The Epic of the Indian

I

‘THE Census Office is of the opinion that the present enumeration will be the last one to be taken of the Indians in their present status. It is believed that before the time arrives for making the next count of the count ry’s inhabitants a very large percentage of those now holding tribal relations will have become citizens, and will no longer be regarded as Indians, except in a racial or historical sense.’

These are the words of the Honorable E. Dana Durand, Director of the Census, in a note to the writer of this article. This means that before 1920 practically all of the tribal organizations will have dissolved, except in so far as some of them may be continued for social or historical purposes; communal holdings of property will have given way to individual ownership, and the red men will have merged themselves into the mass of the country’s voting population. In the march from savagery to citizenship the Indian has traveled a long road, with many windings and turnings, and with many halts by the way; but at last the end seems to be in sight. Let us glance over the course, learn something of the men who traversed it, and get a glimpse of some of its principal landmarks.

‘In order to win the friendship of that people ... I presented some of them with red caps and some strings of glass beads, which they placed around their necks, and with other trifles of insignificant worth which delighted them, and by which we got a wonderful hold on their affections. They afterward came to the boats of the vessels swimming, bringing us parrots, cotton thread in balls, and spears, and many other things, which they bartered for others we gave them, as glass beads and little bells. Finally they received everything and gave whatever they had with good-will.’

This is an entry in Columbus’s journal describing the natives of that member of the Bahama group on which he made his first landing in the New World. We call it Wat lings Island. As he was looking for Asia, and supposed the island to be an outpost of the East Indies, he called the natives Indians, a name which was afterward extended to all the original denizens of the Western Hemisphere.

But the aborigines who were met by the first white men to reach the mainland of the present United States — all of whom belonged to the country under whose flag Columbus sailed — were of a more robust breed, morally as well as physically, than were those who greeted the Great Admiral at the New World’s gateway. Kind and generous at the outset, but ready to strike back when ill-treated, were the Indians who were encountered by Ponce do Leon, when he sailed northward from our present Porto Rico, in 1513, landed at a point near St. Augustine, and called the country Florida, on account of its abundant vegetation. He died a few years later from the effects of a wound dealt by one of his red assailants. Like characteristics marked those met by Narvaez, who entered Florida in 1527 at the head of a large expedition, and was drowned near the mouth of the Mississippi; a few of his men, after wandering as captives throughout Louisiana and Texas, and braving many hardships and perils, reaching Culiacan, on the west coast of Mexico, in 1536.

De Soto, who began, in 1539, to traverse the country from Florida to Arkansas and Missouri, with a great army, witnesses to these same traits. He was buried at midnight in the Mississippi, so as to keep his body out of the hands of his red foes; and his followers, reduced to a mere remnant, fled down the Mississippi, pursued for many miles by his enemies in canoes and on land, reaching safet y in Panuco, Mexico, in 1543. And Coronado and his soldiers, in their foray between 1540 and 1542, which carried them from the Gulf of California up to within sight of the Missouri River in Kansas, give us a similar picture of the red man. De Soto and Coronado were here two thirds of a century before the advent of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent settlement of Englishspeaking people on the American continent, and antedated by two years Champlain’s arrival at Quebec with the earliest French colony on this side of the Atlantic, which persisted.

Why was it that the Spaniards were the first white men with whom the American aborigines on the Atlantic seaboard and the Pacific slope came in contact? Because in the sixteenth century Spain had a little of the preeminence among the nations of the world which belonged to Rome in the third and fourth. Those were the spacious times of Charles V. The Isthmus of Panama, across which the United States government is building its inter-oceanic waterway, was discovered and penetrated in 1513 by

But it was Balboa, another Spaniard, and not Cortez, who was there. Keats was writing poetry, not history. Under Magellan, in 1519, a Spanish fleet passed through the straits since called by his name at the lower end of South America, entered the Pacific, and touched at the Philippines, where Magellan was killed in a conflict with the natives. By way of the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, a part of his followers reached their starting-point. They were the first to sail round the globe. Those were days when Spain blazed paths for the nations across the world’s seas.

