SIGN THIS AND GO AWAY: DEBATES SURROUNDING THE SETTLER COLONIAL PROJECT OF THE GENERAL ALLOTMENT ACT 1881-1906

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

HISTORY

AUGUST 2019

Eli K.M. Foster

Thesis Committee:

Noelani Arista, Chair

Fabio Lopez-Lazaro

David Hanlon

The Thesis of Eli K.M. Foster is approved:

______

Dr. Noelani M. Arista, Chair Date

______

Dr. Fabio Lopez Lazaro Date

______

Dr. David Hanlon Date

Acknowledgements

“It takes a village to raise a child.” This oft used proverb of unknown origin is appropriate for this historian. A group of dedicated scholars and storytellers assisted and guided me as I walked down this road. I must therefore thank all those that made my journey possible, and in some very tangible ways, smoothed that road upon which I walked. There are several outstanding historians at University of Hawai’i Manoa that have taught and counseled me. I am forever grateful to Dr. Noelani M. Arista for her unending support. As my Thesis chair and mentor, her encouragement, refusal to accept less than honest and indigenous minded storytelling and calling me on my occasional laziness inspired and uplifted me. My gratitude to Dr. Fabio

Lopez Lazaro goes far beyond appreciating his requirement of me to create accurate analysis or his modeling of the intellectual historian. He led me to many historical works that I may never have considered to be relevant to my work which have proved invaluable. Dr. David Hanlon not only provided inestimable insights and revisions to my historization in a general sense, but also insights into doing ethnographic history I’ve found to be quite illuminating. Dr. Matthew Lauzon was always willing to help and listen to anything I had to say. His guidance and encouragement, on and off campus will not be forgotten. For all that these gracious and committed professionals have done for me I say Yakoke (Thank You). My classmates and other faculty and staff at UHM have made for an enjoyable and enlightening journey. The various points of view and the numerous discussions have been a great part of the learning process. To my wife Anna and my daughters, for understanding and giving me time to write, I say thanks. I also must thank JC

Thompson of the Mount Tabor Indian Community for his unending support, even when I was behind on tribal council duties while writing. I want to thank Ivonne Fitzgerald who helped me to re-learn the language of my youth. Muchas gracias por darme el poder del lenguaje. Lastly, I

i want to thank Nannie Thompson, my great grandmother, for never forgetting who you were and teaching it to your descendants. It is to her that I dedicate this work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...... i

Abstract ...... iv

Notes on Historiography ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

The Situation before Allotment ...... 10

The Congressional Debate of 1881 ...... 25

Why Allotment? ...... 46

The Congressional Debate of 1886 ...... 58

Who was American? ...... 77

The Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes ...... 91

Enrollment ...... 103

After Allotment ...... 116

Conclusions ...... 120

Source Notes and Bibliography ...... 126

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Abstract

This micro-history is an investigation of the debates about, work and results of the United

States General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly called the Dawes Act. The legislation, adopted by the 49th U.S. Congress, allowed for the executive to terminate Indian tribal land holdings and tribal governments. Lands thus disposed were to be allotted to individual Indian people, who would, by accepting allotment, also receive United States citizenship. The stated goals of the Act were to dissolve tribal governments, make lands available for white settlement, and to lift tribal citizens out of poverty by allotment of their lands in severalty and with fee simple title with the object of assimilating them into the larger fabric of American society. The legislation can be argued to have failed utterly in achieving these goals, thus requiring further legislation in the mid-twentieth century. The result of the Dawes Act was a fragmented and virtually un- assimilated Indian population and increased poverty for Indian people. The General Allotment

Act and the follow-on Curtis Act (1898) which extended the provisions of the Dawes act to include the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” were undertaken within the context of the demonstrable failure of the treaty and reservation system that preceded them in an effort to create a final solution to the “Indian Problem.” It has been argued that the stated goals of the Dawes

Act and its implementation were based upon Indian reticence and resistance to white settlement of their lands, Indian people’s social incompatibility with white Americans, and the property based political philosophy of the United States, as well as influences brought to bear by religious minded philanthropists of a decidedly paternalistic bent. This history fills a gap in current historicizing of the Act by assessing the sources of justification used by members of Congress while debating the object of land in severalty as a civilizing agent for indigenous peoples. What common factor allowed them to pass legislation that superficially at least, appeared to be a

iv complete reversal of existing Indian policy? The effects of the General Allotment Act have been historicized but the congressional debate about land in severalty is less well analyzed. Were congressional justifications based in U.S. Law or was their source extra-Constitutional?

