The American Indian Under Reconstruction. Annie Heloise Abel
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despairingly wrote that "the military have most wonderfully changed their tune."
There was soon occasion for more particular criticism of army practices. In April, General Blunt had issued an order, well-intentioned no doubt, restraining the Indians from selling their stock. He had likewise ordered the seizure of certain salt-works, "salines," the value of which to the Indians can be calculated only by reference to the prominence given in all early records to the salt-licks used in turn by buffalos, aborgines, settlers. In the case of each of Blunt's orders, the immediate object in view was the benefit, not of private individuals, but of soldiers. Moreover, as the Indian crops matured, those same soldiers helped themselves freely to grain and other produce, the outcome of the labour of "helpless women and children," and they did it quite regardless of Indian needs. A real grievance existed and the intervention of the War Department was besought for its redress. Things went from bad to worse. Illicit traffic in Indian cattle added its nefariousness to the general disorder and the conduct of the military authorities was deemed as iniquitous as that of the contractors. Phillips himself did not pass muster. He was as unpopular with one set of men as Blunt was with another. Before long Indians, too, came to share in the cattle-driving. The Wichita Agency tribes were the chief offenders and they stole from the Creek country mostly; but they also made excursions into the Cherokee and down into Texas. White men went frequently with them. It was commonly supposed that few of such raiders ever returned alive; but the profits were worth the risk. And there was raiding in other directions. Supply trains preferred to go unescorted; for the military guard had more than once been a raiding party in disguise. Everything conduced to confusion.
Moreover, there was suffering nearly everywhere. Positive destitution made its appearance in July. It was then that Coffin resented the expenditure of money for the support of John Ross and the rest of the Cherokee delegation in Washington. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs tried to get Choctaw bonds diverted to refugee relief. When the autumn came, clothing and blankets were solicited as well as food. Appealed to for the amelioration of an all too-evident distress, President Lincoln gave his approval to the making of purchases on credit. In Kansas, conditions among the Indians were equally bad. The Seminoles at Neosho Falls were reported naked and famishing in August. Earlier yet a cry of want had come from the Weas, Peorias, Kaskaskias, and Piankeshaws, whose lands were on the Missouri border and subject to raids and whose funds had not materialized during the war. They had been invested in interest-bearing stock by the United States government and, in some mysterious way and without consultation with the Indians, had been converted, just previous to the outbreak of hostilities, into stock of the secessionist states. There were those in Congress who repudiated every idea of responsibility resting upon the government for the substitution and, while senators quibbled over whether relief should be furnished as of right or as a matter of charity, the despoiled and too-trusting Indians starved.
A disposition to shirk responsibility did not reveal itself in connection with the matter of the substituted stocks only but came out again in the Senate debate on the condition and treatment of the restored refugees, restored only in the sense that they had been taken back into the Indian country. An item in the annual Indian appropriation bill carried seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their relief. It was no mean figure and it was based as much upon past expenditures as upon present needs. Senator Brown considered that the Indians had less claim upon the generosity - if that be what it should be called - of the government than had the people of Missouri, his constituents, or than had the unpaid soldier everywhere. Doolittle disputed the point by recalling the circumstances of the abandonment by the United States, the consequent exposure to intimidation and attack, and the expulsion from home with all its attendant miseries. The terrible havoc wrought in the Cherokee country he expatiated upon with vigor, contending that the argument put up by the opposition to the effect that the spoliation, desolation, destruction were the work of Indians, guilty of defection, only made the matter worse for the government and the consequent obligation resting upon it all the greater; since the United States had sworn to protect against both foreign and domestic foe. Brown's concluding charge that three-fourths of the ''donation" would, in his belief, "go in the shape of fraudulent contracts," it was not so easy to refute and Doolittle discreetly ignored it. Like Banquo's ghost, however, it was bound to reappear; for charges against the contractors and their accomplices or abettors were constantly being insinuated if not formally lodged. The whole matter would have to be threshed out, investigated thoroughly, ere many moons had passed.
The abuses of the system, supposing that the way the refugees were provided for can be distinguished by so dignified a name, were all the time creeping out. Charges and countercharges against individuals as responsible for the abuses were of disgusting and appalling frequency and, even if large allowance be made for personal malice, tribal animosities, trade rivalries as well as for the old Indian distrust of white men and for the old jealousy between civil and military authorities there was yet enough to merit the strongest opprobrium then and now. The money was going and yet there was absolutely no visible alleviation of misery. There was much of truth in Senator Sherman's observations that "if we could protect them (the Indians) from our own race, if we could leave them alone without a dollar, with no white man, woman, or child within fifty miles of them, they could take better care of themselves than we could with all our appropriations for them. Their troubles have grown out of their contact with white men ... I do not know but that we had better bring these fifteen thousand Indians to the city of New York and send them to the Astor House or some other comfortable place and take care of them. The same rule applied to the support of all the people of the United States would ruin us as a nation in six months . . .
A particular instance of the mismanagement and shortsightedness of the powers that were is to be found in the very location of refugees other than Cherokee. The Creeks were detained near Fort Gibson and, in the dead of winter, were encamped on the west side of the Grand River in a low wet swamp within two or three miles of their own boundary. The pretext for their detention was that the government could not protect them far from the fort. Within sight of home, precariously sustained by what was, in popular ignorance dubbed charity, they yet had the mortification of knowing that their country was being denuded of its cattle and that very cattle sold by contractors to the government for refugee consumption. Military authorities regarded the cattle as contraband, not so the Indians. It was their opinion that all property left in the Creek country ought rightfully to belong to that part of the Nation that had remained loyal.
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