England and France attempted to plant colonies in North America in the sixteenth century: the English under Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Walter Raleigh, and the French under Cartier and others; but all their projects failed. Spain had the continent to herself until England appeared at Jamestown in 1607, France at Quebec in 1608, Holland on Manhattan Island in 1613, and Sweden on the Delaware in 1638. The settlements of the Swedes were captured by the Dutch in 1655, and the Dutch colonies were absorbed by the English in 1664. Thus, early in the European occupation of spots on this continent, the Indians came in contact with five distinct families of the white race.

II

And what a diversity of names, and in some cases of traits and customs, was possessed by the tribes or clans whom the first, whites encountered in the territory of the present United States! There were the Wampanoags, Pequots, and Narragansetts in New England and the Middle States; the Powhatans in Virginia; the Creeks in Georgia; the Seminoles in Florida; the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Natchez along the Gulf coast for a few hundred miles inland; the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajoes in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; with the Missouris, Pawnees, Osages, Sioux, Crows, Winnebagoes, Chippewas, and Blackfeet,farther to the north and northwest. And far more formidable, both as friends and as enemies, than any of those tribes, were the Iroquois, or Five Nations (the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas), who occupied the whole of northern New York, from Lake Champlain to Lake Erie. We need not wonder that the numbers of the aborigines were placed far too high by the earlier writers. Here are some of the reasons therefor: —

The first hunters, explorers, missionaries, and traders journeyed by way of the sea-coast, the rivers, and the lakes, along which the Indians were most numerous.

In their incursions into the interior of the country the whites attracted the Indians through curiosity, and thought they were equally numerous elsewhere; but vast stretches of forest and prairie were absolutely untenanted, except for short times each year when visited by hunting-parties.

During the year, war and the chase often took the same bands of Indians to several points far removed from each other. The whites thought these were different tribes.

Many tribes were called by different names by the Spaniards, the English, and the French, and among some tribes the names varied at different places and times.

The area needed to support a person by hunting, supplemented by the crude cultivation of the soil, was many times as great as would be required under modern agricultural and industrial conditions.

Obviously the estimates of fifteen or twenty millions for the Indians living three or four centuries ago in the territory comprised in the present United States were far too large. While war, hunger, and the perils of the chase undoubtedly brought the mortality among the red men to a high figure, it seems safe to say that less than one million were here when Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere. The present number is less than a third of that figure, and the absence of war and the advent of improved hygienic conditions are bringing a steady increase among them. Nevertheless, they were numerous and courageous enough to have made it exceedingly difficult, had they so desired, for t he whites to obtain a foothold on this continent. In most cases, however, in the beginning, they lent the whites a helping hand.

With all their boasted superiority in civilization and adaptability to alien and changing conditions, how helpless the whites must have seemed to the aborigines! They were few in numbers and feeble in equipment and supplies. Especially to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, on their arrival at the beginning of a long and severe winter, the outlook was to the last degree hostile. Corn was native to America. Without it early settlers could hardly have maintained themselves. The Indians furnished Raleigh’s colonists at Roanoke with corn, also with fish and fruits. Their short career would have been shorter had not the red men gone to their rescue and warded off starvation.

Not only did the Powhatans supply Captain John Smith and his Jamestown associates with corn, but they showed them how to cultivate it. Under the Indian supervision forty acres of it were planted, and famine was averted. The Narragansetts rendered a like service to Bradford and his Plymouth brethren, and with rude nets caught alewives for them with which to fertilize the ground. In the densely wooded regions, where it was impossible to make clearings in time to raise a crop, the red men taught the whites how to girdle the trees with fire, thus killing the foliage and letting in the sunshine. They showed the settlers how to dry corn so as to utilize it on long journeys, thus removing a serious obstacle to travel in the wilderness.

The early English, Dutch, and French visitors to this continent marveled at the serviceableness of the canoes, some of which were large enough to hold a dozen men, and light enough to be carried on the shoulders of two or three at the portages between different watercourses, or in going around rapids. The Indians told the white men how to make them. The snow-shoes by which the Indians traversed great distances, and without which, for months at a time each year, hunting or travel would have been impossible, were a revelation to the whites, but they were taught how to make and use them. Years before the heliograph was invented white men saw the Indians of the plains, — Sioux, Pawnees, Apaches, and others, —first by some crude surface and afterward by pieces of looking-glass, send signal flashes many miles.

