Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/448

 every horse and animal they had to pay for the two oxen. This was done by an accredited agent of the Government, and by an officer who deserved but little credit. Are such things tolerable, and to be tolerated in the present age and condition of our Government?

What was the consequence? Those Indians felt themselves aggrieved. They saw that a new regime had come; they had had the era of peace and plenty, and now they were expelled by a different influence. They felt grateful for the benign effects of the first policy toward them, and that only exasperated them to a greater extent against the second; and they began to make incursions, ready to take vengeance on any white men they might meet in their neighborhood, and slay whoever they might find. They made their forays from the opposite side of the Red River, from the Wichita mountains, and came like an avalanche upon our unprotected citizens. There is one fact showing how your interference with the Indians within her limits has injured Texas.

There is another fact in connection with the Indian policy of Texas which I shall mention. How was it with the Wichita Indians? Texas sought to conciliate them; they lived beyond her borders, and made incursions from the limits of the United States into Texas while she was an independent Republic. She did everything in her power to bring about peace with them, and, through the friendly Indians, was pacifying them. One of their chiefs, with his wife and little child, and twelve of his men, came to Fort Belknap. Some one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles west of the fort, at Hamilton's valley, property had been stolen by Indians. It was not known which out of the thirteen different tribes had taken it; for outlaws occasionally congregated from each, half a dozen of them stealing off from their tribes, without the influence of their chiefs operating upon them. They were outlaws, careless of the destiny of their tribes, and reckless of the crimes which they might commit, so that they could gratify their cupidity and recompense their daring. These men had taken some property. Dragoons came on in the direction of Red River, and reached Fort Belknap. So soon as they arrived, the officer said to this chief: "Sir, I retain you as a prisoner. It is true you came under a white flag; but I am an officer; I have the power; I take you prisoner, and you must stay here a prisoner until the horses are brought back. Your men must stay, too, except one, whom I will send to your tribe with intelligence of the fact." The chief said: "My tribe have not committed the robbery; it is a great distance from me; it is in another direction. I come from the rising sun; that is toward the setting sun; I was far from it; you are between me and it; I did not do it." "But," said the officer, "you are a prisoner." The officer put him in the guard-house. Imprisonment is eternal infamy to an Indian. A prairie Indian would rather die a thousand deaths than submit to the disgrace of imprisonment. You may wound and mutilate him as you please, you may crush every limb in the body of a prairie Indian, and if he can make no other resistance, he will spit defiance at you when you come within his reach. This chief, meditating upon his deep disgrace, knowing that he was irreparably dishonored, unless he could wash out his stains with blood, resolved that night that he would either die a freeman or rescue himself from dishonor. He rose in the night. He would not leave his wife and child in