The Indian Question in Arizona

In the last five years, the raiding parties of the Apaches in Southern Arizona have been so active and constant in their work of murder and pillage that there has been no security for either life or property outside of the few towns. In that time more than a thousand citizens have been murdered, with all the accompanying barbarities of savage warfare, and an immense amount of property has been stolen or destroyed. Meanwhile, all industries in this region—trade, grazing, mining, and agriculture—have suffered partial or total paralysis. The government seems powerless to protect its citizens or to maintain its peace and dignity against these outlaws.

The press has been loud in its comments on the subject, but these do not usually go beyond the statement of the murders and depredations which have been committed, with an occasional aspersion on the efficiency of the regular army. They do not attempt to trace the causes of the evil, or to suggest a remedy for it, further than to express the simple opinion that the army should catch and kill the Indians who may chance at the time to be on the war-path.

The parties engaged in this bloody tragedy, which is being perpetually enacted, may be divided into four general classes: the Indian, the Frontiersman, the Army, and the Government.

The Indian is no exception to the general law of cause and effect. That he is a murderer and a bandit can surprise no one who will reflect on what has been his treatment for the last twenty years.

In 1871, in order to open certain parts of Arizona to civilized occupation, about eight thousand Indians were placed on the San Carlos reservation, a region a hundred miles square. The agency is situated on the Gila River, in a / low, hot, dirty, unhealthful spot. Some of the tribes now forced to dwell there were mountain Indians. in their native haunts, they enjoyed one of the most delightful climates in the world. At San Carlos they endure one of the most abominable. There they suffer from long and extreme heat, bad water, fever and ague, and ophthalmia. They must appear at the agency on the weekly ration day. If they stay away, they get no rations. In going through the camps of the Chiracalmas and Warm Springs, I have been struck by the misery of their condition. It is these mountain Indians who have caused the most serious trouble. So far as I know, no successful effort has ever been made to instruct or assist them in agriculture. The government feeds them, and the agents have not, as a rule, considered it the policy of their craft to make the Indian self-supporting. The game in that locality is nearly exhausted, so his occupation as a hunter is gone. There he exists, in a hot, sandy camp, on the banks of a low, sickly stream, without amusement, without hope, with no incentive to any good or useful labor.

But he has one agreeable relaxation from his wretched imprisonment on the reservation, that of raiding the surrounding ranches. These raids are to him the most delightful diversion conceivable. The pleasure of killing and plundering, with the very slight risk of capture and punishment, renders this the ideal pastime in the Indian’s estimation.

Let us imagine a few young bucks, utterly tired of their dreary camp life on the Gila. They talk over their position, and organize a raiding party. They easily supply themselves with arms and ammunition, which most frontier tradesmen will sell them in any quantity. They tell their chief that they are going out; or, if he chance to disapprove of such expeditions, they say that they are going on a hunt to the northern part of the reservation, about Camp Apache and Mount Ord. Then, having determined the first ranch to be attacked, they quietly leave their camp, and move by easy marches on the doomed family. They reach the place. One or two creep forward and carefully reconnoitre. All the party assume their positions in the rocks or grass, and patiently wait until they can take the family at the greatest disadvantage. For, though devoted to the sport of killing others, the Apaches are very much opposed to taking the slightest chances against their own lives. The looked-for opportunity arrives, and they spring from their concealment. They kill every human being about the place, unless they can manage, with perfect safety to themselves, to capture some of the ranchmen alive, in which case they will have the opportunity of enjoying an Indian’s favorite amusement, — that of watching a white man die by slow degrees under the most inhuman tortures which savage ingenuity can invent. This entertainment completed, they help themselves to whatever pleases their fancy in the house, and then set it on fire. Finally, they collect all the horses, and, mounting the best, drive the others before them.

The ball is now open. They will move with great rapidity, and will promptly agree on the destruction of another ranch, a hundred miles or more distant. Away they go, now galloping, now trotting, and subsiding into a walk only when the trail is very steep and rough. During this rapid march, they show great skill in keeping the loose horses ahead of them on the trail. An Indian can ride a tired horse from ten to twenty miles farther than can a white man. When a horse is entirely exhausted, his rider calmly dismounts, and proceeds to kill him, usually by stabbing him many times with a long knife. It is very seldom that he will waste a precious cartridge on such an occasion, but under no circumstance will he leave a living horse behind him.