Evidence shows that the Allotment Act of 1887 was not a new idea, but rather an extension of an old one. U.S. Indian policy had not evolved into one of tribal dismantling and allotment of land in severalty with the Dawes Act. Rather the settler colonial project of the United States, encoded in the country’s founding documents and expressed as an outward bound and “Manifest Destiny” brought pressure on the Congress of the United States to provide living space for the immigrant and native-born settlers of the project. With the passage of the Dawes Act the government tried, as they had on previous policy attempts, to achieve their primary goal, the disappearing of the

American Indian after nearly a half century of continuous attempts.

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Notes on Historiography

Historiography of the General Allotment Act falls into a few broad categories; the

Frontier thesis/benign solution narrative, the dispossession narrative and spatial control narratives. This categorization is by no mean intended as complete; transnational and world historiographies, world systems analysis, and Hegelian or Marxist viewpoints have made contributions to the overall study of American History. The benign solution narrative espoused by early historians is that while the Act was an objective failure [all narratives tend to agree on this point] it was none the less well intended. A dispossession narrative, while emotionally satisfying, can obscure the Indian in history; placing him out of time and space as an extinct and stereotypical exotic “other.” This narrative then is not well represented in this work. The late

Dennis Cosgrove’s spatial control hypothesis not only grants Indian agency within the context of that dispossession, it tends not to fetishize the Indian person and relieves the burden of thinking of space in cartesian terms but rather as a place as well as a concept, this idea is fundamental to analyzing the perceptions of settlers and the U.S. government with regards to Indian populations.1

American Historians have produced a Bunto (mound) of books and monographs on the

General Allotment and its effects. Early analysis and writings on allotment tend toward finding its place in the larger historical narrative of the United States and ask whether the policy was benign or oppressive. These analyses tend to fit the allotment into the larger debate on Federal

Indian Policy. This is understandable given the relative newness of the object as an historical phenomenon, the United States being less than three hundred years old. The first group of these

1 Dennis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft”, Spatial Turn in History Symposium, German Historical Institute, February 19th, 2004.

vi historians, which includes D.S. Otis, J.P. Kinney, and other early twentieth century advocates of

Frederick J. Turners “Frontier Thesis,” which created an understanding of the subject that held sway well into the twentieth century.2 These historians tend to shy away from judgement of the

Allotment itself; Otis wrote “Whatever the intrinsic merits or flaws of the allotment system, the

Government failed utterly at a crucial moment in its implementation” when discussing the failure of allotment in achieving its stated goals. This is certainly not surprising considering that Otis’s work was funded by the Government. Kinney and others used appropriations of Indian program funding to support a benevolent government theory on allotment as well. Turner’s Frontier

Thesis was, until recent times, rarely challenged, and such analysis stops short of assessing the effects of settlers’ presence and pressures on the government in anything more than a general sense.

Later, Francis Paul Prucha would pen more than twenty-five works on Indian Policy, many of which address the Allotment Act. A Catholic Priest and scholar noted for thorough scholarship, Purcha’s work falls squarely within the benign solution narrative as well, but with a bit of unease. Purcha’s lack of criticism of Government officials’ motivations is offset by a more nuanced version of the benign nature of the Allotment which allows the reader to see the damage done to indigenous peoples. The late William Unrau3, Emeritus Professor of Native American

History at Wichita State University, lends an archival hand, and Morris Wardell explores the politics of the Cherokee Nation in particular and Indian republics in a more general sense.4 Other takes on the use of archival material are represented by authors like Kate Eichhorn5 and Ann

2 D.S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the allotment of Indian Land, introduction. 3 William Unrau’s work centered around Native Americans and the effects of Federal Indian policy on them. 4 Morris Wardell, author of A Political History of the Cherokee Nation. 5 Kate Eichhorn's work explores the history of media technology and its impact on our lives. She is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School and author of several books.

