Part 8

What a parody is this on our national history! We boast of a father of his country who always told the truth. The Indian knows our Government by the name of “Washington,” and the Indian says “Washington always lies.” Gen. Stanley has said: “When I think of the way we have broken faith, I am ashamed to look an Indian in the face.” Gen. Harney said to the Sioux in 1868: “If my Government does not keep this agreement, I will come back and ask the first Indian I meet to shoot me.” (Bishop Whipple in _Faribault Democrat_, Jan. 5, 1877.) Gen. Harney does not revisit the Sioux.

We have _stolen_ from the Indians; we are stealing from them all the time. I do not speak of the lordly robbery, in which the strong possesses himself of the lands, and if occasion serve, of the home of the weak, and justifies it by the right of the stronger. I speak of the petty stealing of the thief. Three years ago there came past my home a long procession of Indian ponies. Where did they come from? They were the property of the Sioux on the reservations west of us. In the face of the ordinance of 1789, which expressly declares that their lands and property shall never be taken, nor their liberties invaded, except in lawful wars authorized by Congress, in violation of the terms of their treaties, and in disregard of the express declaration of the President in response to the telegram of the agent, “Tell the friendly Indians that they shall be protected in their persons and property,” their ponies were gathered and driven off by officers of the army acting under orders. The Indians were left without their only means of transportation for fuel or food, and no redress has ever been secured. No inventory of individual personal property was kept, and the stolen ponies were scattered through Minnesota, and what were left sold for a song in St. Paul.

Gen. Crook has recently said that the Sioux of the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail bands have been robbed during the past winter and spring of over a thousand ponies, which robbery the army, under the new _posse comitatus_ act, is powerless to prevent. (Letter of June 19, 1879, in _New York Tribune_.)

What I am saying must not be understood as an arraignment of the officers of the army, or indeed of the chief officials of the Government. The army officers have been almost without an exception the firm friends of the Indian, and none have borne more emphatic testimony to their bad treatment than such generals as Sherman, Harney, Stanley, Augur, Howard, Pope and Crook. The latter said the other day, in response to the remark that it was hard to be called to sacrifice life in settling quarrels brought about by thieving contractors, “I will tell you a harder thing. It is to be forced to fight and kill Indians when I know they are clearly in the right.” The responsibility is with the representatives of the people, with Congress.

But to return to the indictment. We have _forced the Indians to break the law_ by placing them under conditions in which it was not possible for them to obey the law and live. This can be proven by the records of many of the Indian reservations when we have attempted to shut them in on lands where starvation was inevitable. Of my own knowledge I can speak of a reservation on which some 1,700 Indians were commanded to remain where there was barely food for a grasshopper, and where in the month of September the little children begged the passer for food, and the dogs were the picture of famine. We have debauched their women. Remember that an Indian has no standing in our courts, and it is easy to see what contact with the whites means to him and his family. He has no redress when his home is violated; and the knowledge of his helplessness makes him the prey of every libertine, until on the distant plains the proximity of a Government post is a sign of his misery. (General Carrington construed this remark to apply to army officers, and corrected it publicly. That was not its intent. The officers of the army are gentlemen. The fort brings into the neighborhood of the Indians and offers more or less of shelter to many men of a very different stamp.)

We have not stopped short of _murder_. The record is a long and bloody one. The details of the Custer massacre are still fresh in your minds. The nation stood still and lifted up its hands in horror at the disaster which in a moment had annihilated every man of a large detachment of U.S. troops, not sparing their noble and brilliant leader. But where was the real “Custer massacre”? Go back to 1868, to where, under the shadow of Fort Cobb, on land assigned to them by the United States, stood a small Indian village. Its chief was Black Kettle, a man whose name was a by-word among his fellows for cowardice, because he could not be induced to fight the whites—a man of whom Gen. Harney said, “I have worn the uniform of the United States for fifty-five years; I knew Black Kettle well; he was as good a friend of the white man as I am.”