Now, if the party be in the humor for a meal, they build a small fire, cut slices from the dead horse, cook them a little, and eat their fill. Thus, in the stolen horse is combined both the means of transportation and the commissary. In this, the Indian possesses a vast advantage over his soldier pursuer, who must ride one horse through an entire campaign, and whose rations and spare ammunition must be carried with him on pack-mules. In this way the raiding party can easily cover a hundred miles in twenty-four hours, while a company of cavalry, with its indispensable pack-train, can with difficulty accomplish more than thirty, in that rough, roadless country.

With the second ranch, the programme of the first is repeated. The Indians murder the inhabitants, plunder and burn the house, and drive off the horses.

After this, the party may be seized with a desire to witness the effect of their escapade on the neighboring military posts. If so, they climb to some commanding elevation on Mount Graham, or about Helen’s Dome. From this vantage-ground, they can survey the surrounding country for a long distance, and their practiced eyes can easily detect, by the clouds of dust in the valleys, the approach of a column of troops twenty or thirty miles away. If they can see several of these columns on the march, they enjoy all the delights of a successful practical joker; for they are confident of their own safety, and have the satisfaction of knowing that they have put into the field several hundred troops.

If their appetite for murder and plunder is still unsatisfied, they may go into Old Mexico, and continue their tactics of rapid transit, ambuscade, and pillage. But it is probable that they will now be content with the results of the expedition. They will break up the loose organization of the party, and traveling singly, by night, individually make good their retreat to the camp on the Gila.

The return of an Indian from such an expedition is a proud day in his life. He is a hero, he is a rich man. He has several good horses, and money, clothes, arms, and ammunition. He enjoys the approval of the old men of his tribe, the envy of the young ones who stayed in camp, and the boundless admiration of all the squaws. On the next ration day, he presents himself at the agency, and calmly resumes the enjoyment of the bounties of the government. If he has been missed, — which is not probable, — and is asked to give an account of himself, he says that he has been hunting on the reservation, or that he has been looking for some ponies which had strayed away from his camp. Every Indian in his tribe would sooner die than utter a syllable to throw a ray of light on the case.

Here you have the picture of the Apache, his home life and his amusements. He is born a warrior and a robber. Before the white man became his neighbor and his prey, he exercised his bloody proclivities on the surrounding Indian tribes. There is no law to punish him, even could his crimes find him out, for he is a citizen or subject of a nation with whom our government has entertained treaty relations; and the acknowledgment of the treaty-making power has always been held to be the most complete admission of the autonomy of a people. He is supposed to live under the restraints of tribal law. But what is tribal law? The Apache code will occupy but a few lines. Here it is: —

Theft committed in the tribe is punished promptly and often severely.

Murder in the tribe is a personal affair, to be settled by the payment of an indemnity or by retaliation.

All crimes successfully committed against the persons and property of individuals outside of the tribe are commendable achievements. The Chiricahua, for instance, who kills and robs a white man, or an Indian of another tribe, is looked upon by his people very much as we regard a hunter who kills a deer, eats his flesh, and takes his skin, — merely as a successful sportsman.

There, among the people of Arizona, dwelling about their ranches, their farms, and their mines, our government quarters, feeds, and looses this outlaw, who is swift as the eagle, cruel as the hungry wolf, and who,

The frontiersman who settles in Arizona or New Mexico belongs to one of two classes. Either he is a poor man, who goes West to conquer a home from the vast and unoccupied public domain; or he is a rich man, taking his capital to new fields, where it will be more remunerative than in the already crowded industries of the East. In either case, if he succeeds in creating tax-paying property from what was formerly an unproductive waste, he is a public servant and benefactor. He has accepted the invitation of the government to make his home on the public domain. He has complied with all the forms of law. He is putting forth his labor, his enterprise, his capital, to increase the national wealth, and the government is under the most sacred obligation to exhaust all its wisdom and power to insure him perfect security for life and property. That the richest and most numerous civilized nation under the sun is unable to afford its citizens absolute protection from the murderous incursions of a few hundred savages is a proposition too absurd to deserve a moment’s consideration.

