Page:Eleven years in the Rocky Mountains and a life on the frontier.djvu/631

140 for gross acts of injustice and fraud, the description of treaties made only to be broken, the doubts and distrusts of present professions of friendship and good-will, were portrayed in colors so vivid and language so terse, that admiration and surprise would have kept us silent had not shame and humiliation done so. Said a chief to a member of our commission:—'I am glad to see you, you are our friends, but I hear that you have come to move us. Tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed we have been moved five times.' He added, with bitter irony, 'I think you had better put the Indians on wheels so you can run them about wherever you wish.'

"The present condition of the Sioux Indians is such as to awaken the deepest sympathy. They were our friends. If many of this powerful tribe have been changed to relentless foes, we must not forget that it is the simple outcome of our own Indian training-school. Generals Sherman, Harney, Terry, and others, use these words:—

'The moment the war of the rebellion was over, thousands of our people turned their attention toward the treasures of Montana. The Indian was forgotten. It did not occur to any man that this poor, despised red man was the original discoverer, and sole occupant for many centuries, of every mountain seamed with quartz and every stream whose yellow sand glittered in the noonday sun. He asked to retain only a secluded spot where the buffalo and elk could live, and that spot he would make his home. The truth is, no place was left for him. If the lands of the white men are taken, civilization justifies him in resisting the invader. Civilization does more than this—it brands him as a coward and a slave if he submits to the wrong. If the savage resists, civilization, with the Ten Commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate extermination. That he goes to war is not astonishing. He is often compelled to do so. Wrongs are borne by him in silence that never fail to drive civilized men to deeds of violence. * * * But it is said that our wars with them have been almost constant. Have we been uniformly unjust? We answer unhesitatingly, 'yes.'"

"General Stanley in 1870 writes from Dakota, that he is 'ashamed to appear any longer in the presence of the chiefs of the different tribes of the Sioux, who inquire why we do not do as we promised, and in their vigorous language aver that we have