He had been to the commandant of the post seeking protection for himself and his people, because troops were in the neighborhood. Four days afterwards Gen. Custer surrounded that village, and although the Indians fought with desperation, not a man, woman or child escaped alive. Gen. Custer doubtless believed he had fallen upon a hostile camp. Was the mistake any the less terrible? Was the butchery any the less shocking? The blood of innocent Indians on the Wischita cried unto God, and the answer came in the deluge of blood on the Rosebud. * * * *

But you ask, has this been the history of our other Indian wars?

Our first war with the Sioux was in 1852 to 1854. For thirty years it had been the boast of the Sioux that they had never killed a white man. How did the war begin? A Mormon emigrant train crossing the plains lost a cow, which a band of Sioux, who were living in the neighborhood in perfect peace, found and took. The Mormons discovering this, made complaint at Fort Laramie, and a lieutenant with a squad of soldiers was sent to recover the lost property. It could not be found. It was already assimilated into Indian. But the Indians offered to pay for it. This the lieutenant refused to accept, demanding the surrender of the man who had taken the cow for punishment. The Indians said he could not be found; whereupon—will it be believed?—the lieutenant ordered his troops to fire, and the Indian chief fell dead. Those troops never fired again; they were killed in their tracks; and this was the beginning of the great Sioux war which cost the Government forty millions of dollars and many lives. (Speech of President Seeley, of Massachusetts, in Congress, April 13, 1875.)

You know the story of the Sioux war in Minnesota—the withheld appropriations, the taunts and the starvation. We need not open that terrible chapter again.

We were at it again in 1866. In violation of the most explicit agreements we built Forts Phil Kearney, Reno and Smith, in their country; they flew to arms; the cost to the Government was a million dollars a month; and finally the forts were vacated.

We had a great war with the Cheyennes in 1864-5. It began in the most atrocious massacre that disgraces the annals of our country. It was at a time when settlers were pouring into Colorado. The buffalo had become scarce; the annuities for some reason had ceased; the Indians were sad and depressed. But they kept the peace. Black Kettle, of whom I have already spoken, was their chief. A white man made complaint to a United States officer that an Indian had stolen some of his horses. The officer did not know the man, nor whether or not he had owned any horses; but he fitted out an expedition to seize horses. Soon they ran across Indians and claimed their stock, though the Indians protested that they had only ponies and no American horses. A fight ensued and some Indians were killed. Black Kettle knew his danger. He rushed at once to the Governor of Colorado, seeking protection. It was refused. Col. Boone, an old resident of the Territory, told Bishop Whipple that it was the saddest company he had even seen when they stopped at his house on their way back. He offered them food, but they said: “Our hearts are sick; we cannot eat.”

Soon after troops appeared upon the horizon. Black Kettle and his two brothers went out with a white flag to meet them. They fired on the flag and the two brothers fell dead. Black Kettle returned to his camp. Three men in the United States uniform were in his tepee. He said; “I believe you are spies; it shall never be said that a man ate Black Kettle’s bread and came to harm in his tent. Go to your people before the fight begins.” He gathered his men and they fought for their lives. A few escaped; but men, women and children were massacred in a butchery too horrible to relate, Women were ripped open and babes were scalped; and the Sand Creek massacre has gone upon record, by testimony that cannot be impeached, as a “butchery that would have disgraced the tribes of Central Africa.” (Bishop Whipple’s letter to _Evening Post_, January, 1879; and the report of the Doolittle Commission.)

But we fought the Cheyennes again in 1867. What occasioned that war? Gen. Hancock, “without any known provocation,” as says the report to Congress of the Indian Bureau, in July, 1867, surrounded a village of Cheyennes who had been at peace since the signing of the treaty of 1865, and were quietly occupying the grounds assigned to them by the treaty, burned down the homes of three hundred lodges, destroyed all their provisions, clothing, utensils and property of every description, to the value of $100,000. This led to a war that extended over three years, and cost us $40,000,000 and three hundred men. (President Seeley’s speech.)