When the frontiersman, year after year, sees his neighbors, his friends, his relations, fall an easy prey to the unrestrained Apaches, and when he sees no laws enacted, no adequate means devised, to protect them, he has a right to consider that the government has utterly failed in its obligations to him. Not only has it failed to protect him, but it has actually placed his enemy in a city of refuge, in easy striking distance of his home and family, and is further responsible for a system which enables that enemy to prey upon him with almost complete immunity from punishment.

In May, 1882, I followed the trail of an Apache war-party from near San Carlos to San Simon, New Mexico, and counted forty-two men, women, and children murdered in mere savage caprice, and, when time and opportunity permitted, murdered with accompanying barbarities which curdle the blood and sicken the heart.

It is clearly the imperative and immediate duty of Congress to devise some effectual means of protecting the frontier citizens and restraining the Indians. In default of an Indian code vigorously enforced, the Apache in his present condition must be exterminated. Let every man judge for himself which horn of the dilemma is humanity, and which is barbarism.

The army represents the strong arm of the government for controlling the Indian and protecting the frontiersman. How inadequate are the means to the end is conclusively shown by the fact that, on the war-path, the relative speed of the Indian and the soldier is three to one. This is no aspersion on the efficiency of our cavalry. They are ready and willing to do all that brave men can do, but the task imposed upon them is simply impossible. I do not believe that there is a body of cavalry in the world that can keep in sight of a raiding party of Apaches, after they have plundered a few ranches, and provided themselves with several spare horses to the man.

The treatment of the army by the government in Indian affairs is both discouraging and unjust. Let us assume for the moment that the various Indian tribes are really nations, possessing treaty power, — the power to declare war and to make peace. One of these nations makes war on the United States. Both powers put their forces into the field. The Indians utterly disregard all the laws of civilized warfare. There is no such thing as an exchange of prisoners. If a wounded soldier falls into their hands, he is invariably put to death, after being subjected to the most cruel and savage tortures which it is possible to invent, — and the originality and ingenuity of the Indian in this respect is vast and varied. In short, they fight under the black flag.

Now, one of the most firmly established rules of international law is that known as the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. This principle, applied to the treatment of prisoners, demands that they be treated with like consideration by both contending parties. If your enemy murders his prisoners, as a simple act of self-defense you are bound to retaliate by putting to death an equal number of your prisoners. To fail to do this is not only encouraging him in his atrocities, but it is an injustice to the men whom you send to fight him.

The Indian invariably makes a rigorous application of this law in his wars with other tribes, and he fully appreciates the great advantage which he possesses over an enemy who persistently declines to apply it to his own protection. I have talked with several Apaches on the subject, and they have expressed surprise, not unmixed with contempt, at our policy of non-retaliation.

Now let us look at the position of the soldier in his relations with the hostile Indian.

Every officer of the army, before he receives his commission, is supposed to be instructed in international law and the laws of war. He makes the acquaintance of the lex talionis, and reads General Orders No. 100 of 1863, being the rules for the government of the armies of the United States in the field, compiled by Francis Lieber, LL. D., a manual still in force with us, and which is considered so able a treatise on the subject that it has been translated and adopted by nearly every civilized nation. Note the following extracts from General Orders No. 100: —

Article 27. “The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations regard retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.”

Article 59. … “All prisoners of war are liable to the infliction of retaliatory measures.”

Article 62. “All troops of the enemy, known or discovered to give no quarter in general or to any portion of the army, receive none.”

After learning his lesson from books, the young officer passes his examination, receives his appointment, and is assigned to a regiment in the West. Let us suppose that, in the course of time, he is ordered to take part in an expedition against hostile Indians. In following the trail of the war-party, he sees burned ranches, and the mutilated corpses of men, women, and children. During the campaign there is a brush with the enemy. The advance guard comes upon them strongly posted among the rocks. A skirmish line is deployed, and their position attacked. During the encounter several soldiers are wounded, and that part of the line, being hotly pressed, gives way before reinforcements can come up. The Indians rush down and carry off the wounded men. Meanwhile, the whole command has come up and been deployed for action. The Indians beat a hasty retreat, and night stops the pursuit.

The next day the young lieutenant comes upon the remains of the captured men. They have been staked out upon their backs, and hundreds of small pieces of wood, sharpened at one end, have been stuck into their flesh. The bits of wood have then been lighted and allowed to burn until they have extinguished themselves in the victims’ blood. The charred bodies are buried, and the command moves on.

