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PRACTICAL SOLUTION OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM.
A LETTER TO DR. LYMAN ABBOT OF THE “CHRISTIAN UNION.”
CAMBRIDGE: JOHN WILSON AND SON. University Press. 1886.
SARAH WINNEMUCCA’S PRACTICAL SOLUTION OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM.
TO DR. LYMAN ABBOT, _Editor of the Christian Union_:--
Because you so cordially announced Sarah Winnemucca’s “NEW DEPARTURE,” a year or more ago, as the Christian Union’s solution of the Indian problem, I send you this Report that I am now desirous to make to the public, _unofficial_ and _official_, of her progress. The distinguishing characteristic of this New Departure is that, instead of being, as usual, a passive reception of civilizing influences proffered by white men who look down upon the Indian as a spiritual, moral, and intellectual inferior, it is a spontaneous movement, made by the Indian himself, _from himself_, in full consciousness of free agency, for the education that is to civilize him.
Sarah Winnemucca’s idea is an inheritance from that remarkable chief of the Piutes, Captain Truckee, who in 1848, for the first time, discovered that there were white men in the world! In the first chapter of her “Life among the Piutes”[1] Sarah tells of his meeting with General (then Captain) Fremont in the mountains of Nevada, who accepted his proffered guidance on the unaccustomed way, and with whom he and a dozen of his braves went down to California, where the wonders of civilization burst upon him, firing his imagination, before his self-respect had been wounded and his heart discouraged, as is the usual Indian experience, with an unquenchable ardor to share these glories.
He and his braves were able to do Fremont service in the affair of Mariposa and the immediately following conquest of California, for which they were decorated, and so respectfully and kindly treated by Fremont that the old chief’s heart was completely won; and he clung to his “white brothers,” as he pathetically called them, to the end of his life, although immediately on his return to Nevada he was told of those terrible emigrations that had rushed across it “like a roaring lion,” as Sarah phrases it, striking terror into the souls of the women and even of the brave men, who could not understand the wanton and unprovoked cruelty with which these white savages shot all Indians down as soon as they were seen, as if they were wild beasts. But he persisted in calling them _exceptions_ to the end of his life.