Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/578

558 their bounds, — the most stirring cause of border strife, raids, pillaging, and butchering on our frontiers. Portions of even peaceful treaty tribes indulge this propensity on the plea of poverty and threatened starvation. For when we covenanted to each tribe its special reservation, so generous in its extent, it was with the expectation that the tribe would live on its resources, after its own way of life. Circumstances have made such subsistence impossible; so that the reservation has become an artificial annoyance and obstruction to the white man, and an insufficient provision and a galling restraint to the red man.

3. Our Government, as a trustee, holds large amounts of funds invested in its securities, on which it is held by old treaties to pay perpetual dividends to the Indians. It is also pledged to pay, for various terms of years, annuities of money and supplies to several tribes, with no funded capital or principal. The annual payment of these obligations, either in money or goods, requires a complicated system of agents, contractors, advertising, inspectors, and freight carriers, from which it has been impossible to exclude gigantic and petty fraud, corrupting the whole service, and causing wrongs to and complaints from the Indians. We thus pauperize the Indians, make it more difficult to engage them in self-support and industry; and we have also made bad bargains, as by giving away purchased land to railroad companies, and to settlers for homesteads, at less than cost, we are annually increasing our Indian debt and losing our money.

4. These Indian reservations, scattered over our domain, are for the most part exempted from general and local jurisdiction by law; and, if we take cognizance of offences in them, it must be by arbitrary and inconstant methods, confusion again coming in through the conflict between State or Territorial and the General Government. Thus, in effect, we have licensed lawless communities, with rights of immunity and the risks of a Pandemonium.