At last, after hundreds of miles of marching, some of the Indians are captured. They are brought into camp, and turned over to the commanding officer.

Now, thinks the young officer, if ever there was an occasion that justified the prompt application of the lex talionis, and Articles 27, 59, and 62 of General Orders No. 100, it is here. In breathless interest he approaches the commanding officer, who sends for the officer of the day, who comes up and salutes. The commander says, “Sir, you will take charge of these prisoners, and place over them a strong guard in the centre of the camp. First, you will take every precaution to prevent their escape; second, you will see that none of the guides, scouts, or frontiersmen with the command approach within a hundred paces of them, for some of these men have had friends and relations killed by these very Indians, and I fear that the sight of the murderers of their people may so inflame their grief and resentment that they will attempt to kill them while in my keeping. This I am determined to prevent. You will notify the command that any person offering violence to the prisoners will be promptly and severely punished. That is all, sir.”

The young officer is immensely surprised at these instructions. He had expected to bear the order for the execution of the prisoners. He had even gone so far as to make surmises on the probability of his having command of the firing party. But when he hears careful directions given for their safe preservation, his astonishment is so great that he even ventures to interrogate his commanding officer on the subject. “Sir,” he says, “will not these prisoners be either hanged or shot, in retaliation for the atrocities which they have committed on citizens and prisoners?”

The commanding officer turns and regards in silence his interrogator for some seconds, while his surprise at the question and the earnest manner of him who puts it gives way to an appreciation of the fact that this is the youngest lieutenant in the regiment, that it is his first campaign, that he is fresh from theories, books, and orders, that he knows little of the practical methods of handling the Indian question on the frontier, and that he does not yet appreciate the difference that often exists between the national statutes and the national practice. Then he says, gravely and kindly, “Young man, I would rather go through a dozen Indian fights than kill one of those prisoners.”

“But, sir,” says the lieutenant, “of what force, then, are the lex talionis, and Articles” —

“I know all that,” interrupts the commanding officer. “They are in the books; but the sentiment of the East will not stand it. If I should retaliate on these prisoners, I should expect to be ignominiously relieved from my command, and perhaps never get another. I should in all probability be either court-martialed, or investigated by a committee of Congress. The Eastern press would denounce me as an assassin and a monster of cruelty. I am now a major, after twenty-five years of hard service in the late war and on the frontier. In a short time I expect my promotion as lieutenant-colonel. But if I followed your very just and natural suggestion I should be so reviled by the press that my confirmation by the Senate would probably be contested and defeated, and my career would be blasted in the profession to which I have devoted my life. An officer must regard the dominant prejudices of the day as well as the laws of war and General Orders. We serve in the people’s army, and we must be careful of their feelings. I might tell you more than one incident in the lives of officers whom I have known, who have acted in the manner indicated by the International Code and the Orders you quote with just such a result, — an interrupted career, popular indignation, obloquy.”

After vouchsafing this explanation the older officer turns away, leaving the lieutenant to reflect on the intricacies of the profession of arms and the complicated nature of the Indian problem, both of which he had considered as very simple, and entirely mastered by himself, when he joined his regiment six months ago.

The main body of the hostiles soon dissolves into small parties, which, scattering in the mountains, leave behind such slight trails that pursuit is impracticable. The command of soldiers then breaks up, and the various companies return to their garrisons. Our young officer watches with interest the fate of the prisoners. They are sent to the nearest post, where they are kept under guard, each receiving the daily ration of a soldier. Finally, they are formally turned over to their agent. Just what he does with them is a mystery. Probably he administers a severe lecture. Possibly he grants them pardon and absolution. At all events, they are soon at liberty on the reservation, enjoying the pleasures of camp life and government rations, and receiving the same treatment as the Indians who have spent the summer peacefully at home.

Perhaps some readers will say that this is merely a romance. But every incident in my hypothetical case has been repeatedly true in the lives of many officers now in the service. Indeed, most of it is my own experience in the campaign against the Bannocks, in 1878.

