My friend the Indian

Preface

A WORD of explanation may be granted a man who has spent the greater part of a rather busy life in fields far remote from literary labor, and who now finds himself thrust into a position where he and his motives may be misjudged.

Let me say that this work was not undertaken without serious thought and many misgivings. Not that I had no story to tell, but that I doubted my capacity to put into readable form the things I have seen or had a part in, and the conclusions I have drawn from my observations. For thirty-eight years I have lived among, or had oflScial dealings with, a race of people little understood by the whites who have displaced them in carrying out the immutable law of the survival of the fittest. It is not the least of my possessions that I hold the confidence of these people. I may say now that in the following pages I have said nothing that will jeopardize the relation that is as a bond between the red men of the West and me.

My friends in official and private life have been good enough to assume that what I know of the Indian, of his losing struggle for an existence according to his own ideals, of his manner of living, mode of thought, habit in action and repose, and of the things that have happened to him on the long trail he has traveled in the processes of evolution since I first became intimate with him on the plains of Dakota in 1871, might be worth setting down for the information [ vii]

PREFACE

of my contemporaries and the correction of some errors which are, unfortunately, but too common. Under the constant urging of these perhaps too partial friends, this work was undertaken. I had thought to use the autobiographical style throughout, but it was so necessary to incorporate in the work momentous occurrences in which I had no part, but which were described to me by the red men who participated in them, that I have not always adhered to this style. The things I have related of my own knowledge may be depended upon as being as nearly correct as may be, allowing for human defects ; those other — and perhaps more important — matters which are given on the relation of the participants, tell the Indian's side of many a disputed event. I have exercised due care to accept no statement of fact, unless the person responsible for it was known to me to be worthy of credence.

The following pages were written at agencies and training-schools in many reservations, from Standing Rock, North Dakota, to Round Valley, California. I do not know that they carry the atmosphere in which the events treated occurred and were written of, but I do know that sincerity of purpose, strengthened by the environment of Indian life as it is to-day, has actuated the writing of every word. And the work must stand as it is — or fall.

Following as I do in the footsteps of the men of distinction in the learning of the books and the fields who have written of the Indian as he is and as he is not, I must throw upon the shoulders of these partial friends, who urged me to this work, the responsibility for my emergence from the gloom of the council-fire,

[ viii ]

PREFACE

from the sordid surroundings of the Indian of to-day, into the limelight of that publicity which shines on the man who has the temerity to put himself into a book. I can make no claim to the use of those literary graces which might adorn a tale, but I have tried in this writing to discharge what I have been told is a duty. If the contention is made that I have written from the Indian rather than from the white man's point of view, then I have no rejoinder to make, but am willing to rest content in the knowledge that I have done justice to "My Friend the Indian."

Contents

I. Moving into the Indian Country

1 16

II. On the Threshold of Civilization

Chapter I Moving Into The Indian Country

Wherein the Personal Element is Necessarily Obtruded — Changes that have come about in a Generation — Leaving St. Paul for Fort Totten — Five Hundred Miles by Bull-Team — Getting Acquainted with the Indians.

FOR thirty-eight years I have been saying " How" to the Indian man rather more frequently than I have been permitted to salute the white man according to his forms. When first, as an employee of the government, I answered the grave salutation of the red man, the buffalo roamed at will over the great plains of the Sioux country; the Indian stood just without the threshold of civilization ; the mailed fist of the military was cufiing the untutored men of the grass-lands into a sense of the beneficence of the peace policy inaugurated by General Grant ; the iron horse had not crossed the Minnesota boundary ; the dull, plodding ox was the courier and herald of the culture that was stowed in embryo in the prairie schooner; Chicago was just beginning to throw off its swaddling-clothes under a blanket of smoke; St. Paul was the frontier to the northwest, and bad men flourished in the towns to the west and south on the borderland beyond the Missouri; Jim Fisk was a king in Wall Street, and the uncrowned [1 ]

kings of the people who lived in tepees were entirely ignorant of the existence of the lords of high finance.

And that was only a generation ago. In the span of a life whose better years have been spent very close to the scent of the tepee smoke, I have seen the Indian prostrated by the hand he kissed, and biting the hand that fed him; I have held savage passions in check when the Indian stood ready to spring in bloody protest on the white man whose coming he resented and whose beneficent intent he did not understand. I have, even more frequently, stood between the white man and the Indian whose rights he contemplated taking from him by the processes of what we have come to describe as benevolent assimilation. While I enjoyed and still enjoy the friendship of white men who are very dear to me, I have done many things that were dictated rather by a sense of the rights of the red man than by the promptings of racial affiliation, and I hold to nothing more firmly, am proud of nothing so much as of the fact that my red friends of the West have given me the title of friend.

