Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/543

Rh hard labor, economy, and savings of an industrious, toiling population, and from enterprises of commerce and manufacture. Further reference to these economical and practical matters will come before us when we deal with the present bearings of the Indian question.

We are concerned now with the perplexities and embarrassments which have from the first thwarted the good intentions of our Government in its policy of dealing with the natives.

It had been the custom of British officers and commissioners in our colonial times to give to Indian chiefs with whom they had friendly relations medals, often of silver, with the figure of the reigning British sovereign, and various symbols and emblems upon them. Our Government found it wise to imitate this effective appeal to the vanity of the savage, who regarded the trinket as a token acknowledging a sort of equality between him and his brother monarch across the sea, only we had no royal personage here to represent sovereignty. Our President, as soon as we had one, had to serve the purpose. Commissioners had been appointed by Congress in 1786 to gather up these medals from the chiefs, and to substitute republican for royal devices. The first of our medals was that given by Washington to the famous Chief Red Jacket, on his visit to Philadelphia in 1792 on a peace embassy. It was a large, well-wrought, oval plate of silver, showing on the obverse the full-length figure of Washington, in uniform, bare-headed, extending a calumet to the mouth of an Indian, who smoked it as he stood by a pine-tree, at the root of which lay a tomahawk; on the background was a scene of husbandry, with a man ploughing; on the reverse of the medal were the arms of the United States. Red Jacket was very proud of this medal; and though he often pledged it for whiskey, it escaped the melting-pot, and was recently in the possession of the well-known General E. S. Parker, an educated Seneca Indian, who was on General