The experience of the civilized world shows conclusively that in extreme cases capital punishment is a just, necessary, and eventually a humane expedient. It acts as a protection to the good, and as a restraint upon the bad members of society. On the same principle, any reflecting person will appreciate how terribly our system of dealing with our wild Indians is in need of an act of Congress, or an order from the President or Secretary of War, reviving and enforcing the law of retaliation in Indian wars. Such an order would have a civilizing and humanizing effect upon the Indian himself, for it would deprive him of a great temptation to indulge his savage proclivities for torturing and murdering his prisoners, — the knowledge that he can do so with impunity. It is also nothing more than an act of simple justice and humanity towards our army, in its struggles with a barbarous foe, to allow it to protect itself against his nameless atrocities by taking advantage of this natural and fundamental law.

In reflecting on that lawless and bloody chaos known as our Indian policy, now existing over a large portion of our frontier, the unprejudiced observer will be struck with the fact that the government and the nation owe themselves, the Indian, and humanity a solemn debt, — a debt until now almost entirely unpaid. If public sentiment has now brought sufficient pressure to bear to cause the government to really desire to abandon its long-continued practice of applying ineffectual means to solve a great problem, then it must promptly and vigorously do two things:

First, enact an Indian code, establish Indian courts, and enforce their judgments by a machinery of law especially adapted to the peculiar circumstances of the case.

Second, give the Indians land in severalty, and encourage them to become self-supporting, independent farmers. If, after allowing them a fair trial, they will not work, then punish them under the Indian code as vagrants, having no visible means of support.

The condition as regards laws and morals on the San Carlos reservation I can best illustrate by two incidents.

The Apaches make from fermented corn a liquor called by them tizwin. By a judicious use of this, after from one to two days’ fasting, they can get very drunk. Tizwin is to them what whiskey is to the white man. One Sunday in August of 1882, a report was brought into Fort Apache that there was a tizwin party and fight in progress among some Indians in camp across the river from the fort. The commanding officer, fearing that some of the Indian scouts belonging to the post, and hence temporarily under his jurisdiction, might be involved, ordered that the combatants should be brought to him. The guard found lying around a blanket, strewn with cards and red and white beans, one Indian alive and unhurt, another dead, with a ball through his heart, and two more rapidly bleeding to death from several deep cuts which they had mutually dealt each other. These were the remains of an Apache tizwin and card party.

The living man was brought to the commanding officer, who asked him if he had killed a man in the camp across the river. The Indian answered that he had. The commanding officer then asked if he did not know that he had committed a great crime, and that he was a bad Indian, to which he laughingly replied, “No, no. I not a bad Indian. I play cards with boy. He lose. He lose more. He no money—he no pay—he no good. So I kill him. That’s all right.”

The commanding officer, perceiving that the Indian was too drunk to be safely left at liberty, ordered him to be confined in the guard-house. The next morning, after he was perfectly sober, he was released, and ordered to leave the post. The commanding officer had no right to keep him in the guard-house after he ceased to be a dangerous person by reason of his intoxication. Had he been sent to the agent at San Carlos, still there would have been no law under which to proceed against him. Or had the agent delivered him over to his chief, to be punished according to tribal law, the chief would have considered a murder over cards as a purely personal matter, and have taken no notice of it. So much for tribal government among the Apaches.

Again, I know an Indian named Chappo, who deliberately killed his own father, and received as the price of this most unnatural crime ten cartridges. Both the Indian and the crime are well known in Arizona. But there is no law to reach such cases. Perhaps Chappo’s chief considered the laborer worthy of his hire. And so the matter ended in Apache ethics.

When we know the recklessness with which Indians kill each other, can we wonder at the levity with which they sometimes kill white men?

I quote the facts concerning the major crime of murder. The same deplorable state of affairs exists in regard to lesser crimes and misdemeanors. In view of this, no humane and just man can deny the immediate necessity of putting them under the restraint and protection of a code of laws. This code should be administered by a judge appointed by the President, for they are not sufficiently advanced to appreciate the jury system.

The next step is to do away with the ration system, and make the Indian self-supporting. The practice of issuing rations, though seemingly charitable and humane, is in the end demoralizing and degrading to the last degree. To be self-supporting under the conditions of our civilization, he must be a farmer. To be a farmer, he must have land; and to feel any security in the permanence of his condition, or any hearty interest in his work, the land must belong to him. To this it may be objected that he is not sufficiently advanced to have land in severalty. This is true. But if we wait for him to advance by nature’s slow process from the condition of the huntsman to that of the husband-man, he will be exterminated long before he is ready for his land. In looking to the ultimate settlement of the Indian question, it is practically useless to set aside a reservation for a tribe. Such acts are merely temporary. We know, and the Indian knows, that the government has been, and probably will continue to be, powerless to insure any tribe in the peaceful possession of a reservation after white settlers have once determined to take it for farms. But if the titles were in severalty, instead of tribal, as now, and could not be conveyed within the period of ninety-nine years, it is possible that each Indian might then be able to hold enough land on which to earn his living.