All these things the Indians did for the whites. They did more. By keeping their treaty promises they showed an example to their new neighbors which, unhappily, the latter often forgot. They were in the Stone Age of development when first met, but they adapted themselves to their new environment with much skill; indeed, the whites in their own Stone Age were not more adaptive than these red men.

Cupidity and a desire to enlist them as allies against other white or red men induced Spaniards, English, Dutch, and French to sell firearms to the Indians, and in their use they soon became as proficient as the whites. The horses introduced by Cortez in Mexico, by Coronado in California and other parts of the Southwest, and by De Soto and others in the southern end of the Mississippi Valley, were the progenitors of the vast droves of mustangs which were seen by hunters, trappers, and explorers in the Far West a century ago and later, and from which many of the domestic animals descended. In utilizing them the Indians, especially the Comanches, Apaches, Pawnees, Sioux, and Blackfeet, quickly surpassed the Spaniards.

In the wars which reddened the annals of the frontier in our march from the Connecticut and the James to the Columbia and the Sacramento, the Indians proved themselves to be far more effective fighters than any other members of the ‘inferior races’ encountered by white men elsewhere in the world. By a significant circumstance, the red men of the territory comprised in the present United States were much more capable warriors than were those in Canada, Mexico, or South America. And by their wars the Indians rendered a better service to the whites than they intended, and than the whites dreamed. The British colonists were thereby prevented from scattering through the wilderness as the French had done in Canada and the Spaniards in Mexico; they were compelled to frame the machinery of self-government, they imbibed a military spirit which enabled them to aid in defeating the French in Canada when the struggle between the two countries came, and thus a desire for independence was aroused which asserted itself against England as soon as the French were driven out. Many of the followers of Putnam, Prescott, and Stark, who held Bunker Hill against Gage’s veterans, were the descendants of the men who fought Metacomet and Canonchet. Campbell, Shelby, Sevier, and the rest of the Carolinians, Georgians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians, when at King’s Mountain they were crushing Cornwallis’s fierce fighters under Ferguson, were applying the lessons which they had learned in battling with Creeks, Cherokees, and Shawnees.

III

‘The Empire State, as you love to call it,’ said Peter Wilson, a Cayuga chief, at a meeting of the New York Historical Society in 1847, ‘was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo. Your roads still traverse the same lines of communication which bound one part of the Long House to the other. Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history? Glad were your fathers to sit down upon the threshold of the Long House. Had our fathers spurned you from it when the French were thundering at the opposite gate to get a passage through and drive you into the sea, whatever has been the fate of other Indians, the Iroquois might still have been a nation, and I, instead of pleading here for the privilege of living within your borders — might still have a country.’

This was no vain boast. The confederation for which the Cayuga chief spoke had a vast influence in shaping the affairs of that part of the continent comprised in the present United States. The service of the Iroquois to the Anglo-Saxon race began when Champlain, the Governor of Canada, as an ally of the Hurons and Ottawas, defeated the Mohawks, in 1609, on the banks of the lake which has since then borne his name. This turned the confederation to the side of the Dutch and the English, the successive occupants of New York, and prevented the French from getting control of the valleys of the Mohawk and the Hudson, from cutting the then feeble English settlements in two, and from capturing each section, the New England and the Southern, in detail.

For generations the Iroq uois held the upper waters of the Mohawk, Delaware, and Susquehanna. They shut the French out of the Ohio Valley for a century, giving the English on the Atlantic an opportunity to strengthen themselves there and build up settlements which contained several times as many inhabitants as the French colonies in Canada and on the lower Mississippi. And when, at last, they began to permit some of the French to enter the coveted region and make a fight for control of the Forks of the Ohio, the English had gained sufficient power to battle valiantly against them, and at last to drive them out.

Wit h home rule for each tribe, and with a central council composed of delegates from all of them, the Five Nations had a federal scheme centuries before the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 framed one for the United States. Centuries before the formation of the triple alliance of Germany, AustriaHungary, and Italy, the Iroquois had a quintuple alliance, which was made sextuple in 1715, when the Tuscaroras entered the league. Before Geneva conferences or Hague courts were ever dreamed of, these tribes settled disputes between themselves amicably. At the time of the advent of the whites on this continent the Iroquois, as overlords of the tribes extending from Lake Champlain to the Mississippi, and from the great lakes to the Savannah, ruled over a larger empire than Rome in the days of Trajan.