It is a small thing to be proud of, some one will say, the friendship of the Indian. I say it is much to have been able to guide the uncertain steps of a simple people across the threshold of civilization, and help to lead them to a realization of the domination of the white man and the impending extinction of their race as an element in the great affairs of men ; to have been able to help convince the Indian that he would gain by bartering his position as a free agent following the dictates of his nature and keeping to the traditions and lands of his ancestors. I would not be understood as claiming for myself any undue prominence in this [2]

work: I was part of the machine organized by the government for the civilization of the Indian, and as a part of that organization I did the work that was appointed me by such means as I could devise. The predecessors of my generation of Indian officials, men of heart and brain and brawn, who had the pioneer work among the Indians, accomplished much as individuals, notwithstanding the fact that they had been isolated. When I entered the service the military arm was the only power that appealed to the Indian, To the men of my time was appointed the task of taking the raw and bleeding material which made the hostile strength of the plains Indians, of bringing that material to the mills of the white man, and of transmuting it into a manufactured product that might be absorbed by the nation without interfering with the national digestion. In doing my part toward bringing about this transmutation, I went to the Indian, instead of sitting in my office and waiting for the Indian to come to me. The duty was not always congenial ; it sometimes led to things and places that I would not have elected to seek out. But it all brought me very close to the red man. I believe I came to understand Indian human nature; I found that, under the blanket in which the Indian shrouded himself, there was a heart and mind altogether human, but undeveloped. I believe that the Indian was a man before outrage and oppression made him a savage. I have known him as a savage, a fighting man, in the pride and insolence of his strength ; I have known him as a sage in council, then as a beggar with the pride starved out of him. I have sat with him at his feasts and councils. I have not [3]

asked more of him than he could give, nor promised more than I could fulfill. It must not be supposed that I took this attitude from motives higher than have inspired other men who have dealt with the Indian. It was early made manifest to me that the policy of simple honesty was the only possible policy to apply to commerce with the red man.

I say these things, not in a vainglorious spirit, but to justify myself in asserting a right to the title of friend of the Indian. If I have come to know the Indian intimately and understandingly, I have earned the right to tell of him as I know him, and these pages are justified.

In the later sixties an impossible condition had arisen in the relations of the white man and the Indian. The Caucasian had wheeled the car of progress up to the border of the Indian land, and had been compelled to halt until the red man had been coerced, cajoled, or compelled to get out of the way. Coercion and cajolery had been pretty well worn out on the Indian, and he had come to some sort of knowledge of the fact that he must make a stand. During the Civil War, and in the unsettled period succeeding it, he had broken loose from the leading-strings of the agents and had things pretty much his own way. His roaming had not been materially interfered with, and there is no doubt that he felt very well able to take care of himself without any guidance from the white man. The care that had been bestowed upon him when he consented, theretofore, to render himself amenable to the arguments offered — backed by fleshpots — by the whites, was not just what would [4]

appeal to any man, white or red. There had been a good deal of chicanery in the administration of Indian affairs. He had been starved into rebellion and beaten — sometimes — into submission. But during the war he had tasted again the delights of practically unhampered freedom. That this freedom took the form of horrid license at times was shown by the awful outbreaks indulged in on the frontiers. Those of the Indians who lived in countries which were not yet desired by the whites were living a wild, free life in the midst of what they regarded as plenty. There is no doubt that the roving bands were a menace to travel on the plains, and that they would have to be put on reservations if the white man was to be permitted to carry out the great promise of which the time was pregnant.

The entire regular army — or practically all of it — was afield in pursuit of the Indians. General Sheridan, whose opinion of the people he was engaged in checking or fighting was summed in the phrase, "There are no good Indians but dead Indians," was in command in the field on the frontier. General Sherman, whose notion of dealing with the Indian was expressed in the statement that they must be suppressed by "merciless and vindictive warfare," was at the head of the army. These same sentiments, as regarded the whites, were evidently held to by the chiefs of the fierce and warlike tribes of Teton Sioux, the Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and others, whose business was the chase primarily, but plunder and war when ill-treatment gave excuse for reprisals. In view of the expressed sentiments of the great military leaders of the times, the attitude of the [5]

Indian is not calculated to cause great surprise — viewed now at a distance of thirty-five or forty years. At the time of the accession of General Grant to the presidency every man's hand was raised against the Indian, and, it must be admitted, the Indian had his hand raised against white men generally. I do not mean that all the Indians were inclined to the warpath, but the greater portion of the warlike tribes were afield and ready for trouble.

