Wigwam and War-path Or the Royal Chief in Chains Part 62

This I state on the authority of Dr. Wm. C. McKay, who was secretary for the council.

That the Indian has been faithful to his compacts, I submit the testimony of a veteran, who has fought them forty years,--General Harney.

HUMANE TREATMENT OF THE INDIANS.

General Harney, before the House Committee on Military Affairs, to-day, gave his opinion that if the Indians were treated fairly there would never be any difficulties with them. He had known but two instances in which they ever violated the treaty stipulations, and in these the Indians were to be excused, for the treaties had grown old before they were sought to be enforced, and the chiefs and head men who made them were all dead. The troubles with the Indians were princ.i.p.ally caused by fraudulent agents and by whiskey dealers.

That the Indian has not been the aggressor in the wars of Oregon, I refer to one of the bloodiest that has ever cursed this young State, in proof.

From Hon. George E. Cole, now Postmaster, Portland, Oregon, I learned some of the facts in this case. No man stands fairer than Mr. Cole as a man of integrity and honor. In proof of this a.s.sertion his present position, in one of the most respectable federal offices in the State, is cited.

In the fall of 1851, a party of miners, returning from a successful gold-hunting expedition to California, encamped on an island in Rogue River. All was peace and quiet. _No war, no blood, no treachery._ The Indians were in joint occupation of the beautiful valley of Rogue river with the white men, whose cabins and farms dotted the more beautiful portions of the country.

After the miners have made camp two Indians visit them,--a common thing for Indians to do. They are invited to partake of the supper,--an act of courtesy never omitted in wild life,--and they accept. The day pa.s.ses into night. The Indians prepare to return to their own camps. The miners object, and, _through fear that they_ might be surprised in the night, demand that the Indians remain. The Indians remonstrate. The miners are more solicitous for them to stay, their anxiety to leave being _construed_ as ominous of intended treachery. The Indians, also, suspecting the same thing on the part of the miners, _break to run_, and both of them are shot down and scalped.

The miners resume their journey. The friends of the Indians miss them. Their scalpless bodies are found on a timber drift in the river below. The Rogue-river war, with all its horrors, was the result.

That it was the most terrible that has ever devastated Oregon, let us call to the stand another unimpeachable witness,--Gen. Joel Palmer,--and we shall learn something of the reasons why it was so. Gen. Palmer, in his annual official report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the year 1856, page 200, says in speaking of this Rogue-river war:--

In every instance where a conflict has ensued between volunteers and hostile Indians in southern Oregon, the latter have gained what they regard a victory. It is true that a number of Indian camps have been attacked by armed parties, and mostly put to death or flight; but in such cases it has been those unprepared to make resistance, and not expecting such attack. This, though lessening the _number_ of the Indians in the country, has tended greatly to exasperate and drive into a hostile att.i.tude many that would otherwise have abstained from the commission of acts of violence against the whites.

The avowed determination of the people to exterminate the Indian race, regardless as to whether they were innocent or guilty, and the general disregard for the rights of those acting as friends and aiding in the subjugation of our real and avowed enemies, have had a powerful influence in inducing these tribes to join the warlike bands.

It is astonishing to know the rapidity with which intelligence is carried from one extreme of the country to another, and the commission of outrages (of which there have been many) by our people against an Indian is heralded forth by the hostile parties, augmented, and used as evidence of the necessity for all to unite in war against us.

These coast bands, it is believed, might have been kept out of the war, if a removal could have been effected during the winter; but the numerous obstacles indicated in my former letters, with the absence of authority and means in my hands, rendered it impracticable to effect it.

Continuing the subject, he further says:--

A considerable number of the Lower Coquille bands had been once induced to come in, but by the meddlesome interference of a few _squaw men_ and reckless disturbers of the peace, they were frightened, and fled the encampment. A party of miners and others, who had collected at Port Orford, volunteered, pursued, and attacked those Indians near the mouth of Coquille, killing fourteen men and one woman, and taking a few prisoners. This was claimed by them as a _battle_, notwithstanding no resistance was made by the Indians.

This witness clearly establishes the fact, that unarmed and unresisting Indians were attacked and shot down like wild beasts, and that "extermination" was the war cry of the white men. He confirms, too, the statement in regard to the rapidity with which intelligence is transmitted from one tribe to another, and its effect.

