Chapter M: M. G. Dana, (1)

H. T. ROSE,
G. D. PIKE,
S. J. HUMPHREY.

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THE MENDI COUNTRY AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD.

BY REV. G. D. PIKE.

The territory under view is bounded on the east by the River Niger, on the north by the Great Desert, and on the west and south by the Atlantic Ocean.

(1.) Its surface is varied by mountains, plains, forest and rivers, while its coast is indented with bays and harbors of grand proportions. Skirting the coast there is an alluvial region extending for fifty miles to a mountain forest range eighty miles in width; then follows an open plateau which extends to the Niger and beyond. The soil of this plateau is described as a rich prairie land, of such productiveness and beauty that it is regarded by missionaries who have seen it as the garden spot of the world.

(2.) The climate of the country is admitted on all hands to be hostile to efforts for the advancement of its people, while the coast has been fitly styled “the burial-ground of white men.” A deadly malaria, poisonous both to man and domestic animals, checks the progress of industries and the work of Christianity. It is believed, however, that this malaria is more especially confined to the low mangrove swamps of the coast, and that after the forest belt is passed the open plateau will afford healthy localities.

The sanitary condition of a country can be determined in a measure by its domestic animals. The pestilential vapors of a malarious region are said to be absorbed to a greater extent by quadrupeds, living constantly in the open air, than by mankind, living a portion of the time in-doors. The ancient Greeks observed this fact, and incorporated it in verse centuries ago:

“On mules and dogs the infection first began,
And last, the vengeful arrow fixed in man.”

Now the open plateau we have mentioned may be called the “cattle-belt of the Mendi country and its neighborhood.” Here unnumbered herds of horses, cows and other domestic animals abound, making it somewhat evident that the climate may be found favorable for the development of an advanced civilization.

(3.) The products of this country are such as are common to the tropics, and are very abundant. Coffee grows spontaneously. India-rubber enough for generations could be easily obtained. Vast areas of timber lands, characterized by trees thirty feet in diameter, with spreading branches sufficient for the shelter of a regiment, abound in the forest belt. Here are found great varieties of dye-woods, and other woods that admit of a beautiful finish. Lumber is in great demand, and the saw-mill belonging to this Association is taxed to its utmost, and quite unable to furnish a supply sufficient for the market near at hand. The export of palm-oil from this locality is very great, and at present is doubtless the leading article of merchandise.

It is quite possible, however, that within a generation the most alluring wealth of the country will be its treasures of gold. This precious metal is found in a belt extending from the Gold Coast inland three hundred and fifty miles. Of the productiveness of the gold mines or pits, as they are called, we can judge but little otherwise than by the meagreness of the facilities of the natives for collecting gold, and by the amount found among the different tribes. From what can be learned I am led to believe that the great enterprise that shall yet stir the thought of the mercantile world in behalf of this region will be that of the gold hunter. In support of this view we have facts before us like the following: The king of the Ashantees is covered with golden ornaments. He is served by his cook with a golden spoon. His spies, to the number of a thousand, wear golden breastplates, his officers carry gold-hilted swords, and his subjects use gold dust for money. The chiefs of the land manufacture golden images to display their wealth, while their attendants are embellished with golden badges. Even on the great plateau, three hundred miles inland, gold is the money of the country. In Bouré the people do nothing but dig up gold, which they exchange for food with the neighboring tribes. The indications certainly are, that if so much gold is secured by native women, who wash out a little surface sand in their simple gourds, mines of wealth must lie beneath awaiting the more powerful machinery of an American civilization.

(4.) We come now to notice the internal improvements projected for opening up this country to commerce and the higher development of its people. Lines of steamers ply from the Senegal to the Niger, and ports are opened where trade is carried on equal in amount to $20,000,000 annually. The Niger and its tributaries afford navigable waters for 3,500 miles, enabling the merchant to proceed with boats from Timbuctoo to the Atlantic. Steamers already ply upon this river and inland trade is rapidly developing.

At present there are many obstacles to overcome, of which the superstition of the natives is not the least. There is, however, a project full of promise for reaching this country. By recent surveys it has been ascertained that opposite the Canary Islands, in latitude 28° north, running five hundred miles south-east in the Great Desert, there is a sink two hundred feet below the level of the Atlantic, extending to within one hundred miles of Timbuctoo, the great city of Central Africa. This sink or depression has a width of one hundred and twenty miles, and contains sixty thousand square miles of land. Explorers agree that a channel once connected its north-western extremity with the Atlantic, where it terminated in a sand-bank, which prevented the waters of the ocean from flowing into its bed. Its mouth is formed between perpendicular rocks, and measures about two and a half miles in width, and is blocked by a sand-bar, three hundred yards across, with a height of thirty feet above the sea. All that is needed is to excavate a ship canal three hundred yards long through the sand-bar, and the inland sea will be speedily formed. When this is accomplished the Mendi country and its neighborhood will be a vast island, approachable from many directions, and a belt of civilization will be closed in until the whole area is blessed with peace and abundance. Then “Afric’s sunny fountains” will “roll down their golden sands” into the lap of the older civilizations, and receive in return the riper and richer results of the heaven-born blessings of the Gospel.

(5.) It is fitting, furthermore, that we consider the character and condition of the people of this domain. As to their physical proportions, we have reason to believe that back of the malarial belt they are well formed, muscular and endowed with powers of great endurance. The tribes of the interior drive down the inhabitants of the forest range into the lowland, where the law of the survival of the unfittest obtains on account of malaria leaving alive the coarse, muscular men of the coast. Of the mental capacity of these people a good illustration was seen in Barnabas Root, a real heathen, who came to this country and was graduated at a Western college and also at the Chicago Theological Seminary, ranking among the best scholars of his class at both institutions.

The capacity of this people is also indicated by some splendid achievements on African soil. A native among the Vey people invented an alphabet with two hundred characters, in which communications could be sent by letter and the language preserved in books. Still another contrived an instrument before the invention of the telegraph, called an _eleimbic_, for conveying sound, and by means of which messages could be sent for several miles. Native women manufacture cloth, woven in different colors; they also make a species of twine as delicate and useful as any in the world. Clay vessels that hold water, iron axes and implements of utility of native manufacture, also abound.

Timbuctoo, the queen city of the Desert, at the north-eastern boundary of the country we are considering, contains 20,000 inhabitants, and is laid out with regular streets and well-built houses. Here is found a great mosque with nine naves and a tower 286 feet high and 212 wide, while other mosques of great age and importance greet the eyes in this wonderful city. These indications of skill are found among native Africans, even if due, especially in Timbuctoo, to the Mohammedan faith. Cities and towns in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and further along the coast, are the result in part of a foreign civilization, but still in some measure attest the capacity of the real heathen.

These people not only evince capacity for the development of material wealth, but for the science of government. They evidently believe in experiments in governmental civilization. For example, the king of Dahomey selects the most robust of his wives for a body-guard and organizes regiments of amazons. These are said to be most courageous soldiers and absolutely devoted to their calling. He also displays his appreciation of object lessons in temperance reform by keeping a drunkard on rum, that his hideous aspect might deter the people from that vice; while the boys who act as porters on the coast promote the observance of Sunday laws by charging for their services on the Lord’s day sixpence extra for breaking the Sabbath.

The question, however, with which we have chief concern relates to the religious instincts or capabilities of these people. These may be measured in some degree by the sacrifices they make and by the notions they entertain. For example, among the Foula tribe the offerings to the Fetish must be made by a “sinless girl.” Among the Mendi, they believe in a supreme being who made all things, who punishes those who wrong their friends; they thank him for blessings, and blame him for trouble and sickness. The fetishism of the African is based upon religious instincts, and indicates the strength of his aptitude for faith, prayer and self-denial.

We have not at command any comprehensive knowledge of the habits of all the tribes of the Mendi country and its neighborhood. We are able, however, to give some account of the unprejudiced conduct of the Ashantees during a four years’ war, as observed by two German missionaries held as prisoners at Coomassie for that length of time. They narrate a condition of heathendom that ought to inspire us to pray and labor for the enlightenment and redemption of this wretched people.

The worst phase of their condition is exhibited in the practice of offering human sacrifices. We are told that when the king visits the burial-place of his ancestors he offers a human sacrifice on approaching the skeleton of each one, and in this manner some thirty persons are slaughtered. When about to repair a roof at the burial-place after a storm, as many more victims are offered to appease the wrath of the departed. On funeral occasions many villagers are killed, till it pleases the king to forbid the further shedding of blood. The arms of poor wretches are cut off in midday, while they are compelled to dance for the amusement of the king before being taken to execution. If the victims will not dance, lighted torches are applied to their wounds until the drums beat, and then their heads are taken off.

During the Ashantee war 136 chiefs were slain. According to the belief of the people it was necessary to send a considerable retinue after them to the other world. For this reason a ceremony called a “death-wake” was instituted, at which, for each Coomassie chief, 30 of their people were killed. If an equal retinue was assigned for chiefs in other localities, the slaughtered persons would number 4,080 souls. At the funeral festivities of Kokofu more than 200 human beings were sacrificed, the king beheading several with his own hand. On the death of a prince many of his wives are slain, and if the number he possessed is not deemed sufficient, the king adds a selection of girls, who are painted white and hung with golden ornaments. These sit about the coffin for days, but are finally doomed to the grave as attendants for the departed. The apology for such practices is given by the king of Dahomey in the following language: “If I were to give up this custom at once, my head would be taken off to-morrow. These things cannot be stopped, as one might suppose. By and by, little by little, much may be done. Softly, softly; not by threats. You see how I am placed.” A missionary of much experience on the coast tells us: “The practice of offering human sacrifices is founded on a purely religious basis, designed as a manifestation of piety, sanctioned by long usages, upheld by a powerful priesthood, and believed to be essential to the very existence of the tribes where it exists.”

But, thank God, over these dark areas of Pagan land we believe the “morning light is breaking.” Already about the Mendi country and its neighborhood there are twenty-three central mission stations, many, if not all of which are circled with tributary “out-stations,” lighting the country like a galaxy of planets and stars and suns. Here different religious societies have organized more than one hundred churches, and one hundred times as many converts, and gathered 20,000 children in its schools. To this it must be added that nearly a score of dialects have been mastered, and portions of the Scriptures printed in as many tongues; while millions of real heathen have felt the blessed influence of the Gospel. As you will see by the map, there is a belt of missions from the Senegal on the north along the coast to the mouth of the Niger, and up the Niger the native black Bishop Crowther has located nine mission stations, manned by converted heathen, who are pushing northward toward Timbuctoo, with their steamers and other facilities for extending the work.

We, of the American Missionary Association, are in the heart of this great domain. The Mendi tribe is supposed to occupy a region hundreds of miles inland, and to number two millions of souls. The work of our missionaries on that ground is fruitful of suggestions and encouragement. The faith and aspirations of all, I believe, was expressed by Mr. Anthony, a colored hero from Berea, Ky., in his letter to New York: “If you had the money I would say, send 100,000 missionaries to Africa at once.” The Freedmen are rapidly fitting themselves to go up and possess this land for Christ. Give us the money and we will send them forward.

At some of the fashionable watering-places by the shores of the sea, during the past summer, you noticed chains of electric lights illuminating the fairy-like towers and palaces and abodes of ten thousand pleasure-seekers, who, amid music and gayety and song, sported in the tide as it broke in billowy grandeur on the snowy sands; darkness was changed to day, and night abolished by the wonderful discovery of Mr. Edison. So, I think, our missionary stations in Western Africa are electric lights, dispelling the darkness and ushering in that light which is the truth and the way. Mr. Edison maintains his luminaries by batteries with positive and negative poles, two extremes operating one over against the other. Not otherwise is it with the lights of the missionary world. They must be supported by the great batteries of prayer and sacrifice. Praying and giving must be our watchword. Pray the Lord of the harvest that He send forth the laborer into His harvest, and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

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THE INDIANS.

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REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

Your committee, to whom has been referred that part of the report of the Executive Committee which concerns the American Indians, beg leave to report as follows:

Another event has occurred, in what may surely be termed the providence of God, to compel the attention of Christians to the condition of the Indians, and to our methods of dealing with them.

Whatever may be said of the policy of the Government, the fact is that the paroxysm into which the country is thrown at each new Indian outbreak, the perplexed uncertainty which is then manifested by our chief public officers, the conflict of orders which issue from the different departments of the Government, the passionate demands which are then made for radical changes in our policy, and the general hopelessness of permanent improvement in the condition of the Indian which that wide-spread demand indicates—these conspire to prove that, if not a fundamental change, at least a more intelligent aim is necessary in our method of dealing with these, the most perplexing of our national wards.

In the hope of furnishing a basis of discussion, and of guiding the efforts of the Association in the new problems which are arising, your committee venture to embody their suggestions in the form of a series of resolutions, which we present for adoption, if your wisdom approves them.

_Resolved_, That the aim of this Association shall be, as far as possible and as rapidly as possible, to secure for the Indians—

1. A legalized standing in the Courts of the United States.

2. Ownership of land in severalty.

3. The full rights of American citizenship.

These three things, we believe, are essential if the Indian is to be, not Christianized or civilized, but saved from extermination.

_Resolved_, That this Association most heartily indorses the plan of the Indian Bureau to secure to as many Indians as possible the advantages of education offered at such distant schools as those at Hampton and Carlisle; at the same time we believe that the system of boarding schools on the reservations, which for many years have been maintained by the Government and the missionaries, is the chief educational agency that must be relied upon for bettering the condition of the Indian.

_Resolved_, That to this end the members of this Association will do all in their power to make the Indian question a pressing question until the attention of Congress is so secured and held to it that the legislative enactment necessary to bring about these changes be completely accomplished.

H. A. STIMSON,
A. F. SHERRILL,
S. R. RIGGS
WM. CRAWFORD,
M. B. WILDER,
JOSEPH HART,
E. P. SMITH.

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THE INDIAN QUESTION.

REV. H. A. STIMSON, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

I stand before you to speak upon the Indian question with an inexpressible sadness. The hopelessness of securing justice or mercy for the Indian oppresses me. I seem to hear the cry of the Pilgrim’s saintly pastor, when the news came to him across the ocean of their first fight with the natives of New England, “I would that you had converted some before you killed any.” Our injustice and oppression of the Indian are not the slow growth of years, as they have been to-day shown to be in the case of the negro; they sprang into being full armed, bitter and destructive, like the spirits from Pandora’s box. As early as 1675 the devoted John Eliot wrote to Gov. Winthrop from the wigwams in which he was consecrating his culture and his life to their conversion: “I humbly request that one effect of this trouble may be to humble the English to do the Indians justice.” (Letter to Hon. Mr. Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut. Roxbury, this 24th of the fifth month, 1675.) The prayer has remained unanswered through the centuries.

I am oppressed with the necessity of arraigning my Government and my country of crime. It is but a short time since England was horrified with the account of the barbarous atrocities committed by an English governor upon the blacks of Jamaica. A committee was at once formed, as an expression of the best sentiment of England, for the purpose of bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. Reviewing the work of the Jamaica committee, of which he had been chairman, John Stuart Mill records its failure. It was defeated not by the law, but by the grand jury, the representatives of the people. “It was not a popular proceeding,” he writes, “in the eyes of the great middle classes of England to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against negroes.” (Autobiography, pp. 296-9.) It is as unpopular to arraign our Government for abuse of the Indian to-day. A single sentence, however, of Mr. Mill’s gives me courage to proceed. He says: “The Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s charge settled the law for the future.” It may be that some simple statements of fact may open the eyes of our people and prepare the way for redress.

Early in the century Sidney Smith said of the English nation, in reference to the possibility of converting the Hindoos to Christ: “We have exemplified in our public conduct every crime of which human nature is capable.” Those words stand to-day the terms of the indictment of the United States in her dealings with the Indians.

We have persistently _broken faith with them_. A volume of testimony might readily be produced; but Gen. Leake’s able setting forth of the history of our Indian treaties furnishes all the proof necessary. But as a single illustration, take this statement from a Government official. In seven of our most important treaties with as many different tribes we have bound ourselves to provide education for the children of those tribes. At a low estimate there are 33,000 children of schoolable age. The Government has provided accommodations for but 2,589. Add 5,082 as the number who may possibly be further accommodated in the miserable makeshifts of transient day schools, and you have but 7,671 as the total provision. (Letter of Acting Indian Commissioner Brooks, April 28, 1879.)

But why begin this story? We have made the name Modoc one to frighten children with for a generation; but the Modoc chief who killed the brave Gen. Canby had first been himself betrayed, and had his kindred killed under a U.S. flag of truce; and his women had been violated and burned to death. (Bishop Whipple’s letter to _N. Y. Evening Post_, Jan., 1879.) We fought the Nez Perces; and when that able and manly chief Joseph surrendered, he did it on conditions the flagrant violation of which on the part of our Government is known to every Indian on the plains. (Mr. Tibball’s letter of October 9, 1879, in _N. Y. Tribune_.) We have justified the sneers with which Sitting Bull dismissed Assistant Secretary Cowan in a council held before the outbreak of the last Sioux war: “Return to your own land, and when you have found a white man who does not lie, come back.” We furnished occasion for the sorrowful words of the old chief who, after the Custer massacre, came to the Whipple Commission on the Missouri and said: “Look out there. The prairie is wet with the blood of the white man. I hear the voices of beautiful women crying for their husbands, who will never return. It is not an Indian war. It is a white man’s war, for the white man has lied. Take this pipe to the great Father and tell him to smoke it, for it is the pipe of truth.”

What a parody is this on our national history! We boast of a father of his country who always told the truth. The Indian knows our Government by the name of “Washington,” and the Indian says “Washington always lies.” Gen. Stanley has said: “When I think of the way we have broken faith, I am ashamed to look an Indian in the face.” Gen. Harney said to the Sioux in 1868: “If my Government does not keep this agreement, I will come back and ask the first Indian I meet to shoot me.” (Bishop Whipple in _Faribault Democrat_, Jan. 5, 1877.) Gen. Harney does not revisit the Sioux.

We have _stolen_ from the Indians; we are stealing from them all the time. I do not speak of the lordly robbery, in which the strong possesses himself of the lands, and if occasion serve, of the home of the weak, and justifies it by the right of the stronger. I speak of the petty stealing of the thief. Three years ago there came past my home a long procession of Indian ponies. Where did they come from? They were the property of the Sioux on the reservations west of us. In the face of the ordinance of 1789, which expressly declares that their lands and property shall never be taken, nor their liberties invaded, except in lawful wars authorized by Congress, in violation of the terms of their treaties, and in disregard of the express declaration of the President in response to the telegram of the agent, “Tell the friendly Indians that they shall be protected in their persons and property,” their ponies were gathered and driven off by officers of the army acting under orders. The Indians were left without their only means of transportation for fuel or food, and no redress has ever been secured. No inventory of individual personal property was kept, and the stolen ponies were scattered through Minnesota, and what were left sold for a song in St. Paul.

Gen. Crook has recently said that the Sioux of the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail bands have been robbed during the past winter and spring of over a thousand ponies, which robbery the army, under the new _posse comitatus_ act, is powerless to prevent. (Letter of June 19, 1879, in _New York Tribune_.)

What I am saying must not be understood as an arraignment of the officers of the army, or indeed of the chief officials of the Government. The army officers have been almost without an exception the firm friends of the Indian, and none have borne more emphatic testimony to their bad treatment than such generals as Sherman, Harney, Stanley, Augur, Howard, Pope and Crook. The latter said the other day, in response to the remark that it was hard to be called to sacrifice life in settling quarrels brought about by thieving contractors, “I will tell you a harder thing. It is to be forced to fight and kill Indians when I know they are clearly in the right.” The responsibility is with the representatives of the people, with Congress.

