Part 4

One being with these people every day can clearly see that the redemption of Africa is in the little folks, and, therefore, I think, that a number of these boys and girls should be taken by somebody, and trained, as they are at Hampton.

This part of Africa is very little behind the South in 1866; and see what the A. M. A. has done in that dark place since that time? There are only two things that differ here from the South. First, the colored people in the South had been taught to work with more skill than these people have. Second, those at the South had more civilized people to deal with than these people have now. Take out these two, and Africa (this part), to-day, will compare with the South before the A. M. A. took it in hand. Now, if so much has been done in America, why not in Africa?

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THE INDIANS.

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S’KOKOMISH RESERVATION.

REV. G. H. ATKINSON, D. D., PORTLAND, OREGON,

_Superintendent A. H. M. S., for Oregon and Washington Territories._

The best way to study the Indian problem is to study the Indians themselves. The agents and employees on the reservations have all the means to test every element of this question.

Safety of Life and Property.

The agent, Edwin Eells, Esq., with wife and children, has lived among the Indians here seven years. The employees and their families have lived here from one to six years each, all without harm or fear. At any moment the Indians could have killed them, stolen their property, burnt the dwellings, and fled to the rugged hills and mountains. The agent has traversed the country occupied by his bands, alone, or with Indians, by day and by night, without injury or alarm, leaving his wife and little ones at their mercy. Whisky is excluded from the reservation, but outsiders have sold it to the Indians, and exposed him and his household and company to danger from them, when excited by it, and the more when arresting them and arraigning and convicting the sellers in the courts. But in no case has he or one of the whites received a blow, or a stab, or a shot, or a threat from an Indian during all these seven years.

Like facts can be put on record of the safety of agents and employees, and their families, on most, if not all the reservations in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Their property has also been safe. Agent Eells affirms that clothes are left out day and night, tools are left in open sheds, doors are never locked, and yet they have never had an article stolen. He adds that they have had no occasion to use force, or show weapons, except in the arrest or retention of criminals. For this police service he commonly appoints Indian constables. What is true on these counts of the S’Kokomish Indians, is true of other bands or tribes placed on reservations in this region. Those who live near them, or who have observed them in all conditions, both off and on the reservations, for the last fifteen, and even for thirty years, can bear witness that they are usually quiet, peaceable hunters, fishermen, or workers on farms, or in mills, or lumber camps, or in kitchens and laundries for the whites, exciting no fear among families, and causing no danger to lone travellers on the prairies or in the forests.

The Nez Percé reservation has been traversed for thirty years by whites in safety. Prospectors have ranged alone among their mountains, and through the gulches in all directions, in search of gold and silver for twenty years, in entire safety. Miners have followed and pitched their camps in every sort of lonely spot, exposed to the attacks of these savages. Long caravans of goods, in mule or wagon trains, in the care of a few teamsters, have passed back and forth among these Indians, and most of the other tribes, transporting merchandise of all kinds during the last twenty years, unmolested by the Indians. Express-men have had no fear to go to any mining camp of the upper country in charge of millions of gold. The mail carriers, on horses, have crossed and recrossed the whole Indian country unharmed. Stages, loaded down with mails and passengers, have rolled along over many of the same routes, having no more fear of Indians than of the white settlers, for whose convenience the post routes were established by government. Flocks and herds, in care of a few scattered men, have multiplied in all those regions. The robberies and murders, as the records of the courts testify, have been committed by white men. Sheriffs trace nearly every crime and outrage to the white, not to the Indian race.

The charges of a thieving, savage, murderous spirit made against the Indian in the public press, on the street, in the halls of debate and legislation, are not borne out by the facts. It is like charging a whole community with the vices and outrages of a small number of its members. It is like putting the stigma upon the whole South for the atrocities of Libby prison and Andersonville. It is the charge of fraud upon the U. S. A. for the defalcations and embarrassments of a few of her citizens.

In war or peace the Indian is cruel in revenge; but we cannot forget the massacres of Memphis. The victim in his grasp is tortured; but we remember the Chisholm and Hamburg horrors, and those in the negro parishes outside of New Orleans. He destroys without mercy, and devastates without remorse; but the Pittsburgh riots, the New York mobs, and the Commune of San Francisco, belong to the white race. He has burnt a few of our hamlets and settlers’ cabins. We have swept him and his household and his camps,—the only houses and cities that he can call his own—with canister and grape, the hail of iron and lead and fire. Having no commissariat, he has starved his prisoners. Without transportation or fortress for their safe keeping, he often raises the black flag and slays them at sight. But again and again, at the outset of battle, the order has moved along our line, “Take no prisoners!” Cold as steel, we have made a jest of his life, and hailed him good only when dead. We have steadily driven him from one hunting ground to another, over the rivers and beyond the lakes, hemmed him in from the gulfs and the oceans, crowded him off the prairies into rugged mountains, compelled him to sell his native lands, and have let loose the dogs of war upon him, because, forsooth, he has had the manhood to resist our march of doom against his race. If he has counted us the aggressors and the outlaws, we have hurled back upon him the fiercest invective known to human speech. If he, in the wild delirium of madness, has outraged and mutilated his captive, we have, in fiercer and more fiery passion, counselled, if not plotted, his extermination.

