Evaluating Primary Sources50
he guests of the rambling hotel had chosen a perfect spot to gather in October 1883. While strolling along Lake Mohonk, less than a hundred miles north of New York City, they could take in autumn’s splendor in a landscape punctuated by cliffs, boulders, and caverns. The main attraction, though, was the hotel itself. Built of wood and rock, the multistoried Mohonk House arose at the end of the lake in a forest of chimneys, turrets, and gables. In proper Victorian style, gingerbread frills adorned the exterior, while inside an air of quiet gentility prevailed. The hotel’s Quaker proprietors prohibited strong drink, card playing, and dancing, but these guests did not seem to mind. They could relax in a large parlor tastefully filled with wicker chairs, writing desks, books, and flowers freshly cut from the hotel’s gardens. Besides, they had come to Lake Mohonk for work, not play. And their work, they knew, was of utmost importance.
Here on the fringe of New York’s peaceful Catskills a hundred or so peo- ple gathered for four days to discuss and—they hoped—influence the fate of the Native Americans. The Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, the first of many such meetings held each October at the resort, attracted delegates from the country’s leading Indian reform organizations as well as members of Congress and federal officials. Mostly Easterners, the conferees had been stirred into action by distressing reports out of the West. From the Great Plains to the Pacific, Indians and their reservation lands were under a massive assault. After years of white–Indian warfare that raged from the Dakotas to California, reformers grew more determined by the 1880s to save America’s 250,000 or so indigenous inhabitants from total destruction. This gathering at Lake Mohonk marked a growing unity among them.
The objects of the reformers’ concern, of course, were far removed from this tranquil setting. And although some of these “friends” of the Indians could claim firsthand knowledge of the Western tribes, Native American represen- tatives were not present at Lake Mohonk. Their absence, however, did not seem to trouble the conferees, who were imbued with a sense of high moral purpose and a conviction that they knew what was best for the Indians. Nor were these reformers disturbed that their campaign to “save” the Indian—and Native Americans’ responses to it—reflected conflicting cultural assumptions. In ways that neither group could clearly perceive, competing values lay at the heart of late nineteenth-century Indian reform. What people in the past missed, however, modern students of history can see. The historical sources left by reformers and Native Americans alike may give us a better understand- ing of America’s solution to the “Indian problem” than possessed even by people at the time.
T
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Setting 51
S E T T I N G
Like the organized efforts to save the Indians of the West, the assault on them began at the Civil War’s end. After 1865, the spread of the iron rail opened up large portions of the country to white settlers. At the same time, the government and the military could again turn their attention to the Indians. In the years after Appomattox, the federal government renewed a campaign, begun as early as the late eighteenth century, to confine Indians to separate land. The result, after 1865, was a concerted effort by the military to place Indians in the West on reservations. The nomadic tribes of the Great Plains became the military’s primary target. By the 1870s, scores of battles had bloodied the prairie from Texas to Montana. After the war, soldiers and hunters also launched a relentless campaign of slaughter against millions of buffalo, pushing the animal to the brink of extinction by the early 1880s. Bloodshed, however, was not confined to the plains. From the verdant Northwest to the sun-bleached southwestern deserts, tribes were assaulted and gradually stripped of their lands as prior treaties were renegotiated in favor of encroaching settlers. Wherever they lived, Indians discovered the same thing: resistance to military force only inflamed whites. Even events in remote northern California could stoke anti-Indian sentiment in the rest of the nation. There, in 1873, the Modoc Indians fled their reservation and fought off the Army for seven months before surrendering. Three years later, hatred of the Indian reached a fever pitch when Americans in the midst of their nation’s centennial celebration received news of the Sioux Indians’ shocking annihilation of Colonel George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry detachment at Little Big Horn in Montana.
In the years following Custer’s “Last Stand,” however, intense white animosity toward the Indians began to wane as their resistance was gradually broken. In addition, several events covered widely in the Eastern press con- tributed to a more favorable view of Native Americans by the late 1870s. In 1877, Chief Joseph led the Nez Perces on a dramatic 1,500-mile trek through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana while heroically fighting off Army troops. By the time Chief Joseph and his harried band surrendered, their determined effort to secure the return of the Nez Perces’ northwest homeland had won the sym- pathy of many Americans. So too did the struggle of Nebraska’s Ponca Indians about the same time to get back their land, which had been inadvertently included in a Sioux reservation by an earlier treaty. When the Sioux attempted to force the Poncas off their land in the 1870s, the government intervened and shipped the Poncas against their will to the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma, where many died of disease. Then, when Chief Standing Bear led a Ponca band back to its homeland in 1879, the Army moved in to stop them. Meanwhile, popular sentiments had also been aroused by the flight of Cheyennes from the Indian Territory to their traditional tribal lands in Montana. Led by Dull Knife and Little Wolf, the band eluded troops across Kansas and Nebraska, only to be cut down by soldiers after attempting to break out of their eventual confinement at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1878.
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Chapter 3 Evaluating Primary Sources52
Such determined efforts to return to lost homes drew a sympathetic white response and swelled the ranks of Indian reformers by 1880. In 1879, the Philadelphia-based Woman’s National Indian Association and the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee were formed in the wake of the Ponca affair. Three years later, the Indian Rights Association was organized in Philadelphia, and the year after that representatives of these and other Indian-reform groups came together on the shores of Lake Mohonk to discuss the Indians’ future. Indeed, not since the end of the Civil War had prospects looked better for the advocates of reform. They would be boosted further when New England–born Helen Hunt Jackson decided to write a book after attending a lecture by Ponca chief Standing Bear on the tribe’s heartbreaking loss of its ancestral land. Published in 1881, A Century of Dishonor provided an account of the government’s “shameful record of bro- ken treaties and unfulfilled promises” regarding the Indians.1 Jackson, who sent copies of the book to every member of Congress, helped win even greater sup- port for resolving once and for all the country’s long-standing “Indian problem.”
Increasingly organized, and armed with Jackson’s exposé, reformers set their sights on government policy toward the Indian. It was an issue with which these mostly well-to-do Protestants were already familiar. In 1869, the Grant administration brought religious denominations into the administration of Indian policy through the Board of Indian Commissioners, established to help oversee a scandal-ridden Office of Indian Affairs. The commissioners—one of whom owned the Mohonk House and many of whom represented Protestant religious groups—for a time administered Indian policy and disbursed reser- vation funds. Meanwhile, various missionary organizations took over the ap- pointment of reservation agents. Like other reformers who initially supported the reservation system, the commissioners had put great faith in its power to reform the Indian. By the late 1870s, however, Protestant reformers came to view the reservation itself as the chief obstacle in the way of Native American progress. There they saw a still-corrupt federal Indian service, increasing Native American dependence on government largesse, and stubborn resistance to a new way of life. The solution to the “Indian problem,” they concluded, re- quired breaking up the reservations. And that was not all. This radical change in policy had to be accompanied by a program to educate Indian children. By the time of the first Lake Mohonk conference, these determined reformers were devoting their efforts almost exclusively to promoting these goals. Before the end of the decade, their labors would begin to bear fruit.
I N V E S T I G A T I O N
This chapter contains a variety of primary sources relating to late nineteenth-century Indian reform. Produced both by white reformers and by Native Americans, the sources are as useful for the opinions and biases that they
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Sources 53
reveal as for the facts that they contain. As you analyze them, your main job is to evaluate the Indian reform program and its impact on Native Americans. In other words, you must determine in what ways late nineteenth- century reformers’ efforts to “save” the Indian succeeded or failed and the reasons why their fruits proved bitter or sweet to Native Americans themselves. A good analysis of this reform movement will address these questions: