Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/87

The Indian Dispossessed annuities, schools, blacksmiths, carpenters, farmers, a sawmill, and a gristmill; the head chief, a very politic old Indian named "Lawyer," found himself—in the treaty—provided with a furnished house and five hundred dollars a year. This was designated by courtesy as "salary." Head chiefs in more highly organized society have been propitiated in much the same way.

It was a most liberal treaty; and it was good policy to make a liberal treaty with these most numerous and powerful of all the mountain Indians, especially in view of the fierce rush for gold that had maddened the Indian tribes of the great Northwest to the verge of war. During that year Governors Stevens and Palmer made treaties with many of the tribes, under instructions from Washington, to extinguish the Indian title to the gold region and gather the natives upon reservations.

The subsequent history of the Northwest would have been less bloody, less filled with tales of Indian massacres and Indian wars, had the Government fulfilled with any degree of promptness its obligations; but Congress, year after year, failed to render the treaties operative by ratifying them, while the Indians, accepting in good faith the terms of their agreements, vacated the ceded lands and gathered upon the tracts reserved for them, to await the benefits that were promised in the way of annuities, instruction, and implements of agriculture. 74