Progress in Civilization.

Proofs press upon the eye and ear of agents and employees that he does more and better with the means in his hand for the support of himself and family than other men would. I visited ten Indian families at their homes on the S’Kokomish reservation, on the 15th of August, and saw twenty more of their frame-boarded houses enclosed within their small claims. About thirty of the Indians, having finished haying, were away from home, most of them hunting in the mountains, or fishing at the weirs. Those at home had neat, well swept rooms, usually a sitting-room, bed-room and kitchen. Almost every one had a cooking stove, with its furniture, and crockery on the table, or in the cupboard a few chairs or benches, a clock in every house (often two), occasionally a rocking-chair and bureau, always one or two bedsteads, with beds and blankets, and often covered with a neat quilt of the wife’s taste and make. Cards and pictures were hung on the walls, and some of their photographs, also. They were dressed in comfortable clothes, and were glad of a call and a kindly greeting. They are adopting the manners of their white teachers.

The school, in charge of Deacon G. A Boynton, has a list of thirty-one pupils, twenty-four of them pure Indians, six half-breeds, and one little white girl. In dress, order and studiousness, they rank with many of our common-schools. In reading, singing, writing, at the blackboard, or in mental arithmetic, they evince ability to learn what white children learn. It is done more slowly, partly because while reciting in English they probably think in their own more familiar language, or in the jargon, and thus fail to get or convey the meaning of words quickly, and probably from lack of such mental training in their parents. The laws of heredity hold in them as in other people. Better shaped heads and finer brain power may be expected of their children.

In church and Sabbath-school, Indian parents and children meet with white parents and children, join in singing, listen to a sermon in the morning, translated by the interpreter into the Twana Indian language, and in the evening, to one in English. They exhibit a desire to learn the word of truth, and are profiting by their instructions. Several of the pupils in the school have become Christians and united with the church.

The testimony of the agent, the missionary, the teacher, the physician, the farmer and the carpenter, is uniform as to their capacity, and desire to improve and live like the whites, and of their real progress in industry and manner of living. They are trusted more and more, and they honor the trust.

It is cowardly to despise them and cast them out like dogs. It is noble to respect them as men and women, who have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They have claims on us for sympathy and help to secure these things. It is a credit to lift up the lowest, if we count them so. Those who know them best have most hope of them, if given a fair chance.

A Neglected Treaty.

No man will clear land and make a farm unless he owns it, or has a lien upon it. The treaty pledges them an allotment for a homestead on the reservation. It was made by Gov. Stevens, in Jane 1855, at Point-no-Point, and ratified by the government in 1859. In private and public speeches, with one voice, they plead for their titles. They want the patents promised in the bond nineteen years ago. With these in hand, they will improve their homes still more. It is a reasonable demand. The plan to remove them from these lands, where they were born, excites their fears and their rebellion. We cannot expect them to rest in quiet and work with energy until we give them the motive of ownership in the soil they till and the timber they cut. This is the question of the hour for the Indian. Shall he own in law his garden and his field and his house, or hold it as a tenant at the will of another, liable to ejectment? If government grant the former, as it has promised, the largest factor of the problem will be found that will solve the rest of it.

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GREEN BAY AGENCY, KESHENA, WIS.

JOS. C. BRIDGMAN, ESQ., AGENT.

The Stockbridge tribe take very little interest in education. The head men, not specially interested, voted to have only six months’ schooling, paying the teacher but $25 per month. As this tribe receive $3,800 a year, the same being the interest on their funds in the hands of the Government, this meagre sum is illiberal. Rev. J. Slingerland, who has been both preacher and teacher for this tribe for many years, is still retained. While the number of children of school age is twenty-five, with nearly as many of the “old citizen” party, who are not allowed privileges, the greatest number attending any one month is thirteen, and the average for the year is ten. The church membership is twenty-nine.

The Oneidas are making an unusually good record. Their crops are nearly or quite one-third larger than last year. The school attendance shows an increase of thirty-seven, and the church membership fifty-three over last year.

