Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/258

 *tenced in Tucson for almost the same offence to one year's confinement in jail. Indians take to trials by jury as naturally as ducks take to water. Trial by jury is not a system of civilized people; it is the survival of the old trial by clan, the rudimentary justice known to all tribes in the most savage state.

General Crook believed that the Indian should be made self-supporting, not by preaching at him the merits of labor and the grandeur of toiling in the sun, but by making him see that every drop of honest sweat meant a penny in his pocket. It was idle to expect that the Indian should understand how to work intelligently in the very beginning; he represented centuries of one kind of life, and the Caucasian the slow evolution of centuries under different conditions and in directions diametrically opposite. The two races could not, naturally, understand each other perfectly, and therefore to prevent mistakes and the doing of very grievous injustice to the inferior, it was the duty and to the interest of the superior race to examine into and understand the mental workings of the inferior.

The American Indian, born free as the eagle, would not tolerate restraint, would not brook injustice; therefore, the restraint imposed must be manifestly for his benefit, and the government to which he was subjected must be eminently one of kindness, mercy, and absolute justice, without necessarily degenerating into weakness. The American Indian despises a liar. The American Indian is the most generous of mortals: at all his dances and feasts the widow and the orphan are the first to be remembered. Therefore, when he meets with an agent who is "on the make," that agent's influence goes below zero at once; and when he enters the trader's store and finds that he is charged three dollars and a half for a miserable wool hat, which, during his last trip to Washington, Albuquerque, Omaha, or Santa Fé, as the case may be, he has seen offered for a quarter, he feels that there is something wrong, and he does not like it any too well. For that reason Crook believed that the Indians should be encouraged to do their own trading and to set up their own stores. He was not shaken in this conviction when he found agents interested in the stores on the reservations, a fact well understood by the Apaches as well as by himself. It was a very touching matter at the San Carlos, a few years ago, to see the