Through the whole wilderness of North America the Indians blazed paths for the whites. They led Chainplain and his associates through the Canadian forests and along its rivers and lakes; piloted Joliet and Marquette down the Wisconsin into the Mississippi, and along the latter to the mouth of the Arkansas; and guided La Salle by way of the Illinois and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, at which point that explorer ‘took possession ’ of all the lands drained by that river and its tributaries for Louis XIV. Not only did the course of empire through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio lie along the red men’s trails, but Boone, Harrod, Sevier, Robertson, and the rest of the pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee followed paths laid out by the aborigines. A Shoshone girl, Sacajawea, led Lewis and Clark over the Rocky Mountains and through the perils beyond, and saved their expedition from disaster, a service which was commemorated by a statue to her at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, and by memorials in Portland, Oregon, and other places in the Trans-Mississippi region.

Moreover, the Indian’s social importance long ago projected itself into politics. At the bidding of the East, Monroe and every other President onward, to and including Tyler, had a hand in an endeavor to create a great preserve for the red men along the western border of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa, which would have closed the overland route to Oregon to settlers, and thus have given England a free hand in her effort to gain undisputed possession of all the region west of the Rocky Mountains and north of Mexico’s territory of New Mexico and California. Thus the United States would have been shut out of the locality comprised in the present states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and part of the western border of Montana and Wyoming.

Stephen A. Douglas told this to his Boswell, James Madison Cutts, in 1854. This, indeed, was a manifestation of the Eastern states’ old jealousy of the growth of the West, which was first voiced in a conspicuous way by Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts in the House of Representatives in 1811, when he opposed the creation of the State of Louisiana, and when he said that he heard that six states would, at some time in the future, be established west of the Mississippi, and that the mouth of the Ohio would be east of the geographical centre of the contemplated empire. Douglas said that he halted this conspiracy by his bill for the organization of the territory of Nebraska, first introduced in Congress by him in 1844, in the latter part of Tyler’s presidency, and kept by him constantly at the front until it passed ten years later. As enacted in 1854, however, it provided for two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, instead of one.

Thus the Indian innocently had a hand in inciting one of the most fateful measures ever passed by Congress. By repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave slavery an equal opportunity with freedom to gain possession of a region from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri adjustment. At this breach of a compact which was intended by its framers to be permanent, a wave of indignation and alarm swept through the free states, which split the Whig party on Mason and Dixon’s Line, and sent most of the friends of freedom — a majority of the Northern Whigs, many of the antislavery Democrats, nearly all the Northern Know-Nothings, and all the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers—into the coalition which became the Republican party. The triumph of that party in 1860 sent eleven Southern states into secession, and precipitated the Civil War, which destroyed slavery and, incidentally, thrust upon the country race-issues which embarrass us to this day.

IV

Moreover, in the country’s social and political life of to-day the red man is a factor of some importance. Exclusive of those in Alaska, there were 243,534 Indians in the United States in 1890, 270,544 in 1900, and 304,950 in 1910. These figures are furnished by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and, except for 1900, are larger than those given out by the Director of the Census. The figures given here are those of the Census Bureau, supplemented by enumerations made by representatives of the Indian Office. According to the count made by the Indian Office the number of Indians in the country at the end of 1911 was 323,783, distributed as follows: —

Contrary to the popular notion, the Indian race is not dying out, though part of the gain shown here, especially that of 1911 over 1910, is probably due to the more complete and accurate enumeration made in recent years. The full-bloods are diminishing, but the mixed breeds are increasing rapidly. Nor have all the Indians abandoned the Atlantic seaboard. Maine and other states give a few hundred to New England; the 6,046 in New York, principally remnants of the Iroquois, represent the large number of these, and of the Algonquins, who once occupied the region covered by the old Middle States; while North Carolina has more than two thirds of those left in the South. Nine tenths of all the Indians are west of the Mississippi, Oklahoma holding more of them than any other community. Of the 117,247 in that State, 101,287 belong to the Five Civilized Tribes. These include, however, 23,345 freedmen, the slaves of the era preceding the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment , and their descendants, and 2,582 whites who have married into the tribes. These 101,287 distribute themselves as follows: — Cherokees, 41,701; Choctaws, 26,762; Creeks, 18,717; Chickasaws, 10,984; Seminoles, 3,123.

