization, a despoiler of his one possession—the great hunting-ground of his fathers. So, under the persuasive influence of these conditions, the Indian moved continually westward, with his heart full of hate for the white man, and the first great lesson in civilization still unlearned. ”

“ Where the first has failed, the Indian is coming into full citizenship through agriculture, education, and Christian teaching. Where both have succeeded in their opposing efforts, we find the Indian figuratively, and often literally, on the rocks; educated, saved, and forlorn,—amiable, but aimless, in his arrested development. He has missed the fundamental lesson of mankind.
But, too often, without the foundation of good land the superstructure has fallen,—and upon us is responsibility for the most miserable being in the land; landless, idle, drunken, dirty, and altogether unattractive ”

“ 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 ”

“ This portion of our great obligation is beyond redemption.
When we hear of dark injustice among the natives of Africa, or in Russia's Siberian wastes, we turn in horror from the oppressed to vent indignation upon the oppressor. But when the tale of our own Poor Lo is told, we lift our eyes to Heaven—not being so well able to see ourselves as to see others—and murmur, reverently, "'T is the Survival of the Fittest!" Those who think lightly are wont to exclaim, impatiently, that the Indian's story is a closed book. ”

“ This seems to me a great and unpardonable vice in the law, that it treats as unoccupied, and subject to pre-emption, lands which have been in fact occupied and cultivated precisely as white men occupy and cultivate, and that, too, for more than one generation of living men. But for that vice of the law the Mission Indians would now be secure in their old possessions, and where their improvements and water-rights were wanted they would be bought and paid for instead of taken for nothing in the name of law. ”

“ Wherever a few faithful voters are gathered together, they can, if they present their demands vociferously, impress their own particular congressman into their service. They become, for him, "the voice of the people"; silent ones do not count. He is the servant, not of the whole American people, but of his immediate constituents. ”

“ Taxation and the breaking up of tribal relations is another objection, and also an utter lack of appreciation or confidence in the good intentions of the Government. He fully appreciates the strength of the Government and the fact that he can be forced into measures, but he claims that if it should come to that he will only ask the privilege to seek another home in another country of his own choice rather than give up his title to the Bitter Root as a reservation by accepting a patent for his farm or by removing to the Jocko. ”

“ As we look back upon the work of these men and view the stability of the old mission edifices which still stand in the most fertile spots in Southern California, justice, more than charity, compels the clear recognition of their devotion to the cause of Christianity as first, and above all else, with a material prosperity as incidental,—a prosperity justified, deserved, and shared liberally with their Indian wards. ”

“ A once struggling people are pleased to call such a man the Father of his country.
It is the story of an endeavor that failed. The Bitter Root Valley was added to the land of the Noble Free, at a cost in money insignificant compared with its value; but in the pledging of the national faith, "if it shall prove, in the judgment of the President, to be better adapted to the wants of the Flathead tribe," have they not paid the price incalculable—the national honor? ”

“ We now show a belated eagerness to square ourselves with these Indians by allotting to them their choice of land from the poor remnants which have been left to them after the many choosings of the white man,—a pathetic spectacle, this granting Indians the choice of land on which no well-equipped white man could make a living. ”

“ The Indians have been driven off, and outside stock wickedly turned into the reservation inclosures, there to riot in growing wheat, oats, and corn, some of which was nearly ripe enough to cut. There are many respectable settlers in the valley who abhor this conduct, and would gladly see the culprits brought to a just punishment. It is not, however, considered a safe undertaking, in the neighborhood of Indian reservations in California, for a good, law-abiding man to attempt to punish a bad man and a law-breaker by habit for any indignity to Indians or those having them in charge. ”

“ Struggle as you may to gather sustenance from your gravel patch; fill your belly with the acorn, the pine nut, and the mesquite bean, if you will; but the day is coming when the white man will need your gravel patch; when his genius will devise some use in his own economic system for the acorn, the pine nut, and the mesquite bean. ”

“ During all these years of trouble, the Indian was faithfully attended by a great Unselfishness, always striving to re-establish him, to educate and enlighten him. The Government met with no opposition in administering this portion of its trust, and the workers were granted its most generous and intelligent support; for the high ideals of the people have always been the Government's inspiration, even though it be often led to action by a selfish few. ”