And they were a very different body of men, physically, from the Indians of to-day. They wore an air of sturdy independence. They were equipped according to their natural requirements. Their minds were generally attuned to magnificent ideas of time and distance. They abhorred the limitations that the white man accepts as affecting his dwelling-place. They were foes to be reckoned with, or they might be converted into friends worth the having. It is a matter for profound regret that the Indian of that day could not have been advanced to his present knowledge of, and capacity for, civilized pursuits without being subjected to the debasing and degenerating physical and moral conditions that were inseparable from the processes of transmutation.

Just previous to the inauguration of General Grant, commissions, composed largely of military men, had proposed treaties to the more important of the tribes. They had accepted the treaties, or some of their chiefs had; and when General Grant, in his inaugural, proclaimed the peace policy in dealing with the Indian, there was a fair prospect that the shedding of blood on the frontier would cease. And it might have ceased if the Indian could have been protected from [6]

his fool friends in authority, and the white man freed in the smallest degree from the promptings of cupidity that would tolerate no delay in grasping the riches that had been the portion of the red man.

From the time of the signing of the treaties of 1868 up to the date of my entrance into the Indian service, in 1871, there had been very large accessions to the number of Indians living at the agencies. On the extreme frontier there had been fighting, and many isolated but bloody encounters took place. But the Indian was different from what he had been a few years previously. In the language of the bounding West in which he made his habitat, it may be said that, in 1871, the Indian was " halter-broke but he had not yet been bitted." That was to come later, when the bloody arbitrament of war had been appealed to and the mighty tide of white men had engulfed and submerged the red bands that stood in the way to the setting sun and fortune. The operation of the law of the survival of the fittest has not been applied, according to the Indian canons of fitness, and the great men of the red race, the last of a race of physical giants, have passed away in the years that have intervened since 1871. They have not yet been succeeded by the race of mental giants that should follow them. But in the process of eliminating the big men of the race, some stirring events took place. In some of these events I had a part, of many I was an interested observer. And the relation of these events will properly include the story of the passing of the Indian of yesterday.

Born in 1842, in the province of Ontario, of Irish and Scotch ancestry, — an accident of birth the dis- [7]

tinction of which I gladly share with some millions of my contemporaries, — I arrived in Minnesota in 1863, with two strong, bare hands, and entered into an apprenticeship for a career among the Indians by becoming acquainted with many of them and of their mixed bloods at St. Paul, Mendota, Wabasha, Faribault, and other places in that then frontier state. I had acquired some slight knowledge of the Sioux language, and when, in 1871, Major W. H. Forbes was appointed agent at Devils Lake agency, in what is now North Dakota, and offered me a place, with virtual charge of the outfit he was taking into the Sioux country, I was in some measure equipped for the position by an understanding of the manners and customs of the Sioux. Looking back down the vista of years, I see now that I was not nearly so well equipped for a life among the Indians as I thought I was when I mounted a horse and navigated a bull-train of twenty yoke of cattle and ten wagons out through the streets of St. Paul in the early morning of July 1, 1871.

The expedition started from the present location of the Hotel Ryan, St. Paul, and it had taken many days and nights of hard work to equip the train with the numerous articles necessary for the establishment of a post beyond the outskirts of civilization. St. Paul was not the metropolis then that it is now. There were outfitting places enough, and a bull-train starting for the frontier was not such a rare sight as to prompt the inhabitants to get out of bed to see us off.

Major Forbes, who was a Christian gentleman and a good friend, was quite prominent in the Northwest [8]

in those days. He had been chief commissary of subsistence under General H. H. Sibley during the Indian troubles, in war-time, in Minnesota, and had served as president of the territorial council and postmaster at St. Paul. He was closely connected with the leading men of his state, counting among his closest friends General H. H. Sibley, Governor Alexander Ramsey, Right Reverend John Ireland, now archbishop of St. Paul, Commodore N. W. Kittson, and General John B. Sanborn. His health was not good at the time he was appointed to the Devils Lake agency, and it was understood that the work would largely fall upon me — understood, at least, by Major Forbes.