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Laura Stoler6, the political realism and philosophy of Vine Deloria Jr.7 are present in this work.

The collection of primary documents used allows the voices of historical actors speak for themselves, and is represented here by collections from Wilcomb Washburn, 8 Kent Carter, 9

Frederick E. Hoxie, and J.C Thompson.10 Finally, historiography about the way in which nations and people identify the individual, the citizen, and the non-citizen is represented here by Dr.

Diego Acosta-Arcarazo in his analysis of citizenship laws and norms in Iberian controlled colonies, and what entails “belonging.”11

This work intends to be a spatial control narrative, with caveats. It is one in which the dispossession of the Indian is not denied; it is explicit in the form of a setter colonialist project.

To inoculate against fetishization and disappearing of the Indian, this history invites the reader into the life story of an Indian family effected by the Allotment Act and tries to maintain a first- person accounting wherein the words of the participants speak for themselves. This is also accomplished by numerous asides to the reader, breaking the fourth wall to remind the reader that Bad Indians are still alive and kicking. This variety of indigenous perspectives is expressed in the dry wit and humor of Vine Deloria, Mark Charles, and John Trudell.12

6 Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City and author of Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. 2009. 7 Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was a Native American author, theologian, historian, humorist, and activist. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969. 8 Wilcomb E. Washburn was an American historian with a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. He taught history at the College of William and Mary and acted as the chair for the Department of American Studies at the Smithsonian Institute. 9 Kent Carter, a historian, and the Regional Administrator of the National Archives-Southwest Region is located at Fort Worth TX. 10 Frederick E. Hoxie is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was formerly the Swanlund Professor of History, Law, and American Indian Studies. He has served as a consultant both to Indian tribes and government agencies 11 Diego Acosta-Arcazaro is Professor of European and Migration Law at the University of Bristol.

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“Well, that’s a very good platitude. But where are you going to bring them into the mainstream in American life?” — Vine Deloria Jr. 1967 on the state of United Sates Indian Policy.

Map of Indian Territory, 1885. This region would later become the state of Oklahoma. Okla-Humma is a Choctaw sentence literally translated as “Red People.” Source: Maps of Indian Territory and Will Rodgers Enrollment Case File, National Archives, Washington D.C.

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Introduction.

It was a warm afternoon near the end of May 1906 when Nancy S. “Nannie” Foster, formerly Vaughan, nee: Thompson, appeared in South McAlester, Indian Territory (I.T.), to be questioned by Commissioners Archibald S. McKennon and Isaac O. Lewis about her enrollment status as a Choctaw Indian.13 Nannie had traveled close to a hundred and fifty miles from her home in Ninnekah, I.T. leaving her five children, aged two to thirteen, with family and made her way by wagon to McAlester. This was an important day for her; Nannie was being required to defend her very nature, her status as a Choctaw of the Yowani town people. She had to do this because her Choctaw kinsmen, one of the last sovereign peoples of the Indian Territory, had succumbed to the inexorable advance of a burgeoning United States and with the passage of the

Curtis Act some five years prior.14 The last un-terminated Indian Nations, the Five Civilized

Tribes were thrown into turmoil.15 For a bit of spatial perspective, the reader will appreciate that

Indian territory at this time stretched from the Arkansas foothills on the west bank of the

Mississippi River to the modern day Oklahoma panhandle in the west, and from what is now the border of Kansas and Oklahoma in the north to the north-eastern border of Texas.