Look at the history of the Delawares, at peace with us since Braddock’s defeat, in 1755, many of them our allies in the Revolution. Yet they have been pushed across the country from Pittsburgh to the Indian Territory, and in their retreat have had five separate reservations “solemnly secured to them forever.”

Many of the Indians at San Carlos are anxious to become independent by farming. But to raise anything on their land, irrigating ditches are necessary; and to construct an irrigating ditch requires much labor and some slight knowledge of engineering. An officer, who once acted as agent for a short time, told me a pathetic story of a tribe—I think the Chiracalmas—who have furnished so many murders of late. They went to work, under a medicine man as engineer, to make a ditch to irrigate some land upon which to raise corn and vegetables. They worked hard for several weeks, but when their work was done the water did not flow into the head of their ditch by three feet. Their engineer’s calculations were at fault, and their labor was lost. It is probable that their disappointment at the failure of their laudable endeavor resulted in several raids on neighboring ranches. If the government gives these Indians land, and encourages farming, it should also construct the irrigating ditches for them. The saving in rations would in a short time more than pay for the ditches.

So much for the peaceable Indian with his laws and his lands.

Now for a method of dealing with the bad Indians.

The code which I contemplate would punish major crimes—murder, rape, arson—with death, and lesser offenses with fine and imprisonment. Leaving the limits of the reservation would for a long time have to be regarded as a serious misdemeanor. The public safety in the West imperatively demands this restriction, at least in regard to the Apaches. To make the system practicable, it would be well to introduce a feature of the French law. In France, in all prosecutions for offenses except those punishable with death or imprisonment for life, it is not necessary that the offender he present at his trial. He is indicted and notified that on a certain day he will be tried for a certain offense. If he sees fit to flee the country, the trial proceeds without him. The witnesses are called and testify, the case is thoroughly investigated, and finally the sentence is duly pronounced and recorded. This may strike the American mind very unfavorably; yet if France, one of the foremost civilized nations, adopts this method of procedure in her courts, we may certainly afford to use it, at least for a time, in enforcing the laws with our criminal Indians. The judge must have ample powers to employ posses to enforce the sentences of his court; otherwise, the law will promptly fall into contempt. There is nothing which seems more despicable to the Indian than weakness or failure in any endeavor.

The law thus equipped is ready to deal with offending Apaches. When an Indian has been tried and convicted, if he is not present to receive his sentence, the judge should have authority to send in pursuit of him several posses from tribes other than that of the criminal. In cases where the sentence is death, they will be authorized to deliver the culprit dead or alive at the agency. In other cases, he must be brought in alive, and no undue severity used in his arrest. It will be left to the discretion of the judge to determine in what extreme cases to employ the expedient of trial in the absence of the prisoner. The posse, consisting of five or six Indians, who capture the absconding criminal should be paid one thousand dollars. This would be about a just remuneration. Some statistician has worked out the problem, and asserts that every Indian killed on the war-path, with our present methods, costs the government $100,000, not counting the lives of citizens and soldiers constantly lost. If these figures are correct, here is a murderer brought to justice, society avenged, and the law vindicated at a saving to the government of $99,000.

It may be claimed that this is an autocratic measure. In some respects it is, when regarded by the Anglo-Saxon mind, resting its ideas of legal procedure and personal privilege on Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. But it must be remembered that our wild Indians are to-day distant at least a thousand years from even the threshold of these great ideas of civil organization and personal liberty. It is the height of folly to attempt to apply our riper institutions to his crude morality. If we give him a code, we must shape it to fit his requirements.

This solution of the problem makes the Indian a person before the law, which at present he is not, any more than is the buffalo or the wolf. It gives him a code to protect and restrain him. It gives him land and a home, and makes it possible for him to become the independent, self-supporting, productive, and useful rear-guard of our civilization.