Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/257

 interested in the perpetuation of the contract system and in keeping the aborigine in bondage.

To sum up in one paragraph, General Crook believed that the American Indian was a human being, gifted with the same god-like apprehension as the white man, and like him inspired by noble impulses, ambition for progress and advancement, but subject to the same infirmities, beset with the same or even greater temptations, struggling under the disadvantages of an inherited ignorance, which had the double effect of making him doubt his own powers in the struggle for the new life and suspicious of the truthfulness and honesty of the advocates of all innovations. The American savage has grown up as a member of a tribe, or rather of a clan within a tribe; all his actions have been made to conform to the opinions of his fellows as enunciated in the clan councils or in those of the tribe.

It is idle to talk of de-tribalizing the Indian until we are ready to assure him that his new life is the better one. By the Crook method of dealing with the savage he was, at the outset, de-tribalized without knowing it; he was individualized and made the better able to enter into the civilization of the Caucasian, which is an individualized civilization. As a scout, the Apache was enlisted as an individual; he was made responsible individually for all that he did or did not. He was paid as an individual. If he cut grass, he, and not his tribe or clan, got the money; if he split fuel, the same rule obtained; and so with every grain of corn or barley which he planted. If he did wrong, he was hunted down as an individual until the scouts got him and put him in the guard-house. If his friends did wrong, the troops did not rush down upon him and his family and chastise them for the wrongs of others; he was asked to aid in the work of ferreting out and apprehending the delinquent; and after he had been brought in a jury of the Apaches themselves deliberated upon the case and never failed in judgment, except on the side of severity.

There were two cases of chance-medley coming under my own observation, in both of which the punishment awarded by the Apache juries was much more severe than would have been given by a white jury. In the first case, the man supposed to have done the killing was sentenced to ten years' hard labor; in the other, to three. A white culprit was at the same time sen