Nannie was the great-granddaughter of Margaret McCoy, a Choctaw/Chickasaw woman who was herself the daughter of Atahobia, a warrior and signatory of the Treaty of Doak’s

Stand in 1820.16 Nannie was not a citizen of the Choctaw Nation; her tribe was the Mount

13 Nannie S. Vaughan, “Interview Transcript, Dawes Application Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906), 1-2, https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 14 The Curtis Act of 1898 was an amendment to the United States Dawes Act; it resulted in the break-up of tribal governments and communal lands of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory. 15 The so-called Five Civilized Tribes are The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole. 16 The Treaty of Doak’s Stand aka The Treaty with the Choctaw of 1820. This treaty ceded the western half of the old Choctaw Nation (Mississippi) in exchange for peace with the United States, the appointment of a permanent Indian Agent, and a $6,000 annual annuity payment.

1

Tabor Indian Community located in east Texas.17 By the age of twenty-nine, she had already been married twice and widowed once. She had five children and was living in Ninnekah to be near to both her Chickasaw relatives in Marlow and her new husband’s family in Anadarko I.T.

However, genealogy, geography, and history no longer mattered to the U.S. Government, the tribes were being dissolved by the United States Government, by law and regulations. The disenfranchisement had been a long process, beginning in 1791 with the signing of the Holston

Treaty with the Cherokee, marking that tribes’ first land cession. And continued to erode both political and territorial sovereignty of Indian tribes in all places where the United states claimed control. Sovereignty in this case is defined as the ability to control one’s life and property without outside intervention by another party. The main legal strategy of the Government was one of treaty making for the purpose of establishing peaceful relations and defining spatial sovereignty over the areas they occupied and intended to occupy and became a continuous process.

By the time Nannie was born in 1876, the government had declared that no further treaties would be made with Indian tribes; they would become Americans and all future dealings would be legislative ones. The General Allotment Act, sometimes called the Dawes

Severalty Act due to its sponsorship by Senator Henry L. Dawes, was intended to accomplish this, and end the Indian problem once and for all, marking a fundamental change in the status of the American Indian within the bounds of U.S. Territories.18

17 The Mount Tabor Indian Community is an amalgamated community of Cherokee, Yowani-Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw Indians in eastern Texas (Smith and Rusk Counties), officially formed in 1848, though inhabited by various members of the founding family groups since the mid-18th century. 18 Wilcomb E. Washburn, The American Indian and the United States; A Documentary History Vol 1-4, Vol 3 (Random House: 1971), 2188.

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Times were changing, and Nannie had to change with them. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, as white settlers had flooded into the region, demands increased to take the lands of the Five Tribes, all that remained of the Indian Territory and combine them with the Oklahoma Territory to create a new state. In 1887, the General Allotment Act legislated the allotment of communal tribal lands into individually owned plots, enacting what appeared as a monumental shift in federal Indian policy, but really was just the latest chapter in the settler colonial project of the United States. In 1893, to aid the final push toward Oklahoma statehood and the assimilation of its Indian population, the U.S. Congress created the Commission to the

Five Civilized Tribes, commonly called the Dawes Commission. The Curtis Act, passed on

June 28, 1898, was an amendment to the General Allotment Act designed to extend its provisions to the Five Civilized Tribes and was named for its sponsor Charles Curtis, a mixed- blood Kaw Indian and Senator from Kansas.19 With the passage of the Curtis Act, Congress created the means to dismantle the remaining sovereign tribes and take final control over all political and social affairs in Indian Territory.20

The General Allotment Act helped weaken and dissolve Indian Territory tribal governments by abolishing tribal courts and subjecting all persons in the territory to federal law.21 This meant that there could be no enforcement of tribal laws and that any tribal legislation passed after 1898 had to be approved by the President of the United States. Towns could be surveyed and incorporated under the Act, and residents were permitted to vote. The establishment of public schools was also sanctioned.22 Prior to this, the Five Tribes had

19 The Kaw Nation originally occupied the lands now part of Kansas. Why Curtis [and other indigenous people including Ely Parker] would support dismantling indigenous sovereignty will be discussed later. 20 Ibid, 2194. 21 49th Congress, “General Allotment Act of 1887, Section VI”, in American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 2191-2192. 22 Ibid, Section V, 2190-2191.