We have just fought the Bannocks and Shoshones. In November, 1878, Gen. Crook wrote to the Government: “With the Bannocks and Shoshones our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of war-path or starvation; and being human, many of them will choose the former, in which death shall at least be glorious.” Is it necessary to say anything more of that war? Why pursue the story? The late Congressman (now President) Seeley, of Amherst College, says: “There has not been an Indian war for the past fifty years in which the whites have not been the aggressors.”

What, then, is to be done? I press upon you the importance of these resolutions. Standing in the courts, the recognition of the Indian as a person with rights, inalienable as yours and mine, to life, to justice, to property, this is the first, the absolute essential. As long ago as 1807, Governor (afterwards President) Harrison said: “The utmost efforts to induce the Indians to take up arms would be unavailing if _one only of the many persons who have committed murder upon their people could be brought to punishment_.” Generals Harney and Pope have testified of late that this is as true now as then.

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.

The scene changes. There is again a wigwam. Lift the blanket door and enter. Three old women are warming themselves by the fire in the centre. A young man lies upon the ground singing aloud from an Ojibway hymn-book, which he reads by the fire-light. An old man rises to greet you, asks you to sit down, and proceeds to talk about Jesus Christ. It is the same Shaydayence. He is known now as the leader of the singing band of the Chippewas, who goes from house to house with a few young men to plead with his countrymen to love Christ. A little later you find him living in a log house with table and chairs and stove, a white man’s home, cultivating also his garden. What wrought the change? He had a friend, Nayboneshkong, who was sick and dying. He went to see him. The sick man had long been a Christian, and now rallied himself to speak for the last time. Hour after hour he expostulated and pleaded. He rose from his bed with preternatural strength. He walked the floor, still talking and praying. Morning came, Nayboneshkong was dead, and Shaydayence went to his wigwam to begin the new life of a Christian man. Observe that he was a savage, a medicine man and a drunkard. What other influence could have saved him? Would education, or citizenship, or civilization, or legal standing, or property rights? Nothing; nothing but the personal power of Jesus Christ; and that did.

The story goes that once there appeared at the cave of a hermit a little child, naked and cold and hungry. The good man eagerly took him in, and from his own scanty store clothed and fed and warmed him. He set his heart upon him as upon his own son. The next day the hermit was gone. It was Jesus who had come thus needy to his door, and proving his love, had in return taken him to himself, and like Enoch, the hermit was not. The child, naked and hungry and cold at our door, is the Indian. I hear the voice of the Lord himself saying, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

You have pointed out the large part which in the providence of God may yet be appointed to the negro race to play in doing God’s work in the world.

I know nothing of the future of the Indian in this direction. He may have no “genius for religion,” no “peculiar talent of faith,” no “wonderful power in song.” That he has talents which are respectable, none who know him can doubt. But be that as it may, before all other men he stands to-day the living witness of the promise of the Scripture, that Christ “is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him.” He, brethren, is the “uttermost” man—the sinner who, abused, outcast and despised, is, at least in your eyes, the furthest of all men from hope and from Christ. Have you religion enough to try to save him? If so, begin by showing him justice.

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THE CHINESE.

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“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 O. Wedderspoon, Esq., Rev. T. E. Noble, Hon. F. F. Low, Rev. I. 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 Mooar, D. D., Hon. E. D. Sawyer, Rev. E. P. Baker, James M. Haven, Esq., Rev. Joseph Rowell, Rev. John Kimball, E. P. Sanford, Esq.