Do you wonder at the Modocs refusing to surrender, with so much to remind them of the white man's bloodthirsty deeds? See the last quotation from Gen. Palmer, and remember that these fourteen men and one woman were killed _after_ the surrender, and in the attempt to escape.

White men were accustomed to regard the Indian as the synonym for treachery and savage brutality. Let us see how this matter stands in the light of what has been already written, after adding one or two other instances from the many that crowd thickly forward for a place on the witness-stand.

Judge E. Steele, a lawyer of high character, a resident of Y-re-ka, Cal., since 1851, and also an ex-superintendent of Indian Affairs, in reporting an Indian difficulty in 1851, relates:--

That while hunting for two Indians who had committed some offence, we fell in with Ben Wright, who, learning from a squaw with whom he was living that the Indians had taken that course, he, with a band of Shastas, had started in pursuit and intercepted and captured them. We came in together, and took the Indians to Scott valley, and there gave them a fair trial, proving their ident.i.ty by both white men and Indians, and the Indian testimony and their own story, all of which was received in evidence. One was found guilty, and the other acquitted and set at liberty. Our present superintendent of public instruction, Professor G. K. G.o.dfrey, was one of the jury.

During our absence the people remained under great excitement, as all kind of rumors were afloat; and our company was so small, and I had started into a country inhabited by hordes of wild Indians, and those of Siskiyou mountain and Rogue-river valley notoriously hostile and warlike. Old Scar-face, learning of the difficulty at Rogue river, contrary to advice given him when we left, had come out from the canon, appeared on the mountain lying east of Y-re-ka, as the Indians afterward told me, for the purpose of letting the whites know the trouble, as the roads were guarded by the Indians on the mountains, so that travellers could not pa.s.s. As soon as he was seen, a wild excitement ensued, and a company started in pursuit. Scar-face, seeing the danger, fled up the Shasta valley, on foot, his pursuers after him, well mounted. After a race along the hills and through the valleys for about eighteen miles, he was finally captured and hung upon a tree, at what is now called Scar-face Gulch.

In speaking of a trip to Rogue-river valley he says:--

We had got out of provisions, and when, at the mouth of Salmon river, we made known our destination to the chief, Euphippa, he took his spear and caught us some fish, but would take no pay.

In 1854 or 1855 there was one more excitement in Scott's valley by the whites fearing an attack from the Indians, from the fact that they had held a dance and gone back into the hills. Here it may be well to state a custom among all those upper country Indians, which, not being generally understood by our people, has led to much difficulty. It is, at the commencement of the fishing season, and at its close, they hold what is called a fish-dance, in which they paint and go through all the performances of their dances at the opening and closing of war.

They also hold a harvest dance, when the fruits and nuts get ripe, but this is of a more quiet character, more resembling their sick dance, when they try to cure their sick by the influence of the combined mesmerism of a circle of Indians, in which they are in many instances very successful. But to return to my subject. Hearing of the gathering of the whites, and knowing the danger to our people and property if a war was then inaugurated, I got on my horse and rode to the place of rendezvous. After consulting, it was determined to fall upon the Indian camp at about daylight next morning, as it was thought that at that hour they could be mostly killed and easily conquered. I returned to my house, took my young Indian, Tom, and started, by a circuitous trail in the mountains, for the Indian camp, and before morning had them all removed to a safe place. In a few days all fears were quieted and harmony restored without the loss of any lives or destruction of property. About this time a young Indian from Humbug creek, visiting the Scott-valley Indians, had stopped at an emigrant camp and stolen two guns. Word was brought to me. I sent for Chief John, and required him to bring the guns and Indian, which he did. I tied and whipped the Indian, and then let him go. Late in the fall, afterwards, I was sitting near the top of the mountain back of my house, witnessing a deer drive by the Scott-valley Indians on the surrounding hills, when I heard a cap crack behind me in a clump of small trees. Getting up and immediately running into the thicket, I discovered an Indian running down the opposite slope of the mountain. I returned to my house, and sent Tom after Chief John, and from him learned that when he left, this Humbug Indian was there. I directed him to bring him to my house, which he did next morning. The Humbug Indian told me it was not the first time he had tried to kill me, but that his gun had failed him, and now that he and all the Indians thought that I had a charmed life. I gave him a good talk, which impressed him much, and then unbound him, and told him to go and do well thereafter. He was never known to do a bad act afterward, but was finally killed by the Klamath-lake Indians, about a year afterwards.