As used here, the term ‘civilized’ means precisely what it professes to mean. For two generations preceding 1907, when they became merged in the general mass of the country’s citizenship, each of these tribes had its own legislature, executive and judiciary, and governed itself wth comparatively little interference from Washington. Its members had farms, mines, mills, mercantile houses, schools, churches, and banks, and engaged in most of the employments in vogue in the white communities of their region. These tribes occupied, and still occupy, that part of the present State of Oklahoma which was formerly called the Indian Territory.

Some advances in their social status have also been made by more than half of the remaining 203,000 Indians. Over 25,000 of their children attend the government, missionary, and contract schools. To its wards the government is a liberal and considerate guardian. In recent times its appropriations for Indian schools have averaged nearly $4,000,000 annually. For various purposes Uncle Sam’s expenditures on Indian account, from Washington’s inauguration in 1789 to the middle of President Taft’s term in 1911, aggregated $520,000,000.

Much of the education which the Indian pupils receive in the government schools is practical, comprising farming, fruitand stock-raising and the elemental trades for the boys, and cooking, sewing, nursing, and laundering for the girls. Especial attention is given to agriculture. Experts are employed on the reservations to teach the most approved methods of cultivation of the soil, and experiment farms have been established to discover the crops which can be raised most advantageously in the various localities. To stimulate the interest of the pupils, old and young, they are encouraged to hold agricultural fairs, where live stock and produce are exhibited.

Hundreds of Indians are working on the government’s irrigation schemes. Railroads are offering employment to boys who are learning trades, or who show any inclination for mechanics. Coöperation between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and private corporations is enabling our wards to improve their economic condition, and to meet the demands of civilization. In many directions, opportunity stretches out its hands to the red man and starts him on the road toward social independence.

The progress of the Indian in the past quarter-century, especially since the enactment of the Dawes Severalty Law in 1887, which gave individual ownership of lands to such of them as sought it, and were prepared for it, who thereby virtually became citizens, has been greater than any other people ever made in the same length of time in the world’s history. v

‘My people want to live as in the days that are gone, before the palefaces took from us the lands that were ours. We don’t want schools or schoolteachers. We want to be let alone to live as we wish, to roam free without the white man always being there to tell us what we must do and what we will not be allowed to do.’

It was the plaint of an aged Hopi chief from the reservation of his tribe in far-off Arizona, uttered in the White House, inveighing against the new order which the white man brought. It was a plea for the resurrection of the dead past — of a past which began to die before this old sachem had reached middle life, and which would be infinitely more difficult to revive than it would be to bring back the vast herds of buffalo which stretched across the landscape from the Missouri to the Sacramento and from the Red River of Arkansas to the Red River of the North, in the days when the old chief was young.

Except in a few spots, the blanket Indian has vanished. He is almost as rare a sight to-day in Muskogee or Vinita as he would be in Albany or Hartford. In proportion to the number of inhabitants there are very nearly as many pianos and automobiles in the towns of the old Cherokee nation in the present State of Oklahoma as there are in those of Vermont or Delaware. The only Indians who are in the old, free, nomadic condition which the Hopi warrior would restore are about two hundred Seminoles in the Florida Everglades and the big cypress morass. These Indians are as independent of the white man, and almost as isolated from him, as were their forefathers when Ponce de Leon and De Soto landed in their neighborhood. They are neither citizens nor wards of the United States, nor do they hold any relation to their old associates who were transferred by the government to the west side of the Mississippi two thirds of a century ago, and who became one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the present State of Oklahoma.

A better representative of the red men of to-day than is the old Hopi chief is the grandson of Sitting Bull, — the Sitting Bull who assisted in the slaying of Custer and his three hundred, - who tells his brethren that their need is ‘more religion and less fire-water.’ He is a product of the government’s schools, such as Carlisle and Haskell, which bring members of many tribes together, and place them in association with whites, compelling them to look beyond their reservations and their clans, and holding out to them the goal of citizenship.

