|
|
 How We Thought So how could our grandparents
consider themselves moral people yet rationalize murdering Indians and
despoiling the wilderness? Instead of merely condemning them, let's
take a moment to understand them too.
Pioneer Practices.
From the days of the Plymouth colony on the Atlantic to the present
period when the Pacific bounds--for how brief a time let us not attempt
to say--the "area of freedom," the extermination of the Indian race on
the continent has been as gradual and as natural as the growth of an
empire, and the increase of the whites over the hunting grounds once
possessed by the dusky tribes of America. In vain humanity has pleaded
the cause of the "poor Indian," in vain national efforts have been put
forth to save, and in vain civilization has provided a seat beside her
in the triumphal car of Progress and Improvement for the child of
nature and of "nature's God." His path has been downward from the day
that disclosed to him the stranger's track upon the Atlantic shore. His
destiny, or doom, has been to perish with his native wilds. Slowly he
has receded before the paleface, in a line of march towards the setting
sun. He has reached the last "vestige of dry land," and even thither he
has been followed, until the waters of the Pacific wash alike the feet
of the white and the red man.
Could that decree of fate which has followed the Indian to the verge of ocean rest here as readily as we withdraw from the contemplation of its unceasing pursuit, tracked out as it has been by scores of writers, there still might linger for many centuries to come a worthy remnant of the brave men who once held sway on the continent. But we know that this may not be. Once it was but by the light of prophetic vision that we saw the last Indian hunted to the shores of the western ocean. Today we overlook the Pacific wave, and build our homes upon the crumbling ashes of Indian huts and above the mounds of whole tribes that have been swept from before us. We stand upon the eastern coast of the great western waters, and across its waves we look for fresh signs invoking further extension of the homes of freemen. But the Indian whom we have hunted to these shores--where is his abiding place? This we call "manifest destiny." It gives us this broad expanse of land and water, and levels the primitive forms of nature, and bows down even unto the dust the outcasts of humanity. It is to no purpose that we proclaim redemption and strive to avert the fast-closing doom of the Indian. The nature of our existence does not permit of success being attained. The practices and usages of our people, from the days of the pilgrim fathers to the present moment, have involved the annihilation of the Indian race as a necessity and a part of the irresistible impulse of America's destiny. They perish, and were ordained, or at least are identified with their native wilds, to perish and pass away with the forest and hill. We may labor at "policy," and perhaps provide for a few tribes a few years' lengthened period of existence or lingering decay, but we never can save. We never can by allotments of land, by government rations, or by any system which we may adopt for the promotion of the welfare of the red man, cure the wound that is rankling in his race. We cannot shut out for him a remnant of territory of which he may be taught to feel sole possessorship, where he may prosperously and at peace pass his days. We cannot debar him from intercourse with our frontiers, while from the touch of the pernicious influences wrought by pioneer settlements he recoils as from the deadly upas, with the poison breath drying up his life. And more than this, the cause of pioneering immigration admits of no mild, humane, pacifying or conciliatory doctrines and practices. When the march of civilizing improvement is seriously impeded or obstructed, peace or war are the only and ready alternatives. No humanizing or Christianizing course could be adopted. The men who are always thrown in advance of the body of immigration are always but poor apostles in the work of conversion or reform. The axe and the rifle bear out their only ideas of improvement. When stubborn tribes of Indians do not readily conform to the elements of the new life established among them, they are like the wild beasts of the forest, and must shun the quick glance of the white settler. When it becomes necessary to subdue them, the rifle is substituted for the axe, and the day's work of slaughter counted up as though the change from the ordinary avocation of the woodsman among the forest trees to the "clearing" of a "patch" of Indians were hardly noticed. It is difficult to realize that, with all our pious resolves to sustain a humane Indian policy only, here in California, many wild sections of country can only be reclaimed from the hands of the Indian by the method usually adopted to redeem the forest land from its