Of another affair, occurring in 1855, he says:--

Learning of the difficulty, and judging the Indians were not wholly to blame, I proposed to Lieutenant Bonicastle, then stationed at Fort Jones, and Judge Roseborough to accompany me, and with Tolo, another Indian, to visit their company, and arrange terms of peace. We went and spent two days with them before arriving at a solution of the difficulty. During this time they several times pointed their guns at us with a determination to shoot, but as often were talked into a better turn of mind, and finally agreed to go and live at Fort Jones, and remain in peace with the whites. The third day thereafter was settled upon for their removal, when Bonicastle was to send a company of soldiers to escort and protect them. In the next day a white man, who had a squaw at the cave, went out, unknown to us, and told the Indians he was sent for them, and thereupon they packed up and started for Fort Jones with him, one day ahead of time agreed upon. On their way in at Klamath river, about twenty miles from Yreka, they were waylaid, and their chief, Bill, shot from behind the brush and killed. They kept their faith, nevertheless, and came in, when I explained it, so they were satisfied. This was _known to the Modocs, and they talked of it on our last visit to the cave._ Occasionally thereafter I was applied to only on matters of trifling moment and easily arranged, until my appointment to the Indian superintendency, in the summer of 1863, for the northern district of California. In this narration I have pa.s.sed over several Rogue-river wars without notice, as I had nothing to do with them; also the Modoc war of 1852, which took place whilst I was away at Crescent City; therefore all I know of that was hearsay; but I know it was generally known that Ben Wright had concocted the plan of poisoning those Indians at a feast, and that his interpreter Indian, Livile, had exposed to the Indians, so that but few ate of the meat, and that Wright and his company then fell upon the Indians, and killed forty out of forty-seven and one other died of the poison afterward. There is one of the company now in the county who gives this version, and I heard Wright swearing about Dr. Ferrber, our then druggist (now of Valejo), selling him an adulterated article of strychnine, which he said the doctor wanted to kill the cayotes. That the plan was concocted before they left Yreka defeats the claim now made for them, that they only antic.i.p.ated the treachery of the Indians.

Schonchin was one of the Indians that escaped, and in late interview then he made this as an excuse for not coming out to meet the commissioners. The story of the Indian corresponds so well with that I have frequently heard from our own people, before it became so much of a disgrace by the reaction, that I have no doubt of the correction in its general details. At the time others, as well as myself, told Wright that the transaction would at some time react fearfully upon some innocent ones of our people; but so long a time had elapsed that I had concluded that matter was nearly forgotten by all, and nothing would come of it, until the night of my second visit in the cave, when Schonchin would get very excited talking of it as an excuse for not going out. The history of that night you have probably seen as it was given by an article in the "Sacramento Record" and "San Francisco Chronicle," for which paper he was corresponding; he was made wild; he was with me the whole time after.[5] A final peace was made with the Modocs, but the year is now out of my mind; but about 1857 or 1858 they came to Yreka with horses, money, and furs to trade and get provisions and blankets. On their way out they were waylaid at Shasta river, as was claimed by Shasta Indians, and seven killed, robbed and thrown into the river. Many of our citizens thought white men were connected with this murder, and it is probably so. The Shasta Indians retreated; they claim that but few of their people were engaged in the ma.s.sacre, but it was mostly done by the white people, in their negotiations for peace in the spring of 1864, mentioned hereafter.

[5] Refers to the Ben Wright ma.s.sacre.

Col. B. C. Whiting, another ex-superintendent of Indian Affairs, says, "In 1858 a party of white men went to an island in Humboldt bay, California, and murdered, in cold blood, one hundred and forty-nine men, women, and children, who were _suspected_ of being connected with other Indians who were at war with white men;" and that "no effort was ever made to bring the murderers to justice."

One more witness,--one whose statement was made with chains on his limbs, and while he was on trial for his life at Fort Klamath, July, 1873.

Captain Jack says:--

I wanted to quit fighting. My people were all afraid to leave the cave. They had been told that they were going to be killed, and they were afraid to leave there; and my women were afraid to leave there. While the peace talk was going on there was a squaw came from Fairchild's and Dorris's, and told us that the peace commissioners were going to murder us; that they were trying to get us out to murder us. A man by the name of Nate Beswick told us so. There was an old Indian man came in the night and told us again.