“ No man with a particle of humanity left can meet these people as an agent does without feeling ashamed as the agent of this good Government, which has forcibly taken possession of this country and assumed the care for this weak people, that we should have by neglect and dishonesty of its paid agents reduced them to such abject poverty and helplessness. ”

“ A Government slavishly dependent upon the expressed will of the people has no incentive to enforce a sustained, consistent Indian policy opposed to local interests, although in accord with the perfectly well understood, but unexpressed, sentiment of the great body of the American people. ”

“ The untamed Indian had but one tangible right,—the right to be shown the new way by those who had made his own way impossible. The very dearth of his rights as a savage measured the white man's tremendous obligation to bring him, by all reasonable means, into the rights that come with civilization. That the Indian did not turn readily to the better way, history makes us sure ”

“ The Potrero reservation is covered over with squatters who have settled there long since the lands were set apart for Indian purposes. They are there in open defiance of law. They have managed to get their cases before the Indian Department for adjudication. The rights of these Indians to these lands are as clear and absolute as the proclamation of a President can make them. The squatters should never have had a standing in court till after they were dispossessed. The Government ought to have removed every one of them, and if they have rights then let them assert them before the courts. ”

“ This second class of Indians are the ones now most especially needing the energetic care of the Government. The land-grabbers are after them, and an agent with seven-leagued boots could scarcely travel from village to village as fast as those Americans who are seeking a few acres of ground with a spring upon it, or moist lands where wheat and potatoes grow without irrigation, that may be pre-empted or taken up under the desert-land act. That such lands have been held by Indians and cultivated by Indians counts for nothing more than if they had been only homes for grasshoppers and coyotes. ”

“ At the close of the Mexican war some of these old Mission Indians remained in possession of lands under written grants from the Mexican Government. Some have sold out, others have been elbowed off by white men. All are now waiting the adjudication of the commissioner of land titles. Many of them are good citizens in all respects save the right to vote and be witnesses. They are anxious to hold their title homesteads and resist all offers to buy as steadily as they can. How long their limited shrewdness can match the overreaching cupidity that ever assails them it is difficult to say. ”

“ Ugly facts never stood out more plainly. In this Indian business Congress has persistently betrayed the nation's ideals at the behest of a small fraction of the people; the Rosebud land scandal of 1904 (told in the chapter, "Uncle Sam, Trustee") shows that it can be led as easily now as ever before. If in our self-satisfied conceit we think that other businesses have not led, and are not now leading, Congress to other betrayals of public trust, we, too, may as well say that history can tell us nothing, and close the book. ”

“ In view of subsequent history it is instructive to read in the agency reports of forty and fifty years ago of the earnestness and industry that characterized the Indian's beginning in agriculture and stock-raising. It does seem as though the very pathos of his simple efforts would have impressed upon the Government with new force the double right of the agricultural Indian to the best of the land, and protection upon it during his long endeavor to come into the better way,—the right of a man striving to do a man's work, and his prior traditional right to all the land. ”

“ There is no virtue, in the official mind, in the unexpressed sentiment of a great order- and justice-loving people, so long as they continue to live under the delusion that the public servants are directing the public business with due regard for the national honor. ”

“ But we find these once independent farmers on a bare reservation, without means to begin life anew, reduced to the condition of ration Indians, living for four years on the bounty of the Government. The voice of Charlos is raised in one continued protest; but even this man of indomitable will seems to have reached the limit of his endurance, and it is painful to find him at last embittered, broken in spirit, with little faith in the white man and his ways. ”

“ Most of the larger ranchmen have about them one or several families, whom they permit to build their slight houses on the corners of the ranch, or on grounds adjoining, and in addition allow the use of water sufficient to irrigate a garden, which such Indians often cultivate. These Indians do most of the ordinary work of the ranches, except when harvest-time, sheep-shearing, or some special season requires the employment of other help. They live more or less comfortably, as the proprietor of the ranch to which they are attached is a humane and just man, or hard-hearted and a cheat. ”

“ President Grant's record as a steadfast friend of the Indian is too secure to be called into question, but this executive order is eloquent of a system which can procure the signature of an illustrious president to as black a lie as ever Russia's bureaucracy compelled from the hand of the Czar. Can this business be charged to the American people? ”