But to return to the indictment. We have _forced the Indians to break the law_ by placing them under conditions in which it was not possible for them to obey the law and live. This can be proven by the records of many of the Indian reservations when we have attempted to shut them in on lands where starvation was inevitable. Of my own knowledge I can speak of a reservation on which some 1,700 Indians were commanded to remain where there was barely food for a grasshopper, and where in the month of September the little children begged the passer for food, and the dogs were the picture of famine. We have debauched their women. Remember that an Indian has no standing in our courts, and it is easy to see what contact with the whites means to him and his family. He has no redress when his home is violated; and the knowledge of his helplessness makes him the prey of every libertine, until on the distant plains the proximity of a Government post is a sign of his misery. (General Carrington construed this remark to apply to army officers, and corrected it publicly. That was not its intent. The officers of the army are gentlemen. The fort brings into the neighborhood of the Indians and offers more or less of shelter to many men of a very different stamp.)

We have not stopped short of _murder_. The record is a long and bloody one. The details of the Custer massacre are still fresh in your minds. The nation stood still and lifted up its hands in horror at the disaster which in a moment had annihilated every man of a large detachment of U.S. troops, not sparing their noble and brilliant leader. But where was the real “Custer massacre”? Go back to 1868, to where, under the shadow of Fort Cobb, on land assigned to them by the United States, stood a small Indian village. Its chief was Black Kettle, a man whose name was a by-word among his fellows for cowardice, because he could not be induced to fight the whites—a man of whom Gen. Harney said, “I have worn the uniform of the United States for fifty-five years; I knew Black Kettle well; he was as good a friend of the white man as I am.”

He had been to the commandant of the post seeking protection for himself and his people, because troops were in the neighborhood. Four days afterwards Gen. Custer surrounded that village, and although the Indians fought with desperation, not a man, woman or child escaped alive. Gen. Custer doubtless believed he had fallen upon a hostile camp. Was the mistake any the less terrible? Was the butchery any the less shocking? The blood of innocent Indians on the Wischita cried unto God, and the answer came in the deluge of blood on the Rosebud. * * * *

But you ask, has this been the history of our other Indian wars?

Our first war with the Sioux was in 1852 to 1854. For thirty years it had been the boast of the Sioux that they had never killed a white man. How did the war begin? A Mormon emigrant train crossing the plains lost a cow, which a band of Sioux, who were living in the neighborhood in perfect peace, found and took. The Mormons discovering this, made complaint at Fort Laramie, and a lieutenant with a squad of soldiers was sent to recover the lost property. It could not be found. It was already assimilated into Indian. But the Indians offered to pay for it. This the lieutenant refused to accept, demanding the surrender of the man who had taken the cow for punishment. The Indians said he could not be found; whereupon—will it be believed?—the lieutenant ordered his troops to fire, and the Indian chief fell dead. Those troops never fired again; they were killed in their tracks; and this was the beginning of the great Sioux war which cost the Government forty millions of dollars and many lives. (Speech of President Seeley, of Massachusetts, in Congress, April 13, 1875.)

You know the story of the Sioux war in Minnesota—the withheld appropriations, the taunts and the starvation. We need not open that terrible chapter again.

We were at it again in 1866. In violation of the most explicit agreements we built Forts Phil Kearney, Reno and Smith, in their country; they flew to arms; the cost to the Government was a million dollars a month; and finally the forts were vacated.

We had a great war with the Cheyennes in 1864-5. It began in the most atrocious massacre that disgraces the annals of our country. It was at a time when settlers were pouring into Colorado. The buffalo had become scarce; the annuities for some reason had ceased; the Indians were sad and depressed. But they kept the peace. Black Kettle, of whom I have already spoken, was their chief. A white man made complaint to a United States officer that an Indian had stolen some of his horses. The officer did not know the man, nor whether or not he had owned any horses; but he fitted out an expedition to seize horses. Soon they ran across Indians and claimed their stock, though the Indians protested that they had only ponies and no American horses. A fight ensued and some Indians were killed. Black Kettle knew his danger. He rushed at once to the Governor of Colorado, seeking protection. It was refused. Col. Boone, an old resident of the Territory, told Bishop Whipple that it was the saddest company he had even seen when they stopped at his house on their way back. He offered them food, but they said: “Our hearts are sick; we cannot eat.”

Soon after troops appeared upon the horizon. Black Kettle and his two brothers went out with a white flag to meet them. They fired on the flag and the two brothers fell dead. Black Kettle returned to his camp. Three men in the United States uniform were in his tepee. He said; “I believe you are spies; it shall never be said that a man ate Black Kettle’s bread and came to harm in his tent. Go to your people before the fight begins.” He gathered his men and they fought for their lives. A few escaped; but men, women and children were massacred in a butchery too horrible to relate, Women were ripped open and babes were scalped; and the Sand Creek massacre has gone upon record, by testimony that cannot be impeached, as a “butchery that would have disgraced the tribes of Central Africa.” (Bishop Whipple’s letter to _Evening Post_, January, 1879; and the report of the Doolittle Commission.)

