In 1802 President Jefferson wrote to a friend that he had heard that there was one man left of the Peorias, and said “If there is only one, justice demands that his rights shall be respected.” Reviewing subsequent history we may well repeat Jefferson’s solemn words, “I tremble for my country when I know that God is just!”
We can make no more treaties with the Indians. The act of 1871 put an end to that dreadful farce. There have been nearly 900 treaties since 1785. They have been the loaded dice with which we have always won and the Indian always lost. We have hoodwinked ourselves by them to a perpetual fraud and deception. They have been to the Indian a veritable compact of death. Relying on them he has sooner or later found himself held by the throat by the wolf starvation, or impaled on the bayonet of the soldier; crowded to the wall by the encroaching settler, or removed to the wilderness by the Government as soon as he had begun to make for himself a home. The Stockbridges have been thus removed four times in a hundred years, and are now on a reservation where it is impossible to get a living. The Poncas are the latest instance.
Treaties must give place to personal rights. We must provide something better for him than a reservation; that is, life in a community for which we have provided no law, no courts, no police, no officer other than an anomalous “agent,” no ownership of land—nothing, in short, that all civilized people regard as the first element of civilized life, and without which the congregate life of bodies of men is impossible. We say to him, Cease to be a savage, hungry but free, and come and be a pauper, dependent on the will of others, without law, and still hungry. As one of the agents wrote in 1875: “It is a condition of things that would turn a white community into chaos in twelve months.” It behooves every honest man, every man who loves his country, to see that the day of equal personal rights for the Indian, the only man on the broad earth who has none, shall at once dawn.
But I remember that I am speaking to a company of Christians. Religion before all else can prepare the Indian to make the most of his citizenship. Look at this picture. Here is a wigwam in the pine forest. Before it is a tall pole, from the top of which hangs a dried bladder containing a few rattling shells and stones. It is the wigwam of Shaydayence, or Little Pelican, chief medicine man of the Gull Lakers. He is the incarnation of the devil in that tribe. He holds the tribe in his hand, and represents their idolatry and their bloodthirstiness. It is due to him that the missionary has been driven away. More than that, he is an inveterate drunkard. He has been rescued from freezing to death, drunk in the woods, by a chance lumberman finding him and thawing him out before an extemporized fire.