3 exercised sole jurisdiction over its citizenship requirements, determining who was a tribe member and who was not, but with the passage of the Indian Office Appropriations Bill of 1893

Congress authorized the Dawes Commission to prepare new citizenship rolls for each tribe.23

Tams Bixby, replaced the ailing Dawes, and began the compilation of a census to be used as the basis for allotment of tribal lands to individual Indians. Enrollment of tribe members and the ensuing allotment was performed with minimal tribal input and without tribal consent.

The effects of the General Allotment Act were, by the summer of 1898, in full view as

Indians scrambled with white settlers, as well as other Indians, for little pieces of dirt in what was left of the Indian Territory. Nannie, like other members of the Mount Tabor Choctaw and the Jenna Choctaw were generally denied enrollment by the Dawes Commission due to their locations outside of Indian Territory in Texas and Mississippi, respectively. 24 The Mount

Tabor Community existed, and still exists, in the piney wood country of central-east Texas, near the community of Troope. It mattered little that the community was related to many families in the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw Nations. Ultimately, Nannie, along with the rest of the Mount Tabor Indians did not appear on the final roll.25 It took some years and a lawsuit by W. C. Thompson, a Mount Tabor Choctaw, to secure enrollment and allotments for seventy extended clan members. The remainder of the Mount Tabor Choctaw, including Nannie, were left with nothing as their cases were deemed to not be analogous to that of their kinsman.26 The

Cherokee of Mount Tabor fared somewhat better, but they too, had many members left off the

23 Kent Carter, The Dawes commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893-1914, (Ancestry Publishing: 1999), 2. 24 The Jena Band of Choctaw Indians are one of three federally recognized Choctaw groups in the United States. A remnant band of Choctaw who chose not to go to Indian Territory during the Removal era. They are in La Salle, Catahoula, and Grant parishes in the U.S. state of Louisiana. 25 Dawes Commission “Final Rolls”, https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=300321&rows=20 26 William C. Thompson et al. v. Choctaw Nation, M.C.R. 341 (1905).

4 final roll of the Cherokee. The Curtis Act, passed to bring the Five Tribes under the jurisdiction of the Dawes Act, had dealt the killing blow to the sovereignty of the Five Tribes, but was merely the culmination of legislation designed to strip tribal governments of their authority and to strip Indian people of their unique tribal identity, and their political and social norms which began with the passing of the General Allotment Act of 1887.

The life story of Nannie Thompson is a long tale that takes place mostly after the events that shaped her people and her descendants; it is but one of many thousands of such stories. This history is an attempt to explain, if only partially, how my great grandmother, a

Choctaw/Chickasaw woman of the Yowani town people, born and raised in the Chickasaw

Nation, ended up in a lonely grave in a town she barely knew, in a place that was alien to her, her seed scattered among so many little “American” lives.27 To understand what happened to

Nannie, and the countless others like her, we need to assess the debates, the work and results of

Allotment.

The stated goals of the Act were to supposedly to dissolve tribal governments, make lands available for white settlement, and to lift tribal citizens out of poverty by assimilating them into the larger fabric of American society.28 This was to be accomplished through individual ownership of land, education, and instilling a Protestant work ethic in Indian peoples. The legislation can be argued to have failed utterly in achieving these goals, thus requiring further

27 The Yowani are a band of Choctaw Indians from the Six-Towns Division of the pre-removal Choctaw Nation. They migrated west from the nation and eventually settled in the eastern part of Spanish Texas in 1803. 28 49th Congress, “General Allotment Act of 1887, Sections III-VI”, in American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 2189-2192. It must be noted that the stated goals of the Act seem to have been forgotten by the time it was implemented, as we shall see.