Devils Lake is situated something like a hundred miles west of the Red River of the North, in North Dakota. From time immemorial it had been the resort of the Sioux, the natural phenomena manifested in and about the lake appealing to the superstitions of the Indians. It was called by the Sioux "Minnewaukon," spirit, or sacred water — suffering in the translation as so many of the Sioux names of people and places did. The lake, strongly impregnated with salts and iron, is very brackish, and there are innumerable whirlpools, all of which were attributed by the Sioux to the activity of the spirit that had its abode in the lake and the surrounding country. While the phenomena that were not understood may have menaced the Indian through his superstitious fears, the material attractions of the country quite overshadowed the immaterial drawbacks. It was a great buffalo country. The mighty bison roamed the undulating prairie in uncounted numbers, moving in [9]

very early days up to and along the Red River and the Canadian lakes, and then away down to the great plains to the southwest. As the settlement along the Red River drove the buffalo back out of the valley, the great herds made the Canadian boundary, or thereabouts, the limit of their grazing land, and in the fifties and sixties they occupied the country around Big Stone Lake, the James River valley, and westward over to and beyond the Missouri River. In the country about Devils Lake they had been very numerous, and had lingered there until the Red River half-breeds and Indians became too thick, disappearing from that country in 1868.

The Red River half-breeds had for many years made Devils Lake the scene of the summer hunts. They were descendants of the French voyageurs, who had married the daughters of the northern tribes and who had grown greatly in numbers and established for themselves a local habitation on the Red River, after the founding of the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, at, or near, what is now Winnipeg. They were a happy-go-lucky lot, leading an easy-going existence in the Indian style when they were abroad, and after the fashion of the frontier white man in their permanent habitations. Some day, some one will arise who will write the epic of the Red River half-breed, and the world will be the richer for a knowledge of these people, half Indian, half French, having the capacity for endurance of the one race and the vivacity and appreciation of enjoyment of the other, — of their devotion to primitive Christianity on the one hand and their wild indifference to all trammels on the other. They trapped in the winter, did [10]

service as voyageurs and freighters, and hunted the buffalo for the hides and pemmican. They did all the freighting for the old fur companies, and the screeching protest of the wooden axles of the carts, which they formed into trains miles long, could be heard on the prairie long before the outfit came into sight, their carts being built entirely of wood, with no ironwork whatever in the construction, not even an iron nail being used. The preparation of pemmican may not have originated with the Red River half-breeds, but they most assuredly preserved the art of making it. Pemmican was made of buffalo-meat, which was dried and then pounded into pulp; hides of buffalo calves were made into sacks that were quite impervious ; the sacks were filled with the lean meat ; the tallow of the animals slaughtered was then melted and poured into the sacks, the tops sewed up, and when the mass hardened it would keep almost indefinitely. Pemmican formed the most nutritious and easily portable article of food, and was of great value to travelers who made long distances over plains where meat could not always be obtained. It was the article of diet most to be depended upon, and with very little pemmican in his pack, a plainsman could travel an incredible distance without fear of lacking ample subsistence. In the neighborhood of Devils Lake, an enormous quantity of this frontier delicacy was made and sold to the Hudson's Bay and American Fur companies.

These half-breeds made a permanent camp on the

south side of Devils Lake, and used that for a base

in their hunting expeditions, and here they had lived

for years, generally on excellent terms with the nomad

Indians who hunted in the same country. It was for the purpose of locating these wandering bands of Indians that the reservation had been established on the south side of Devils Lake. The Indians roamed that section of the country from beyond the Minnesota border to away up north of the international boundary — not yet surveyed and defined. The Cut Head, Yanktonai, and bands of Santees were numerous enough. Some of them were people who had been frightened out of the vicinity of the Minnesota settlements by the depredations of their kinsmen of the Medawakanton, Wahpakoota, Sisseton, and Wahpeton bands during the Minnesota Massacre, in 1862. They were without a reservation home, and they congregated at Devils Lake, on the appointed reservation, voluntarily. It had been provided in the establishment of the reservation, that when five hundred Indians had gathered there an agent should be appointed. A military post had already been established and garrisoned by United States troops. About this post, or in the neighborhood, about seven hundred Indians had congregated, and it was to minister to these people that I started from St. Paul that morning in July thirty-eight years ago.

