DAWES H ENRY LAURENS DAWES, an American congressman, was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, October 30, 1816, and was educated at Yale University. He studied law and, after admittance to the bar in 1842, at once began to practise in North Adams, in his native State, removing to Pittsfield, in the same county, in 1864. He served in the State legislature, 1848-52, and, entering Congress as representative in 1857, was soon active in anti-slavery legislation. In 1875 he succeeded Sumner in the United States Senate and was re-elected in 1881 and 1887. During his congressional career he served on innumerable committees and was conspicuous in legislative action on the tariff and other topics of importance. To him is due the establishment in 1869 of the "Weather Bulletin " and the origin of the severalty law dividing the Indian lands, and he was the creator of the system of Indian education as far as it is due to legislation. Many of his speeches have been issued singly, but no collection has yet been made. ON THE INDIAN POLICY DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, APRIL 5, 188 O tribe of Indians ever entered into a treaty with N° the United States that did not result in putting fet ters upon them. They have been lassoed into imprisonment and confinement within limits that the necessities of growth in this government required, and no sooner have we made treaties than we have gone to work deliberately to violate them. But it is not treaty obligations alone of which the Indian has to complain. Why, sir, the treatment of the Indian agents, and the army, and the whole department, with the Indian for long back is covered with blots, and stains, and bad faith, and aggravations to the Indian, and provocation to violence on his part. While we have been deliberating over this very measure in our committee on Indian affairs, a peaceable Indian chief who never raised his hand in violence upon a white man, whose home had been ceded to him by words of grant on the part of the United States as solemn and effective as a warranty deed, in consideration of his good behavior and peaceable deportment toward the United States- this is the language of the grant — who had been driven at the point of the bayonet from that home into the malaria of the Indian Territory, has there been enticed by false pretences into the Indian agent's own house, an agent of this modern civilization, and there shot down upon the floor in cold and cowardly murder by the soldiers of the United States under the direction of an Indian agent. Sir, the Northern Cheyennes, taken by the army from their home and the graves of their fathers among the cool mountain streams of the Northwest, down to the torrid jungles and malaria of the Indian Territory, there to fall before the ravages of disease, when they broke away and wandered through the wilds of western Kansas seeking their old home, were taken by the armed soldiers of the United States and shut up in midwinter, in January, in a guard-house, when the thermometer was ten degrees below zero, without clothing to protect them from the inclemency of the weather. They were told by the officer whose official report I have here, "You shall have neither food nor drink nor fuel till you consent to go back to your doom in the Indian Territory," and there they were kept without either food or fuel or drink four or five days the officer reports four, the Indians say it was sevenin what the officer calls "the freezing-out process." And then, when the chief was called out of the guard-room under pretence of a conference, armed soldiers were placed in siderooms, out of sight, and when he and his fellows came into a - room for a peaceable conference they were seized and put in irons, and those in the guard-house breaking out with the resolution to die in flight for their homes rather than to die in the Indian Territory the victims of disease, were fired upon with shot and shell and every male member of the band but those in irons and two others, with thirty women and children, were laid corpses in the process. Sir, I have before me the process pursued toward men supposed to be guilty of the murder of a young man from Massachusetts upon a stage route in Arizona. When an officer of the army called the Indians into council, having previously arranged with a half-breed that like Judas he should go among his brethren and betray the men he was willing to say were guilty, and when that process was gone through with, under the pretence of a council with friendly Indians, soldiers at a given signal shot them all dead. Does anybody wonder, when these instances multiply around us every day, when flags of truce, like that under which General Canby fell at the hands of the Modocs, are violated by our own soldiers when they treat with the Indians; when the whole history of the dispensing of the Indian annuities and of the Indian appropriations is one long history of plunder; when we make our promises with no apparent intention of keeping them,-is it to be wondered at that the Indian question has come upon us with difficulties almost passing solution? Sir, before we can do anything toward making something out of the Indian we must do justice to him. The process of extermination, I think, is substantially abandoned by our people. It has proved a failure, at least, with all the advantages under which it has been tried and the fidelity with which it has been pursued: sparing no expense of Indian warfare or cruel treatment, transferring the Indian from place to place, taking him from the cold regions of the north to the almost inhospitable and uninhabitable regions of the Indian Territory, there to die by hundreds; still the truth stares us in the face that there are more of them to-day than there were yesterday. Take the Poncas, who lived upon a reservation the title to which was a grant, in so many words, from the United States, in which it was recited that it was in consideration of two. things: first, of a like grant on the part of the Poncas to the United States, and next, of their long, peaceable, and quiet life and demeanor towards the United States. Take them and follow their band of eight hundred men, driven by soldiers into the Indian Territory, and falling down in the process and in the acclimation to four hundred and eightyfour, or about that number; yet it is true that within the last year, since they have come to be acclimated and taken care of, there are more of them than there were when the year began. So it is true of them all. And, sir, that policy pursued so faithfully has got to be abandoned, and I thank God that it has. Then we have to deal with these Indians by some other process. Another process is like that shadowed forth in the argument of the senator from Alabama, that we shall violently break up their tribal relations and scatter them, wild and savage and uneducated, abroad in the community; subject to the laws and enjoying all the rights and privileges of citizens of the United States, having no other restraint upon them than the feeble and ineffectual restraint that comes from bringing them into a court of justice to plead to an indictment they cannot understand for the violation of a law they do not know the meaning of. Sir, the senator from Colorado [Mr. Teller] well described the strength of the cords which bind the Indians to their bands. I venture to say there is not power enough in the United States to violently and against their will rend those cords. They are the ties of family, and kindred, and blood, as strong in the savage as in the civilized man, and stronger, perhaps, in some respects. If there were no question of humanity in it, it is an impossibility. You cannot with an army larger in number than all the bands themselves rend asunder by violence those cords and attachments which bind them one to another in families, any more than you could invade the homes of the civilized, scatter them and think vainly that thereby you had broken asunder all the ties that bind man to his family and to his kindred. You may give up, then, Mr. President, all attempts thus to disintegrate and separate from their clans and their tribes the two hundred and fifty thousand Indians you have upon your hands and are obliged to feed by daily rations and clothe as you do your soldiers. You can neither exterminate them, nor can you violently separate and scatter them in the community and expect that you can make citizens of them. If you did it you would have two hundred and fifty thousand people gathering in the western States more than in the eastern, for they would not trouble us, but you might just as well turn loose the inmates of an insane asylum and impose upon them the restraints of law and require at their hands obedience to the obligations of citizenship as to undertake by this process to make citizens, self-supporting, obedient to the law of the Then, sir, if you can neither exterminate them nor by the puny, ineffectual attempt at an enactment here at your desk, disintegrate and scatter them around through the forty-five |