The Methodist Mission-school is unfortunately located for reaching even a fair number of scholars, and Rev. S. W. Ford, without additional compensation, has opened a school a mile and a half distant; his daughter, Miss Mary W. Ford, teaching the Mission school without pay. The records of the two schools are seventy-nine scholars enrolled, with an average attendance of forty-five, against an average of twenty-six for the one school of last year. I am urging upon the Department the wisdom of establishing this new school, which was started as an experiment, with the result as above. Unless thus sustained it will be abolished, as Mr. Ford cannot give his time without reward.

The church membership, 178, has had some twenty-five additions the past year, as the result of a revival in the fall and winter of ’77–78. Two or three of its members have been licensed to preach the gospel. Exception to the rules of the Methodist Church is made, and Mr. Ford is now on his sixth year at this post, being found peculiarly fitted for work among the Indians, whom he well understands, having lived with this and other tribes of the State.

The Episcopal Mission-school has enrolled 114, many of whom are induced to come by gifts of clothing, etc., supplied by the Episcopal Mission. Average attendance for the year forty-five and two-ninths. The Episcopal Church is well attended by a serious and devout congregation on the Sabbath. Membership 150.

Although there is a lodge of Good Templars with this tribe, I regret to say that some of the members do not realize the sacredness of their oath as they should, and falling from grace is no uncommon occurrence; yet it has brought about a radical change with some who have been confirmed drunkards for many years.

The Menomonees have shown a wonderful spirit of thrift and enterprise the past year, putting 200 or more acres of new land under cultivation. Permission having been granted by the Department, it is proposed to hold a fair the last week in September, with a list of prizes for the best and second best productions of their crops, stock of all kinds, and manufactured articles by the women. Two hundred dollars in silver coin is to be given. This is creating a spirited impetus to good work, and lively times are expected on Fair-day.

The schools of this tribe have, we regret to say, taken a step backwards. In 1876, through the advice of Inspector Watkins, the day-schools were consolidated into a Manual Labor and Boarding School at Keshena, which far exceeded our most sanguine expectations in numbers and interest. The breaking out of the scarlet fever, in the fall term of 1877, compelled us to close the school, with but four or five weeks’ teaching. It was renewed on the 6th of January, but, owing to the non reply to letters, and the omission of instructions from the bureau, only eight weeks’ schooling has been had since January 1st.

At the present time we are waiting permission to employ a matron (as necessary to the success of the school as a teacher). This delay is to be greatly regretted, as fifty children could be easily gathered (the limit of our poor accommodations), while the day-school has an average of less than ten.

Crime and drunkenness is greatly on the decrease; not a case of any magnitude of the former, and but a very few cases of the latter, coming to my notice for the past year. This is a very hopeful sign with this tribe, many of whom are wishing to become citizens.

With the exception of scarlet fever, in a very mild form, among the Menomonees, the sanitary condition has been excellent with these people.

As you are aware, the religion of this tribe is about equally divided between the Pagan and Catholic, the former adhering closely to their rites and ceremonies, as for worship and the burial of their dead; and, when standing by, as they render their thanks to the Great Spirit for “our homes,” “our friends,” “our food,” asking His protection “from storms,” “from disease,” and, “when taken into the happy hunting-ground,” to be “found in favor,” etc., one cannot but feel that “He” who “is no respecter of persons” accepts their thanks and hears their petitions, although accompanied with the shaking of gourds and the pounding upon an Indian drum, instead of the grand _Te Deum_ from the organs of our city churches.

While the soil for Christian labor is unfavorable, and tares find root, to the choking out of good seed sown, yet we should take heart in the increasing desire on their part for better homes and farms, and the laying aside of the wigwam for good houses, the gun and rod for the plow and hoe. A slow and certain improvement in their habits from year to year is observable, and with kindness, honest dealing and right influence, the time is not so very far in the future when they can and will take a place in our nation, not a whit behind many pale faces.

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THE CHINESE.

“CALIFORNIA CHINESE MISSION.”

Auxiliary to the American Missionary Association.

PRESIDENT: Rev. J. K. McLean, D. D. VICE-PRESIDENTS: Rev. A. L. Stone, D. D., Thomas C. Wedderspoon, Esq., Rev. T. K. Noble, Hon. F. F. Low, Rev. L. E. Dwinell, D. D., Hon. Samuel Cross, Rev. S. H. Willey, D. D., Edward P. Flint, Esq., Rev. J. W. Hough, D. D., Jacob S. Taber, Esq.

