University of Virginia Library

The Indian Territory.*
By the Hon. Henry L. Dawes, LL.D.
FORMERLY UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS, AND CHAIRMAN OF THE DAWES COMMISSION FOR THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES
*This paper was read at the Lake Mohonk Indian Conference.— EDITOR.

IN order to understand the purpose for which the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes was created, and the present condition of their work, it will be necessary to refresh our memories as to the conditions which caused its appointment. So much of the past of these tribes as is essential for this purpose is briefly this. These tribes are the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles, numbering about 64,000 at the last census. Seventy years ago they were living on their own lands in Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi, and to induce them to surrender these lands to the white men of the States where they were situated, the United States gave them in exchange the Indian Territory. In the treaties made with them we conveyed the title to the lands directly to the tribes for the use of the people of the tribes to hold as long as they maintained their tribal organizations and occupied them. This stipulation prevented their parting with them without the consent of the United States. We stipulated in these treaties that they should have the right to establish their own governments without our interference, such governments as they pleased, not in conflict with the constitution of the United States. We also covenanted with them that we would keep all the white people out of their territory. Having thus set them up for themselves in a territory far west of any of the States, beyond all further trouble, as it was thought, we left them to do as they pleased for forty years.

During that time they set up governments after the pattern of our own, at least on paper, with a chief magistrate chosen for a fixed term, a legislative council and courts. They were more advanced in civilization than any other Indians in the country, tho hardly enough so to justify the name by which they have been distinguished from the rest of the race. The expectation upon which these transactions were based was that they were sufficiently civilized, so that thus isolated they would go on under the influence of our example to the attainment of our own civilization and our Government in all essential characteristics. This expectation was far from being realized, for during that time they had made little if any progress. They

had become slaveholders and thereby made all labor of the master disreputable, and idleness worked its natural results. A few grew rich while the less intelligent many in consequence grew poor. Their governments in all departments fell under control of these same few, who used them for their own gain, and their children every year, for lack of training and proper education, fell back of their parents in all the qualities essential to progress in civilization.

At the breaking out of the Civil War they had made but little, if any, progress, and in many respects their condition was less hopeful than in the beginning. They cast in their fortunes with the Confederates during the war, and were the victims of spoliation to a terrible degree by the armies of both sides. At its end they were well nigh beggars, stripped of everything valuable and wretchedly helpless. We then entered into new treaties with them with some modifications of the old ones, not changing, however, the nature of their title to their lands. Slavery in the Territory was abolished by these treaties and the tribes stipulated to receive their freedmen into perfect equality of citizenship, with the right to an allotment of a specific number of acres of their land whenever their lands were allotted.

On this new basis they began anew in 1866, but under conditions and amid environments still less favorable to any development of well ordered governments. They were no longer isolated from outside influences. States, as well as these Indians, had moved westward and were pressing upon their very borders. Their lands had become valuable by the discovery of vast deposits of coal and other material. Cotton fields of great extent and promise were developing, and vast areas of grazing lands were tempting the herdsmen of Texas. In the new treaties they had consented to the building of a railroad from north to south across their Territory, and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas road was built through its entire length from the north to its southern boundary, bringing in its train white employees at every station, and with them all necessary supplies, breaking down beyond repair all treaty obligation to exclude white occupation. Besides all this, white labor had taken the place of slave labor. In short, more than three hundred thousand white non-citizens had under various conditions taken up permanent residence in the Territory. These people had no legal status or right among them. Some were there on invitation, some had come as hired laborers, and some were there on sufferance. They had come to stay, and the obligation of the treaty to keep them out had become a dead letter. Yet these three hundred thousand had no title to a foot of land, had no voice in the government under which they lived, and no protection from its officials or laws, were excluded from its courts and their children from its schools. They built towns on land to which they had no other title than a permit of no legal value, for which they paid tribute to some irresponsible holder, and governed them as best they could. Thirty thousand white children of school age were being left without any other provision for education than such as could be afforded from the scanty earnings of the pioneer. Then came a worse evil into their midst. The Territory became a refuge for fugitives from the justice of neighboring States. Warrants of arrest could not follow them across the line, and no provision of the constitution or of law required their extradition.

It is not necessary to enlarge upon the deplorable condition into which these elements were sure to plunge the Territory, from which its government, such as it was, in the hands of comparatively a handful of the population, could have no power to relieve it. And we had bound ourselves to stand aloof and not interfere, whatever might take place. That such a government should exist in the midst of the States of the Union independent of us, yet under the same flag, was an impossible anomaly of itself. It also contained elements of discord which under any circumstances made the maintenance of peace and orderly government within its own borders for any length of time next to impossible. It had become peopled by two races in which the one owning the soil and having control of all the functions of government was to the other race as less than one to three, making certain sooner or later an outbreak for relief, violent and bloody, like all other conflicts of races for power.

Under these conditions it was that in

1893 the Government felt compelled to undertake the removal of this menace to its own peace as well as to that of the Territory itself, by an effort to induce these anomalous governments with their communal land titles to exchange them for political institutions and land tenure in harmony with our own. The task was to obtain their consent to so great and radical a change, for all these conditions were titles vested and guaranteed by treaty, which could not be changed without their consent. It was for this purpose that the Commission was created in 1893, and for which it is still engaged.

The first task before the Commission, and that which has proved the most difficult, was obtaining agreements with them that any change at all should be made. In addition to the traditional pertinacity with which the race clings to its own customs and ways it encountered adverse interests and business investments that had grown up and been fostered under existing governments, as well as distrust so natural and constant in all negotiations with Indians and the difficulty of comprehension of the full meaning of the proposed change. A recital of details would not be profitable. Suffice it to say that after repeated failures and after repeated rejections of agreements signed, sometimes by the tribes and sometimes by Congress, agreements have finally been signed and ratified with the Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles, providing for the allotment of all their lands, except such as are reserved for town sites and public uses, among such persons as shall finally be found by the Commission to be citizens, the substitution of United States laws and courts for those heretofore in force in these tribes, the expenditure of their revenues by United States officers, and the supervision of their schools by officials appointed in Washington. A time in the future is also fixed in each when the tribal governments shall give place altogether to governments territorial in character.