But we fought the Cheyennes again in 1867. What occasioned that war? Gen. Hancock, “without any known provocation,” as says the report to Congress of the Indian Bureau, in July, 1867, surrounded a village of Cheyennes who had been at peace since the signing of the treaty of 1865, and were quietly occupying the grounds assigned to them by the treaty, burned down the homes of three hundred lodges, destroyed all their provisions, clothing, utensils and property of every description, to the value of $100,000. This led to a war that extended over three years, and cost us $40,000,000 and three hundred men. (President Seeley’s speech.)

We have just fought the Bannocks and Shoshones. In November, 1878, Gen. Crook wrote to the Government: “With the Bannocks and Shoshones our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of war-path or starvation; and being human, many of them will choose the former, in which death shall at least be glorious.” Is it necessary to say anything more of that war? Why pursue the story? The late Congressman (now President) Seeley, of Amherst College, says: “There has not been an Indian war for the past fifty years in which the whites have not been the aggressors.”

What, then, is to be done? I press upon you the importance of these resolutions. Standing in the courts, the recognition of the Indian as a person with rights, inalienable as yours and mine, to life, to justice, to property, this is the first, the absolute essential. As long ago as 1807, Governor (afterwards President) Harrison said: “The utmost efforts to induce the Indians to take up arms would be unavailing if _one only of the many persons who have committed murder upon their people could be brought to punishment_.” Generals Harney and Pope have testified of late that this is as true now as then.

In 1802 President Jefferson wrote to a friend that he had heard that there was one man left of the Peorias, and said “If there is only one, justice demands that his rights shall be respected.” Reviewing subsequent history we may well repeat Jefferson’s solemn words, “I tremble for my country when I know that God is just!”

We can make no more treaties with the Indians. The act of 1871 put an end to that dreadful farce. There have been nearly 900 treaties since 1785. They have been the loaded dice with which we have always won and the Indian always lost. We have hoodwinked ourselves by them to a perpetual fraud and deception. They have been to the Indian a veritable compact of death. Relying on them he has sooner or later found himself held by the throat by the wolf starvation, or impaled on the bayonet of the soldier; crowded to the wall by the encroaching settler, or removed to the wilderness by the Government as soon as he had begun to make for himself a home. The Stockbridges have been thus removed four times in a hundred years, and are now on a reservation where it is impossible to get a living. The Poncas are the latest instance.

Treaties must give place to personal rights. We must provide something better for him than a reservation; that is, life in a community for which we have provided no law, no courts, no police, no officer other than an anomalous “agent,” no ownership of land—nothing, in short, that all civilized people regard as the first element of civilized life, and without which the congregate life of bodies of men is impossible. We say to him, Cease to be a savage, hungry but free, and come and be a pauper, dependent on the will of others, without law, and still hungry. As one of the agents wrote in 1875: “It is a condition of things that would turn a white community into chaos in twelve months.” It behooves every honest man, every man who loves his country, to see that the day of equal personal rights for the Indian, the only man on the broad earth who has none, shall at once dawn.

But I remember that I am speaking to a company of Christians. Religion before all else can prepare the Indian to make the most of his citizenship. Look at this picture. Here is a wigwam in the pine forest. Before it is a tall pole, from the top of which hangs a dried bladder containing a few rattling shells and stones. It is the wigwam of Shaydayence, or Little Pelican, chief medicine man of the Gull Lakers. He is the incarnation of the devil in that tribe. He holds the tribe in his hand, and represents their idolatry and their bloodthirstiness. It is due to him that the missionary has been driven away. More than that, he is an inveterate drunkard. He has been rescued from freezing to death, drunk in the woods, by a chance lumberman finding him and thawing him out before an extemporized fire.

The scene changes. There is again a wigwam. Lift the blanket door and enter. Three old women are warming themselves by the fire in the centre. A young man lies upon the ground singing aloud from an Ojibway hymn-book, which he reads by the fire-light. An old man rises to greet you, asks you to sit down, and proceeds to talk about Jesus Christ. It is the same Shaydayence. He is known now as the leader of the singing band of the Chippewas, who goes from house to house with a few young men to plead with his countrymen to love Christ. A little later you find him living in a log house with table and chairs and stove, a white man’s home, cultivating also his garden. What wrought the change? He had a friend, Nayboneshkong, who was sick and dying. He went to see him. The sick man had long been a Christian, and now rallied himself to speak for the last time. Hour after hour he expostulated and pleaded. He rose from his bed with preternatural strength. He walked the floor, still talking and praying. Morning came, Nayboneshkong was dead, and Shaydayence went to his wigwam to begin the new life of a Christian man. Observe that he was a savage, a medicine man and a drunkard. What other influence could have saved him? Would education, or citizenship, or civilization, or legal standing, or property rights? Nothing; nothing but the personal power of Jesus Christ; and that did.