DIRECTORS: Rev. George Moor, D. D., Hon. E. D. Sawyer, Rev. W. E. Ijams, James M. Haven, Esq., Rev. Joseph Rowell, E. P. Sanford, Esq., H. W. Severance, Esq.

SECRETARY: Rev. W. C. Pond. TREASURER: E. Palache, Esq.

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We print the following letter from our Brother Pond, in regard to the need and call for a mission work in Hong Kong, not because the Executive Committee have formed any design of entering upon such a work in the name of the American Missionary Association, but only as these letters from converted Chinamen show to what earnestness of missionary zeal they have been converted, and so bear witness to the reality of their Christianization.

Even though we felt warranted in extending our work to embrace a limited foreign field on the Chinese Coast, as we do not, there are questions of comity which would forbid it. The English missionary societies occupy the Hong Kong field in force, and the Presbyterian Board have missionaries in the Canton district, from which the Chinese immigrants come to our Western coast. We shall be very glad if they, or either of them, will supply the want indicated by our correspondent, and for which the Chinese converts show such deep concern.—[ED’S AM. MISS.]

MORE ABOUT A MISSION AT HONG KONG.

While studying the proposition which I ventured to broach last month, for a mission at Hong Kong, which should be in intimate relationship with our Californian Mission, I requested our helper, Bro. Fung Affoo, to consult the Chinese brethren on the subject and tell me what they thought. Soon after, letters began to pour in upon me, till now I have about twenty on file, and it has occurred to me that extracts from these would interest the readers of the MISSIONARY. Some of them I can copy verbatim; some will need to be retouched a little in their English in order to be understood; but the ideas are their own, and the expressions will be modified as little as possible.

First of all, Affoo himself says: “I told the brethren at the meeting last Sunday what you said to me about establishing a mission at Hong Kong. They were very glad; their faces beamed with joy. They all wish, with one accord, that this enterprise will be accomplished before long.”

The first letter which I take from my file is from Wong Sam. He says “I wish you could establish a school in Hong Kong for a Young Men’s Christian Association, as we have here. Then we could hold all our brethren together when they go back to China, and they would not all scatter abroad. I am sure all our brethren will be glad to have one. I ask God all the time for it, if God is willing, for He knows what is best. We cannot do anything without the Holy One. Accept my warmest love and thanks for your kindness in expending so much on our account, and bringing us out of darkness. You will not lose your reward ‘in my Father’s kingdom,’ as Christ says.”

The next one which comes to hand is from Hong Sing, and addressed to Affoo. It reads as follows: “I heard you some time ago talking about if we would like have one American Association school in Hong Kong. I feel very glad, indeed, if we have one school in Hong Kong, that we may go back to our China and find a Christian Home. Canton and Hong Kong have two or three schools, but not our Congregational Association. You know how many of our Christian brothers have gone back to China. They find no Christian home; then they find very hard to be good, and bye-and-bye feel cold with Jesus.”

Joe Lee and Chin Quong write to say: “I like the idea of having a Christian school in Hong Kong very much, indeed. I think it will be great benefit, not only to the Christian boys, but also to the poor heathen boys there.” Chung Sun says: “I very glad; God very good to me. I like bye-and-bye go back China; tell father, mother, sister, brother, very good Jesus. If him all [i.e., his relatives] no like me I go Christian house, call Christian friend Help me tell father, mother, sister, brother, how very good Jesus is. If all man, woman love Him, bye-and-bye go heaven. If he all beat and _lick_ me, I go to the Chinese Mission at Hong Kong; very good, all the same my own church.”

Ah King writes: “Dear Mr. Pond—I am very glad in heart that I heard missionary schools be opened in Hong Kong. I think you make these things for our Christian brethren, just like builder build a stone foundation of buildings—the wind cannot blow off it.” That is, the mission work at Hong Kong will tend to secure the results of our work here. Without this, the winds of contradiction and persecution in China will tend to blow our brethren who return there off the foundation.

Perhaps these will suffice as samples, and I think that all the points made in the other letters are referred to in these. But the tone differs in different letters, and the fact specially emphasized; thus, for example, the chief point with one is, “If it [mission at Hong Kong] can be, it can keep us _doing good_ when we go back, and I thank God with all my heart.” With another, it is sorrow that we been without such a mission so long. “We plead,” he says, “our brethren to help us. I pray that God will bless you and open a way to make a mission in Hong Kong.” Another says, “If men can’t do it, we all hope God has an authority [has some way] do it for us. I hope our parents hear the gospel, receive it all, come to Him forever.” A refuge from persecution is often referred to. “We have great many trials, and I hope the Christians do this thing, then our brothers have a place to see each other. We are far from each other in China.”