5 legislation in the mid-twentieth century.29 The result of the Dawes Act was a fragmented and virtually un-assimilated Indian population and increased poverty for Indian people.30

This historical discussion falls squarely within the context of the public and private debate on the implementation and stated goals of the Dawes Act, Indian people’s perceived social and political incompatibility with white Americans, and the need to assimilate them and erase these incompatibilities, and in the words of the late Emeritus Professor of History at

Marquette University, Francis Prucha; to Americanize them.31 It is also important to keep in mind that this history, though connected to the overarching story of relations between Indian people, colonial settlers, and government officials by no means concludes that there is any sort of evolution of Indian policy. This research does not claim to establish causality or continuity in the broader history of Indian policy which is likely impossible to confirm in any undebated way.

Rather, this history is an example of what Vine Deloria Jr. called a “sometimes connected bunch of topical interests that have considerable interplay and that demand our attention in every generation” when speaking of the trap encountered by the historian that wishes to find a connected chronology in U.S. Federal Indian Policy.32 The work and results of the General

Allotment Act, such as they were, were the result of a desire by some to divest Indian people of their lands for personal gain, further enable the settler colonial march westward, or simply remove a stubborn political obstacle to their ability to win the votes of those colonial settlers.

This is not an all-inclusive set of reasons. According to Prucha “the missionary minded reformers worked form a place of well-intentioned and courageously ill-informed, yet altruistic

29 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 2210. 30 Francis Paul Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians; Writings by the “Friends of the Indian”, 1880-1900, (Harvard University Press: 1973), 3-4. 31 Ibid, 6-7. 32 Vine Deloria Jr., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, (University of Oklahoma Press:1985), 6-7.

6 ideals.”33 The property based political philosophy of the United States which was the root of disagreement between the United States and Indian tribes, and the influence of the various religious and social organizations loosely referred to as the “Friends of the Indians” bears much of the responsibility for the creation and failure of the attempt to assimilate the American Indian as an individual or a set of peoples.

When Nannie met the commissioners that day, she had already enrolled in 1896. The

Choctaw Nation’s Advisory Enrollment Board had accepted her and her children. As far as she knew their decision was final, but that enrollment had been challenged by Choctaw Nation attorneys as having been done without authority of law.34 Now she was being interviewed again.

The questions posed by McKennon and Lewis were straight forward. Lewis asked, “Where were you living at the time [of enrollment]?” Answer- “at Marlow”. “Where did you enroll?” Answer-

“at Kiowa”. “Didn’t you know that the Commission was at Duncan, enrolling Choctaws living in the Chickasaw Nation?” Answer- “no sir”. McKennon, “How long have you lived in the

Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations?” Answer- “I was raised there”. Lewis asks; “Did you hear that you were refused [enrollment]?” Answer- “No Sir, never did hear that we was [sic] refused or accepted”. McKennon asks; “Can you tell me why you wouldn’t make an inquiry into a matter of such importance to you?” Answer- “Because I was placed on the Choctaw Roll”. Lewis asks;

“But then you were marked off?” Answer- “It came out in the paper that we was [sic] marked

33 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, Introduction. 34 Nannie S. Vaughan, “Dawes Choctaw Enrollment Card R725”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc

7 off”. Lewis asks; “By the Dawes Commission?” Answer- “No Sir, not the Commission, I don’t know who marked us off”.35

The interview of Nannie Vaughan is a typical example of these interviews.36 Nannies’ answers convey the confusion inherent in the process. Nannie seems to have felt she stated the obvious. She was a Choctaw living in Marlow, that should have been enough. Interestingly,

Commissioners Lewis and McKennon felt so too. The result of the above interview was that she and her children were re-admitted to the Choctaw Roll, including her infant son from her new marriage to Lewis Foster. Thomas Foster, my great uncle, had been enrolled in 1904.37 In the end it was for naught as the Commission’s decision was overruled in 1909 by the Secretary of the

Interior, who wished litigation to end and dismissed all new appeals out of hand. Nannie, along with a couple dozen remaining litigants from her extended Mount Tabor family, were stricken from the rolls.38