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

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REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

The report opens with stating the greatness of the problems with which the Association has to grapple, protests against the discriminating legislation of State and nation, and concludes as follows:

We regard the work of this Association among the Chinamen in America as fruitful in good results. Its Superintendent on the field has said: “I doubt whether any evangelistic labor in connection with our churches has yielded larger results, in proportion to the funds employed and the breadth which we have been permitted to give to the work.” That work has been limited. Out of $179,000 expended by this Association last year, only $6,596 was given to this work. This was increased a little by other funds in California. But this sum, applied to twelve schools, with twenty-one teachers and 1,489 pupils, is too small for the greatness of the work, for the 100,000 Chinamen in this country have the closest relations with the millions left at home. They are constantly coming and going. The Rev. W. C. Pond said in 1876 that during the fourteen preceding years nearly 130,000 had landed in San Francisco, or about 9,000 annually; but they are returning nearly or quite as fast as they come. They are “picked young men, industrious, enterprising, persistent.” As they come to us, feel our molding touch to harden or to soften, and then return home, we owe it to them, to ourselves, and to Christ, to pass as much as possible of this moving stream of immortal souls through our schools and under the influence of One greater than Confucius. We want the returning stream to bear on its bosom the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ. We, therefore, recommend the enlargement of this work to its utmost demand. It touches vitally the evangelization of 400,000,000 of brothers and sisters. This work is broader than that among the Indian and the Negro; it is broader than the evangelization of Africa. We press its importance, therefore, both upon the officers and the constituent members of this Association, for by and by we may see in it the Divine purpose to redeem China by means of the Chinamen returning home laden with the riches of grace, more precious than gold.

Your committee desire to express their high appreciation of the able and exhaustive paper on the Chinese question read before the Association by the Rev. J. H. Twichell, and submitted to this committee, and recommend its publication.

Your committee deem it of great importance suitably to recognize the action of President Hayes in saving us by a veto from national disgrace. When Congress had so far forgotten the whole past policy of our Government, and the principles of Christianity imbedded in the foundations of the Republic, as to pass a bill indirectly abrogating a treaty unmentioned in the bill, the Executive interposed and saved both our treaty and our honor.

We would suggest, therefore, the expression of our appreciation of his action in the adoption of the following resolution, viz.:

_Resolved_, That the American Missionary Association, assembled in its thirty-third anniversary, believing that the treaties existing between the United States and China, so far as they relate to the rights of emigration from one country to the other, and the treatment such emigrants should receive from the people and nation among whom and in which they live, are right, just, wise and Christian, does heartily record its appreciation of the high services which President Hayes, under God, has, by his timely veto of the anti-Chinese bill, been enabled to render the Republic, in preserving inviolate its treaty obligations and also the cause of Christianity, in removing a threatened formidable barrier to the evangelization of the Chinese, not only in America, but also in their native land, and the Association hereby tenders him its profound thanks for the same.

_Resolved_, That the secretaries of this Association be authorized to convey to President Hayes this our action.

A. HASTINGS ROSS, W. A. NICHOLS, CHARLES C. CRAGIN, MARK WILLIAMS, C. CAVERNO, E. M. WILLIAMS, JEE GAM.

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UNITED STATES AND CHINA—THE SITUATION.

REV. J. H. TWICHELL, HARTFORD, CONN.

OUR OPPORTUNITY.

* * * * Much as anterior conditions and causes have to do with it, the great opportunity now maturing in China for the ingress of revolutionary influences from without, has been pre-eminently shaped by Protestant missions; and in the nature of the case, it devolves on Protestant Christendom the highest obligations to meet it that circumstances can create. To no other nation, however, does such a share of this opportunity and corresponding obligation fall as to the United States; for we sustain relations to the Chinese Government and to the Chinese people that are, in important respects, singular.

(1.) To begin with, there is the relation of _neighborhood_. Sailing up the Pacific, near our coast, one summer evening, Yung Wing, leaning against the steamer guards, and looking across the level waters to the westward, said, “Yonder lies my country, next land to this.” Between us and China, between our two realms, the one so old, the other so young, for a thousand miles of coast on either side, nothing intervenes but the sea, which no state owns, and that is contiguity. Along so great a boundary America and China may be said to touch, yet without possibility of territorial dispute. And this nearness is one feature of our special opportunity.