For reasons which may be easily guessed, the Indian fits well into the new order. On the whole, reputable fiction and the drama have treated him with tolerable fairness. They have never made him an object of derision, as they have representatives of other ethnic types, including the Caucasian. Always fearless, generally dignified, sometimes vindictive, as he is portrayed in books and on the stage, he is never made contemptible. Unlike the Negro, he is never subservient or obsequious. Assailed as he was until recent times by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he has always successfully resisted the thraldom which overwhelmed white men for many centuries in earlier ages and in other countries, and which held the blacks in servitude in our land within the recollection of millions of men still living. He has never been a slave. In his contact with the whites in our time he arouses no prejudice. The superior race which refuses to associate on terms of equality with men of black, brown, or yellow skins, raises no social barrier against the red man.

The average Indian is under no necessity of asking concessions from his Caucasian associates or rivals in the ordinary pursuits. ‘Big Chief’ Bender of the Philadelphia Athletics, wearers of the blue ribbon of the baseball arena; Meyer, the Seneca catcher of the New York ‘Giants,’ Thorpe, Burd, Arcase, and others of the Carlisle football team, are at the head of their respective professions. They have beaten hosts of whites at the white man’s games. Harvard’s football team, composed of a race which has millions to draw upon, was one of the great white schools which, in the season of 1911, went down before the Carlisle players, whose recruiting field is narrow in comparison. In the Olympic games at Stockholm, in July, 1912, Thorpe and Sockalexis carried off prizes in competition with the best men in their particular field whom Europe and America could muster. As the winner of the pentathlon and the decathlon, Thorpe was acclaimed the greatest of the world’s all-round athletes.

Probably these triumphs would not bring much pride to the Hopi chief just mentioned. Nor would he have been especially pleased at a recent scene at the Ohio state capital in which his race figured. There, on the anniversary of the discovery of America, October 12, 1911, in a city named for the discoverer, gathered representatives, women as well as men, of a hundred tribes of the people upon whom Columbus’s geographical mistake fastened the designation of Indians. They met to form the American Indian Association. Appropriately, too, their meetingplace was the campus of the Ohio State University, for most of them, of both sexes, were graduates of government schools of the higher education or of white institutions of learning. Among them were lawyers, physicians, journalists, bankers, educators, merchants, clergymen, agriculturists, and participants in almost all the other important activities. They met to form the American Indian Association, the purpose of which is to advance the interests of the race and, while aiming to preserve its best distinctive traits, to bring it into harmony with its new environment, and fit it for the rôle it will have to play in American citizenship. Appropriately, too, the Governor of Ohio, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and other public officers, took part in the exercises.

Two months later, this time in Washington, D. C., there was a similar assemblage, for the same general objects, with the added purpose of bringing the red men into political association. Delegates of both sexes were there, representing thirty-four tribes, scattered through more than a dozen states, and they formed the Brotherhood of North American Indians. After a lapse of centuries, descendants of the race which established the Federation of the Iroquois, will part icipate as voters in another federal scheme. This time they are to be partners of their former enemies, to be on terms of equality with them, and to work for similar objects. United, with their new weapon, the ballot, the Indians could hold the balance in elections in Oklahoma, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Probably fifty thousand Indian ballots were cast for president in 1912.

The Indian is entering politics. He has already entered. Since 1907 he has cast thousands of votes in every election in Oklahoma. Members of the race are in the legislature of that state, and also in Congress. The latter include Senator Robert L. Owen and Representative Charles D. Carter of Oklahoma, the former of Cherokee blood and the latter Chickasaw; and Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, one of whose recent ancestors belonged to the Kaw tribe.

At the summit of an ancient burialmound in the township of Otsego, New York, is a marble slab on which is written: —

But the red man is taking his revenge. At home and abroad, in romance and drama, he is held to be the distinctive American. He is the one man among us who is not called upon to place a hyphen in his title. To-day, as in the past, and in many tongues, The Last of the Mohicans and the rest of Cooper’s forest tales are read. Puccini, DeMille, Hartley, Nevin, Mary Hunter Austin, and the rest of the writers of operas and plays who aim to extract the flavor of our soil, are compelled to call upon him. The Girl of the Golden West, Poia, Strongheart, The ArrowMaker, and other productions which deal with him, are presented on the stage of two continents. He is the asset which saves the country from the imputation of vulgar newness. Even if we attempted to, we could not rid ourselves of him. As the world appraises us, the Indian is the dominant feature of American artistic life, an inseparable adjunct in its histrionic properties, the Niagara of America’s æsthetic landscape.