To understand the motivation behind the General Allotment Act and other programs designed ostensibly to help the Indian and solve the Indian problem, one must read the words of the reformers; congressmen, the “Friends of the Indian”, and government agents. It is also imperative to read the words of the people touched directly by the Act. Doing so reveals the strength of conviction [or lack thereof] for all parties involved. From the many available words, I

35 Nannie S. Vaughan, “Interview Transcript, Dawes Enrollment Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, 2-3. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 36 Henry L. Dawes, “Report of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory. October 3, 1898”, in American Indians and the United States Vol 1, 682-683. 37 Thomas C. Foster, “Choctaw Enrollment Card NB 971”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 38 Thomas Ryan, “Letter to Nannie Foster June 14th, 1909, Dawes Application Record 6063” in U.S National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc

8 have chosen to include those that speak most directly to the goals of allotment and assimilation, as well as a few voices of the various Mount Tabor families affected.

Chapter one will illuminate the situation in Indian Territory and the western frontier of the United States prior to the General Allotment Act. Chapter two will expose the Congressional debate on Senate Bill 1773 in 1881, which was the precursor to the General Allotment Act and contained most of the language found in the later bill. Chapter three will investigate the perceived need for allotment which influenced the debate in 1886. Chapter four will look to the later Congressional debates in 1886 for comparison and detail the Allotment Act in its final form.

Chapter five contains a study the underlying philosophies that created and enabled the legislative project and attempt to define the term “American” to some degree. Chapter six will expose the workings of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, known popularly as the Dawes

Commission, during the enrollment of the Five Civilized Tribes. Chapters seven and eight will cover the enrollment of the Mount Tabor Indians, and the aftermath of the allotment on Indians in general terms and the members of the Mount Tabor community. The last chapter will recapitulate this history as it pertains to the descendants of Mount Tabor Indian Community, and to some degree, Indian peoples in more general terms to clarify the justification and rationale behind the allotment program as a settler colonialist and civilization project.

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Chapter One The Situation before Allotment

Inherent in almost any study of U.S., Indian relations by way of Federal Policy lies a question: are the various ideas, statutes, and doctrines of Indian policy consistent? The answer, possibly surprising, is yes, and no. No in the sense that they are Deloria’s “sometimes connected bunch,” and finding a consistent chronology is difficult. Yes, in that the history of Federal Indian

Policy has consistently assumed that Indian people are less than human. This consistency arises early in the story of North America as European nations attempted to justify their various invasions of the western hemisphere. Justification was provided by two Papal bulls which make up what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493.39 These edicts allowed for all lands not ruled by a Christian Principality and those anywhere a hundred leagues westward of the Azores to fall under the jurisdictional sovereignty granted to the Spanish Kingdoms.40 The

Inter Caetera bull was not created specifically as a way to take indigenous land, the European

Kingdoms would not have felt any need for such a legal instrument. Rather, the bull was the result of a dispute between Portugal and Castile over who held jurisdiction to these newly discovered lands.41 The Castilian Crown sought diplomacy, and the Pope resolved the issue for the Catholic Kings. The bull codified what would become known as the doctrine of discovery and decreed that any lands not ruled by European Christians were free for the taking regardless of the settlement of those lands by indigenous populations. This Doctrine of Discovery created the space and possibility for a global land grab for anyone with a King or a vision, a ship, and a

39 Deloria Jr., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, 239-240. 40 In the 15th century, there were five kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula; Castile, Aragón [which included Catalonia, Valencia, the kingdom of Naples, Sardinia and Sicily], Navarre, Portugal and the Muslim Emirate of Granada. 41 Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 4th of May 1493.