primitive, wild and unprofitable condition. Yet such is the fact. Government agents, with their rum and tobacco dispensations, can accomplish very little in the work of attaching to some of our public lands a marketable value, or encouraging settlement in many districts of the state. Towards her northern boundary, many of the fairest lands of California are overrun with troublesome and untamable tribes of Indians. The Rogue River Indians are an unalterably vicious and dangerous people. They will never, in their mountain homes, consent to partake of the thralldom of the white man's law, and preach against the practice as we may, they can only be removed by the exterminating encroachments of their superior enemy--by the law of the rifle and the axe, and the code of practice usually "served out" by the pioneer. That extermination is only another name for the warfare already commenced in this country is shown by the following extract from a letter written by one of an expedition at present ranging the Rogue River country. He says: "During this period we have been searching about in the mountains, destroying villages, killing all the males we could find, and capturing women and children. We have killed about 30 altogether, and have 28 prisoners now in camp." This system of singling out and deliberately destroying "all the males" is on the plan of indiscriminate massacre. We may treat these things with strong disfavor, but by such process, and by this barbarous practice, do our pioneers prepare the way for settlement and civilization. Daily Alta California, San Francisco, August 15, 1851, page 2 The Red Men.--Here we learned more fully the particulars of the recent difficulties with the Indians. It resulted in their being surrounded by the whites, and completely reduced to terms on their favorite fighting ground. From twenty to thirty Indians were killed. Bad as these savages have been, one cannot help thinking that such an expenditure of human life is too wasteful to meet the smiles of Heaven. William Roberts, "Tour to Puget Sound," Vermont Christian Messenger, Northfield, Vermont, May 11, 1853, page 1 Indian Tom's Last Hunt.
There was a brave, big-hearted set of fellows among the mountains of
Josephine Co., Oregon, in early times. They were rough,
perhaps, but
soft as women when a comrade was in distress, and as intrepid as
soldiers of the old guard when in dangerous situations. It needed
rough, bold men in those days, for the times were rough, and many a
story is related of the manner in which they stood shoulder to shoulder
for mutual protection. Illinois River, below Kerbyville, was the
wildest and most inaccessible part of the country, but gold in paying
quantities had been found on it, and in 1852, notwithstanding the
mountains through which it ran were a favorite resort for Indians, many
of the boys continued to work on it: One of the strongest parties was
located on the "Pearsall" bar [about
fifteen miles below Kerby],
and one of the number being Aleck W----, a great strapping Western man,
lithe as a cat, steady and unerring in his aim, always carrying a
"pass"' for a redskin in his rifle, and gaining the credit of making
many a "good" Indian. Aleck was a terror to them; their trails were
unsafe, and frequently aboriginal visitors to the Pearsall camp lost
their reckoning and never returned. After the close of hostilities
between the whites and Indians, the latter often visited the camp,
sometimes hunting deer for the boys, and were generally treated fairly,
as they deserved to be. On one occasion, a "black," named Tom,
belonging to the Rogue River tribe, a sulky, ill-favored wretch,
demanded Aleck's gun for a hunt, which was refused, the owner saying he
wanted to hunt on the next day himself. The Indian was offended and
inclined to be saucy, the result was he was driven out of camp in an
angry mood, flinging at Aleck as he went such an angry glance as only a
redskin can give. The menace was instantly recognized, but the old
hunter said nothing. Starting up the mountain on the west side of the
river the next morning, with the snow two feet deep, Aleck hunted
steadily and faithfully till noon. Usually successful, he never was in
such ill luck, but still he labored on in hopes of getting sight of a
deer. Finding he was above the "sign," he made a detour which took him
considerably down the mountains, and then swinging round he crossed his
own track made during the forenoon in the deep snow. There was a
moccasin print in it. The situation at once flashed on the mind of the
hunter; Indians never followed the tracks of another hunter expecting
to find game, and he at once realized that it was himself that was
being hunted. Pushing onward a short distance without leaving anything
to indicate that the moccasin tracks had been discovered, Aleck pressed
through a bunch of brush, and turning abruptly to the left ensconced