The INTERPRETER. That is one of those murdered in the wagon while prisoners by the settlers.

CAPTAIN JACK (continuing). This old Indian man told me that Nate Beswick told him that that day Meacham, General Canby, Dr.

Thomas, and Dyer were going to murder us if we came to the council. All of my people heard this old man tell us so. And then there was another squaw came from Fairchild's, and told me that Meacham and the peace commissioners had a pile of wood ready built up, and were going to burn me on this pile of wood; that when they brought us into Dorris's they were going to burn me there. All of the squaws about Fairchild's and Dorris's told me the same thing. After hearing all this news I was afraid to go, and that is the reason I did come in to make peace.

Add to all this the fact, that the popular cry was war, of which the Modocs were aware, as they were of all the incidents referred to in this chapter; and the further discouraging knowledge that no efforts had ever been made to punish offenders for crimes committed on their race; and a candid mind may be enlightened as to the cause of the failure of the Peace Commission sent out by President Grant in 1873.

The seed was sown while he was carrying on business at Galena, or fighting rebels around Vicksburg. The harvest came while he was in power. It was rich in valuable lives. It was costly in treasure.

It was a natural yield. It came true to the planting. The seed was sown broadcast, and harrowed deep into human hearts by the constant repet.i.tion of insult and wrong, irrigated often by the blood of the Indian race. It slumbered long (sometimes apparently dead, save here and there an outcropping giving signs of life), so long, indeed, that Judge Steele thought "the matter was nearly forgotten by all," until Schonchin called it up during one of Steele's visits to the Lava Beds in 1873.

If the harvest _was_ delayed in part, it was none the less prolific when it came. The _reapers_ were few, but their _sheaves_ were many, and bound together with the lives of the humble, the great, the n.o.ble, the good.

Does my reader yet understand why the policy, under which we settled a great matter of difference with a great nation, was not successful in settling a small matter with a small nation? Does he see, now, on whom the blame rests?

I hear some one answer:--

"On the frontier men, of course."

Not too fast, my friend. While it is true that each succeeding wave of immigration to the border line has borne on its crest a few bad men mixed with the good, it is also true that the great majority of the frontier men were of the latter cla.s.s,--brave, fearless pioneers as G.o.d has ever created for n.o.ble work; rough, unpolished men and women, with great hearts that opened ever to their kind. I a.s.sert here, in reiteration, that nowhere in all this broad land can be found men and women of larger hearts and n.o.bler aims than frontier people. As far as their treatment of the Indian tribes is concerned, I a.s.sert, fearless of contradiction, that three-fourths of them are the Indians' best friends; and that, if dissensions arise, they are caused by bad white men, who mix and mingle with the Indians, and, by their wilful acts of dissipation, provoke quarrel and bloodshed, thereby involving good citizens. When once blood is spilled, the Indian too often feels justified, by his religion, in wreaking vengeance on the innocent. They retaliate; and hence border warfare reigns, and the b.l.o.o.d.y chapter is repeated over and over again, until "Extermination" rings along the frontier-line, and both races take up the cry.

The question has been asked twice ten thousand times, What is the remedy?

For two hundred years, political economists, statesmen and philosophers have been proposing, experimenting, and failing in schemes and plans for the Indian. Never yet have they come squarely up to duty as American citizens and Christian patriots should, and recognized the manhood of the Indian, treating him _as a man_, dealing justly and fairly with him, redressing his wrongs, while punishing him for his crimes.

In plain words, we have never, as a nation, experimented in our management of the Indian race of America, with a few plain laws that were first written on the marble tablets of Sinai, and sent along down succeeding ages, between the 12th and 19th verses of the 20th chapter of Exodus. Nor have we always remembered the 31st verse of the sixth chapter of St.

Luke:--

"And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise."

If, as we proudly a.s.sert, we, as a nation, are the rich inheritors of the priceless boon of liberty, then let us be the champions of human rights.

If we are the friends of the weak and oppressed, let us protect those whose claim upon us is based upon a prior inheritance, and whose weakness has been our strength.

If we would welcome the exiled patriot from other lands, let us give the hand of fellowship to those whose birthright to this land cannot be disputed.

If our civilization is the most exalted on the face of the earth, then let us be the most magnanimous in our treatment of the remnants of a people who gave our fathers the welcome hand.