Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/379

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 371 very properly concluded to wait for the action of the govern- ment. There was another reason which had operated against an allotment and that was the opposition of the owners of large bands of horses, who were interested in free range on many thousand acres of land, which they could not expect to get in any governmental scheme of allotment. As heretofore stated, Howlish Wampo had 800 head, Tin-tin-meet-suh had 4000, and these men would exert all their influence to postpone the time when they could have only 160 acres each. There was still another reason that operated upon all, poor and rich, horse owner and horseless alike, viz. : that expansive feeling we call freedom which resists the lets and hindrances of limited areas and among the aborigines everywhere in America finds ex- pression in opposing the private ownership of land. Likely the poorest breech-clouted Indian felt, while sauntering aim- lessly about on that great reservation, that it was God's free gift to him and that he could camp anywhere upon it, by its mountain springs and meadows, in its pleasant groves or on its grassy undulating plains, without feeling himself a tres- passer or hearing the warning "keep off the grass." That feeling that the earth is the equal birthright of all the living is not confined to any tribe or race or time ; it crops out all the time and everywhere, notwithstanding the edicts of despots or the equally despotic enactments of popular assemblies. And who can tell, even with the help of statistical tables relat- ing to nations in varying degrees of civilization, how much the death rate is affected by the suppression of this innate aspiration and habit of freedom? The common opinion that the Indian cannot bear civiliza- tion because it denies to him the rude and merely animal ex- citements which are the constituents of barbarism, that in fact he is as much out of place as an ichthyosaurian of the once torrid seas would be in the cooler waters of the present ocean, and is therefore a vanishing product of evolution, when examined critically, is found to be wide of the truth. Evi-