The story goes that once there appeared at the cave of a hermit a little child, naked and cold and hungry. The good man eagerly took him in, and from his own scanty store clothed and fed and warmed him. He set his heart upon him as upon his own son. The next day the hermit was gone. It was Jesus who had come thus needy to his door, and proving his love, had in return taken him to himself, and like Enoch, the hermit was not. The child, naked and hungry and cold at our door, is the Indian. I hear the voice of the Lord himself saying, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

You have pointed out the large part which in the providence of God may yet be appointed to the negro race to play in doing God’s work in the world.

I know nothing of the future of the Indian in this direction. He may have no “genius for religion,” no “peculiar talent of faith,” no “wonderful power in song.” That he has talents which are respectable, none who know him can doubt. But be that as it may, before all other men he stands to-day the living witness of the promise of the Scripture, that Christ “is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him.” He, brethren, is the “uttermost” man—the sinner who, abused, outcast and despised, is, at least in your eyes, the furthest of all men from hope and from Christ. Have you religion enough to try to save him? If so, begin by showing him justice.

* * * * *

THE CHINESE.

* * * * *

“CALIFORNIA CHINESE MISSION.”

Auxiliary to the American Missionary Association.

PRESIDENT: Rev. J. K. McLean, D. D. VICE-PRESIDENTS: Rev. A. L.
Stone, D. D., Thomas O. Wedderspoon, Esq., Rev. T. E. Noble, Hon.
F. F. Low, Rev. I. E. Dwinell, D. D., Hon. Samuel Cross, Rev. S.
H. Willey, D. D., Edward P. Flint, Esq., Rev. J. W. Hough, D. D.,
Jacob S. Taber, Esq.

DIRECTORS: Rev. George Mooar, D. D., Hon. E. D. Sawyer, Rev. E.
P. Baker, James M. Haven, Esq., Rev. Joseph Rowell, Rev. John
Kimball, E. P. Sanford, Esq.

SECRETARY: Rev. W. C. Pond. TREASURER: E. Palache, Esq.

* * * * *

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

The report opens with stating the greatness of the problems with which the Association has to grapple, protests against the discriminating legislation of State and nation, and concludes as follows:

We regard the work of this Association among the Chinamen in America as fruitful in good results. Its Superintendent on the field has said: “I doubt whether any evangelistic labor in connection with our churches has yielded larger results, in proportion to the funds employed and the breadth which we have been permitted to give to the work.” That work has been limited. Out of $179,000 expended by this Association last year, only $6,596 was given to this work. This was increased a little by other funds in California. But this sum, applied to twelve schools, with twenty-one teachers and 1,489 pupils, is too small for the greatness of the work, for the 100,000 Chinamen in this country have the closest relations with the millions left at home. They are constantly coming and going. The Rev. W. C. Pond said in 1876 that during the fourteen preceding years nearly 130,000 had landed in San Francisco, or about 9,000 annually; but they are returning nearly or quite as fast as they come. They are “picked young men, industrious, enterprising, persistent.” As they come to us, feel our molding touch to harden or to soften, and then return home, we owe it to them, to ourselves, and to Christ, to pass as much as possible of this moving stream of immortal souls through our schools and under the influence of One greater than Confucius. We want the returning stream to bear on its bosom the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ. We, therefore, recommend the enlargement of this work to its utmost demand. It touches vitally the evangelization of 400,000,000 of brothers and sisters. This work is broader than that among the Indian and the Negro; it is broader than the evangelization of Africa. We press its importance, therefore, both upon the officers and the constituent members of this Association, for by and by we may see in it the Divine purpose to redeem China by means of the Chinamen returning home laden with the riches of grace, more precious than gold.

Your committee desire to express their high appreciation of the able and exhaustive paper on the Chinese question read before the Association by the Rev. J. H. Twichell, and submitted to this committee, and recommend its publication.

Your committee deem it of great importance suitably to recognize the action of President Hayes in saving us by a veto from national disgrace. When Congress had so far forgotten the whole past policy of our Government, and the principles of Christianity imbedded in the foundations of the Republic, as to pass a bill indirectly abrogating a treaty unmentioned in the bill, the Executive interposed and saved both our treaty and our honor.

We would suggest, therefore, the expression of our appreciation of his action in the adoption of the following resolution, viz.:

_Resolved_, That the American Missionary Association, assembled in its thirty-third anniversary, believing that the treaties existing between the United States and China, so far as they relate to the rights of emigration from one country to the other, and the treatment such emigrants should receive from the people and nation among whom and in which they live, are right, just, wise and Christian, does heartily record its appreciation of the high services which President Hayes, under God, has, by his timely veto of the anti-Chinese bill, been enabled to render the Republic, in preserving inviolate its treaty obligations and also the cause of Christianity, in removing a threatened formidable barrier to the evangelization of the Chinese, not only in America, but also in their native land, and the Association hereby tenders him its profound thanks for the same.

_Resolved_, That the secretaries of this Association be authorized to convey to President Hayes this our action.