himself behind a large clump of manzanita growing on the comb of a
small ridge. Placing his rifle through the branches of his own cover,
so as to command the right point of his broken trail, and lying down in
the snow behind it, he waited. One--two hours passed, till the watcher,
now nearly chilled, thought he waited in vain. The soft snow made no
sound, and he dare not raise himself to even a sitting position for
fear of discovery, but at last his quick ear detected a slight rustle
in the brush and an ugly brown face, made hideous with hatred, and
smeared beneath the eyes to protect them from the glare of the snow,
was in sight. It was his friend of the preceding day. Stopping where
the trail was broken, as if conscious that his game was nigh, he
glanced wildly about, with his eyeballs almost starting from their
sockets, and his gun cocked; but only for an instant. There was a
little white puff of smoke from behind the manzanita cover, the print
of a human form in the snow--an empty wigwam on the river! Leaving the
body where it fell, Aleck took the Indian's yager, broke it across a
tree and flung it into a ravine. Finding a revolver on the Indian, he
detached the cylinder, throwing it in one direction, the stock in
another. Returning homewards, the hunter jumped up several
bands of
deer, but he was nervous and chilled from his uncomfortable vigil, and
he went home empty-handed. Aleck's failure was noticed; but saying that
the sights of his gun had been moved, he quietly lighted his own pipe
and kept his own counsel. A year passed by and still Tom did not make
his appearance. Another year, and still the ugly face was not seen at
the camp. At last one of the boys asked Aleck, "where do you suppose
Tom keeps himself?" "How should I know," was the reply. "Am I my
brother's keeper? Why do you ask?" "O," said his partner, quietly, "I
found some bones up on the mountain yesterday, and kind o' guessed they
were Tom's." "Well," said Aleck, in surprise, "What, do you think he
suicided!" "Yes, I guess so, made a hole dead center between his eyes,
then busted his yager all to flinders and threw it down the gulch,"
laughing, remarked his interrogator. Right there Aleck confessed,
detailing every circumstance, explaining his silence as prompted by the
fear of trouble from White Indians only, and demanded a fair trial.
Being the only witness, and known to be a man of the strictest
veracity, the trial at the camp was short and the verdict--"served the
darned sneak right." Aleck still lives in Josephine County, and often
laughs when he thinks of the little game where the Red tried to outwit
the White.Tuskegee News, Tuskegee, Alabama, January 22, 1880, page 1 Wiped Out.
The death a few days ago at Jacksonville of an aged squaw, the last of
the Rogue River Indians, settles the account between civilization and a
once-powerful tribe, which was opened something like half a century
ago, in the most satisfactory, if not, indeed, the only way in which
such accounts have as yet been permanently settled. There is something
in a degree pathetic in the complete wiping out of a brave and sturdy
people which even the recital of atrocities they have perpetrated upon
peaceful white settlers cannot wholly subdue. Yet, the passing of the
Indian is so manifestly in accordance with nature's great law of
survival of the fittest that an attempt to stay its progress is futile.
The best such efforts have as yet been able to accomplish in full four
hundred years' varied endeavor has been to push these people upon
reservations set apart for their use and herd them there while they
slowly dwindle away--mocking them meanwhile with a pretense at
civilization. It is true that the various schools of the country have
turned out some dozens of young Indians, more or less, well equipped
for the industrial battle of life. But these--especially the young
women among them--have found it so hard to face the altered conditions
to which their school life has presented them that they are scarcely
less objects of pity in the struggle before them and around them than
is the last member of a vanished tribe, waiting in despairing silence
the summons of the "happy hunting grounds."--Portland Oregonian.
Toronto Saturday Night, June 10, 1893, page 14 Reprinted from the Oregonian of May 16, 1893, page 4. The "aged squaw" was known as Indian Jenny. The records of a passing--indeed of a past--race are written in the seamed faces and dreamy attitudes of the "last of the Rogue River Indians," are caught by the camera in their primitive home in Southern Oregon. Aged in appearance beyond their years, listless and indolent, there is yet a suggestion of a story in the faces of these Indians that one cannot regard without pity, even though he applauds the theory of the survival of the fittest, the working out of which these last representatives of a finished tribe attest.--Oregonian. Del Norte Record, Crescent City, January 24, 1903, page 2 |
|