The Cherokees and Creeks declined to treat with the Commission at all for a long time, till the patience of Congress was exhausted and in 1898 a law was enacted requiring to be done substantially the same things in these tribes that had been agreed upon by the others, excepting the allotment of their land in fee, which could not be done without their consent. Instead the Commission was required to allot the use of the surface only. It was provided that any change in the provisions of this law might be effected by agreements duly ratified by both Congress and the tribes respectively. Accordingly agreements were entered into during the last winter with both these tribes substantially like those already effected with the others, but too late to be ratified before the adjournment of Congress. There is every reason to believe that they will be duly ratified at an early day. When that is done, there will be agreements with all the tribes for the changes desired, in substantial uniformity in all essentials and in harmony with the institutions and laws of the adjacent States.

These agreements require much work still to be done in carrying out their provisions. These agreements require the Commission to allot the lands of the tribes to citizen Indians alone and make it the judges of the question who are such Indians, subject to an appeal by aggrieved parties to the United States courts. They are required in so determining to strike from all existing citizenship rolls all names in their opinion wrongfully there, to add all names wrongfully excluded and to admit all new applicants entitled, in their opinion, to citizenship according to the laws and usages of the respective tribes. This requires of them a judicial determination on evidence offered on every name in the whole roll of citizens in all the five tribes, about which there is question, and on all new names of applicants. The impression got abroad that blood, however attenuated, without regard to the other requirements of the laws and usages of the tribes, entitled one to admission to citizenship. Accordingly crowds of applicants came from all the adjacent States, and even from Northwestern States, for the first time into the Territory, claiming citizenship upon some claim of Indian blood in their veins, regardless of residence and citizenship elsewhere all their lives.

The Commission was compelled to pass judicially upon more than 7,500 such claims embracing in classes and families, relying on the same facts, very

many thousand more up to the close of the last fiscal year. In the vast majority of these cases the evidence failed to disclose blood enough to sustain anything beyond imagination or pretence. Through all this maze and this labor the Commission has completed the roll of the Seminoles and nearly so of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, the much larger part of the Creeks, and are beginning the like work among the Cherokees. After this they are required to allot these lands to such only as appear on these rolls. But this is to be done in a manner quite different from that of the government on the reservations, where little more is required besides setting off a given number of acres of land of uniform quality to each Indian found on the agency roll in such part of the reservation as seems best to the allotting Commissioner. Such a method of allotting the Indian Territory in its present condition would be manifestly unjust. The construction of railroads through its length and breadth, the influx of 300,000 non-citizens building large and flourishing towns, and inaugurating business enterprises of great importance, and the discovery of coal deposits of great value, all these have contributed so to unsettle relative values that the greatest injustice would be inflicted if allotment were to be made by equality in acres. All citizens have an equal right in the value of their lands, and when allotted that equality must be preserved. Yet an allotment of fifty acres near a railroad station, or near the town of Ardmore or Muskogee, or in the neighborhood of a working coal mine, would be worth more than one of two or three hundred acres situated in some parts of the Territory. Therefore it is required that allotment shall be made by equality of value as near as possible, taking into consideration the fertility of the soil, location and all other elements of value, so that when completed each allottee will have his equal share in value without regard to the number of acres.

This just requirement has imposed upon the Commission the most difficult and perplexing of all its labors. It requires a personal knowledge of the conditions affecting the value of every acre of land in a Territory as large as the State of Indiana, if it is to be of any service in such an adjustment, and an instinct to distinguish between real and fancy values. This has been its endeavor in its efforts to discharge this important, but exceedingly difficult portion of their duty. They have completed that work also in the Seminole country, so that now all preliminaries to final allotment to the members of that tribe are completed. The final allotment there will be commenced at an early day. In the Creek and the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes good progress has been made in the same work, and its completion there also is near at hand. It will be undertaken in the Cherokee tribe as soon as the necessary force now engaged elsewhere can be liberated for that purpose. There is much other detail connected with this work which it would be neither interesting nor instructive to recount here. What has been described will enable the conference to form an estimate of the character and progress of the work.

That so much time has been spent by the Commission and such care taken in matters preliminary to final allotment has arisen from the belief that a just and wise system of land tenure is the basis upon which the superstructure of a prosperous State must ultimately arise, and the conviction that any misstep here would be attended with irreparable injury. It has, therefore, been the especial endeavor of the Commission that no mistake in these preliminaries which it could avoid should jeopardize success. It is now carrying on the work under conditions more favorable and encouraging than at any time heretofore. A great change has, since the beginning, come over the attitude toward them and their work of the people most affected by it. Distrust has disappeared and opposition ceased. In their place hearty co-operation of those influential in the control of affairs is helping to push on the work. Most able and earnest men are at the head of their respective governments, giving effective aid in securing a wise and speedy solution of the difficult problems before them. Within a few weeks past the chief magistrates of two of these tribes, the Chickasaws and Creeks, have delivered their annual messages to their respective Legislative Councils, treating largely, and in the most hopeful tone, of their future, and urging wise measures in view of the new

conditions confronting them. These messages would well become the Governors of the oldest of the States in the propriety and ability as well as temper and style in which they presented matters concerning the welfare of their people. The guidance of such men is full of promise that statehood in the near future is sure to come to a Territory so rich in all the elements of a healthy growth.