A. HASTINGS ROSS,
W. A. NICHOLS,
CHARLES C. CRAGIN,
MARK WILLIAMS,
C. CAVERNO,
E. M. WILLIAMS,
JEE GAM.

* * * * *

UNITED STATES AND CHINA—THE SITUATION.

REV. J. H. TWICHELL, HARTFORD, CONN.

OUR OPPORTUNITY.

* * * * Much as anterior conditions and causes have to do with it, the great opportunity now maturing in China for the ingress of revolutionary influences from without, has been pre-eminently shaped by Protestant missions; and in the nature of the case, it devolves on Protestant Christendom the highest obligations to meet it that circumstances can create. To no other nation, however, does such a share of this opportunity and corresponding obligation fall as to the United States; for we sustain relations to the Chinese Government and to the Chinese people that are, in important respects, singular.

(1.) To begin with, there is the relation of _neighborhood_. Sailing up the Pacific, near our coast, one summer evening, Yung Wing, leaning against the steamer guards, and looking across the level waters to the westward, said, “Yonder lies my country, next land to this.” Between us and China, between our two realms, the one so old, the other so young, for a thousand miles of coast on either side, nothing intervenes but the sea, which no state owns, and that is contiguity. Along so great a boundary America and China may be said to touch, yet without possibility of territorial dispute. And this nearness is one feature of our special opportunity.

(2.) A second and more pregnant feature of it is to be noted in the _good-will_ that in a peculiar degree characterizes the relations of our two countries in the past and in the present. This may seem a strange thing to say just now, but the truth of it will appear on a brief survey of facts. Probably it is less our merit than our fortune, but it is certainly the latter, that through the whole stage of that unhappy, though largely unavoidable collision of China with the foreign powers, by which she was forced off from her intolerable policy of exclusion, our Government was the least conspicuous of the principal aggressors,—less so than France, less so than England, less so than Russia. To the several treaties in which the collision issued, that with the United States, and that alone, contained the express provision that the parties to it, and their peoples respectively, should “not insult or oppress each other for any trifling cause, so as to produce an estrangement between them.” There has been, and is, less bitter remembrance of us on the score of that conflict than of the other belligerents engaged in it. Again, while we have subsequently had men in the various ranks of our diplomatic service in China who have hurt us there, and have them still, we have probably given least offence on _that_ score. No thanks to our civil service want of system; but in the providence of God, we have had more than our proportion there of men who have helped our good fame. Eighteen years ago we sent thither an ambassador, one result of whose six years of official life there was, that at the end of that time jealous Pekin had come to recognize in him, what he truly was, a friend to China. I mean, of course, Anson Burlingame, of Massachusetts. For his friendship, China offered to his acceptance honors never before or since conferred on a foreigner. She freely committed to his hands a trust of supreme magnitude. She made him her ambassador to all the western people. In that capacity he came home to his own country, and framed with us the first of that new series of treaties in which China gave and received the pledge that made her a member on equal footing of the family of nations. And that treaty, the work of our own citizen, large minded enough to value the capabilities of that great people, large hearted enough also to make his sympathy felt by its rulers, still stands, and is _going_ to stand. But this most remarkable and luminous paragraph of history—is there another such between China and any other nation but ours?

(3.) Finally, as if to supply the last term required to complete our relationship for all possible service to the Chinese race, as if to openly designate and summon us to the office of aiding its emergence into a new life, especially of ministering to it the holy faith, (which is the best gift we have to impart, the one secret and source of our happier lot,) for us and for us alone, of all Protestant Christendom, by bringing to our soil, to the presence of our institutions, to our church doors, a multitude of Chinese people themselves, God provided the condition of _personal contact_. That was the rounding and perfection of our opportunity.

But, it will naturally be inquired, is not whatsoever exceptional advantage gained for us in the past mostly annulled by the later and recent record of social and political hostility here at home, which stands against us in our account with China? I think not.

The shameful truth is, China is wonted to the ill-treatment of her subjects on foreign Christian soil, and if we have furnished no exception to the rule, our outrage has been milder than she is accustomed to; so that, after all that has happened to wound her feelings here, there still remains to us the benefit, though it is nothing, I repeat, to be proud of, of comparison with worse doers.

ADVANTAGES OF THE ANTI-CHINESE AGITATION.

I am glad to pass to a pleasanter topic, and to remark next, that there are certain incidental consequences of the anti-Chinese agitation, and, as well, certain circumstances felicitously contemporaneous with it, that have operated to offset and countervail the injury which that agitation may be supposed to have inflicted on our relation with China—that have done more than that.

First, it has developed and brought out into expression a _vastly preponderant public opinion adverse to the whole movement_. The argument for it has been heard and canvassed, and not without sympathy; for it was presented by our own countrymen, and it was not to be questioned that they were in a measure of honest difficulty of some sort with the matter they brought to trial. But I think it is entirely true to say that the event of the discussion has been that the argument is answered. It did not stand as to its facts. I believe that all the main counts of the indictment against Chinese emigration and Chinese emigrants we severally disproved to the public satisfaction.