My old friends of the frontier would remember a trip with a bull-team across the meadow-like prairies of northwestern Minnesota and Dakota in the early seventies as a sort of progressive picnic — forgetting the heart-breaking encounters with oxen that would not move when they should, and could not be headed off when a sudden stop was needful ; the breaking down in places far remote from repair-shops, and the remedying of the breaks according to first principles [12]

AN UNTAMED INDIAN in travel ; the camping in a strange country ; the pursuit of runaway cattle. They are all a joke to me now, and the story would not at all appeal to the man who leaves St. Paul, Minnesota, in a Pullman on the palatial Northern Pacific train about midnight, and eats his late breakfast before he reaches Jamestown, North Dakota, in the morning ; so I am not going to dwell on that trip of five hundred miles. There were in the party Andy Atkinson of Faribault, wagonmaker ; Hypolite Dupis, a character and frontiersman who came into the country in 1831 ; Ben Nesbitt, a colored man, who was an object of much curiosity to the Indians of the plains. He was one of the few black men in that part of the Indian country in those days. There was another, named Isaiah, who had lived among the Standing Rock Indians for many years, and who was killed in the Custer battle. He was with the white forces, and the Indians took a horrible revenge on his corpse when they found that he was among the dead soldiers. Two others, Haines and Lechner, white men, made up the list of employees.

The country through which the trail led, after I left St. Cloud, Minnesota, lay in a general way along the road that had been established as a post-route, which led away to the west, through Dakota and Montana, and up into Idaho, reaching the miningcamps. In 1867 and 1868, military posts had been established at different points along the route, with a view to protecting the mail-carriers from the marauding Indians. Major Charles Ruffee, now of Brainard, Minnesota, had the mail contract, and he had suffered great losses from the spoliation to which he had been subjected by roaming or hostile bands. I believe [13]

he still has a claim for a considerable amount of money which has never been allowed or paid. General Terry took a military expedition into the country, and established and left garrisons at posts called Forts Pembina, Ranson, Totten, Stevenson, Buford, and then over into Montana. These posts did not all lie along the direct trail, but were calculated to protect the adjacent country. There were other posts established later, at Jamestown and Bismarck, and at the eastern end of the chain was Fort Abercrombie on the Red River of the North. The country west of the Red River was entirely devoid of white settlement except for the military posts. It is almost inconceivable that this should have been the fact ; but in those days there was no Fargo, no Jamestown ; Bismarck was still in the future, and Alexander McKenzie was bending his genius in some other direction than booming the future capital. It was not until the next year that the Northern Pacific crossed the Red River, taking the white man along in its wake — it was not safe to venture too far in front or to either side. In the summer of 1872 Jamestown was a roaring camp, and that fall the road went out to the Missouri. At that day so terrifying was the winter to the people who had not become inured to it, that no attempt was made to operate the railroad west of the Red River except in the summer-time.

And this was the country I was compelled to travel through to reach the military post at Fort Totten, beside which the Devils Lake agency was to be established. The military — the fort was garrisoned by three companies of the Twentieth Infantry — was occupying a new set of buildings; the old post was [14]

abandoned for agency use and occupied forthwith. It had been built in rather primitive fashion, and with a view of impressing the Indians rather than of adding to the attractions of the landscape. Around the buildings, some of which were still occupied by the mechanics attached to the post and for stabling purposes, was built a substantial log-stockade. The new post, partly erected the year before and completed after my arrival, was of brick and very presentable.

Here I was welcomed in such fashion as might be expected by Indians who did not know what might be looked for from the new institution. They were not exactly cordial. They were blanket Indians — essentially I mean, and in their mental attitude. Along the lake there were a number of half-breeds from the Red River, who had lingered after the buffalo had left the country. They gathered about and gave us a vivacious welcome, with "bonjours" in plenty, as well as offers of assistance — which were declined firmly but kindly.

Tio Waste (Pretty Lodge), who was also known as Little Fish, of the Sissetons, Wanata of the Cut Heads, and Left Bear of the Wahpetons, all prominent men, put themselves on the reception committee and came in to get acquainted. The rest of the seven hundred Indians, scattered about the reservation, apparently inspired by the reverse notion of the society woman's idea of etiquette, waited for me to go out and leave cards at their residences — which attitude they overcame when the fall set in and they became hungry and cold — the ordinary condition of the plains Indian at that day.