10 compass. The doctrine also produced an oppositional consensus between the Spanish Kingdoms and the other participating European nations like Britain and France that, in the words of Vine

Deloria, required conceiving of indigenous populations as “childish creatures in need of the civilizing benefit of Christianity and European commerce.”42

The consensus view of indigenous people was oppositional as it did not arise form a unique and shared source; the Spanish colonizer and the English would draw their conclusion[s] from different perspectives of empire but would arrive at similar results. European empires conducting colonial settler projects were empires of expansion who had at some point legitimized themselves using the “language of warfare.”43 Nothing happens in a vacuum though, and seemingly “overnight changes” are often the end state of an evolving set of circumstances, aims, and goals of the people involved. The circumstances driving the colonization of the

American continent were not the same for everyone, nor were the ideals and aims. Throughout the history of the Spanish conquest and colonization in America, the extraction of precious metals continued to be the crown’s principal economic concern. By contrast, the English and the

French were predominantly concerned with creating trade hubs and producing agricultural and industrial products.44 These differences can be applied to the evolution of Indian policy in the

Americas, and more specifically for our purpose, British colonial North America.

This Doctrine of Discovery, underpinning colonial efforts by the Iberians since 1492, also has been foundational to American jurisprudence for the length of its national history; from its influence on Chief Justice Marshall’s decision in Johnson v. McIntosh, to The Indian Removal

42 Ibid, 240. 43 Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500- c. 1800, (Yale University Press: 1995), 63. 44 Ibid. 66-67.

11

Act of 1830, to the General Allotment Act in 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898. While this is true, it is also true to say that the English, and later the United states were not attempting to convert indigenous people in the way the Conquistadores were. While many narratives in the Spanish literature of conquest likened the colonizer to El Cid and as an heir of Caesar, with, if not a divine sanction, at least God’s favor, the decidedly Protestant colonists of the British cohort in

North America were not interested in saving souls for God.45 They were much more interested in settlement and control of land.46

The doctrine is encoded into the United States’ founding document, the Constitution. It is embedded in case law and the Declaration of Independence. Indian people still know this truth.

When announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in 2019, Mark Charles,

Diné [Navajo] said, “The Constitution is working…it specifically excludes natives…in 1823 we had a Supreme Court case, Johnson verses McIntosh…two white men litigating over a single piece of land, one of them acquired the land from a native tribe and the other acquired it from the

U.S. government…they ruled that discovery is what gave title to the land…they referenced the doctrine of discovery was used as a legal instrument…and that natives were here first but were less than human.”47 Thus, while Indians owned the equitable title to their lands, it became subject to the superior title exercised by the Discoverer.

From Aristotle’s first use of the designation barbarian to the settler colonial period in the

Americas, it remained a term both to describe the relative sophistication of a people, and a designation of the other; those that were different. The term could be, and often was applied to

45 Ibid, 74. 46 Ibid. 47 Mark Charles, “Mark Charles for President 2020,” YouTube Video, 8:57, Mark Charles 2020, May 28, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_livxZNCQeU. accessed June 15, 2019.

12 anyone who did not speak the settler’s language, share their Christian faith, or act in accord with natural law by becoming a “real man” by actualizing his potential.48 Though not held by all

European settlers, the concept of the Indian as less than human, or at least barbarian, as a viewpoint held by many, is well documented historically. For example, the sixteenth century renaissance humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the sixteenth century renaissance humanist, wrote in his 1544 work Democrates Secundus, to support a case for just war and the state of the

Indian person as a natural slave. He described the difference between the man [European] and an

Indian as being as different as comparing the sighted to the blind. Sepúlveda used language to frame the Indian person as a deviant of unnatural origin who may practice cannibalism and generates a brutish speech. He continuously uses terminology intended to animalize the Indian in support of his argument for just war. While these suppositions were not held by all his contemporaries, they certainly were not particularly offensive to a sixteenth century educated public.49

Others did write in disagreement with Sepúlveda. Bartolomé de las Casas, the Bishop of

Chiapas and early ethnographer of the Americas, was one. Las Casas took the merits of

Aristotle’s theory of the natural slave to task by deploying a different comparative between the

Indian and other ancient peoples. The effect remade Aristotle’s thesis on the relationship between the man and the barbarian into something more nuanced. Las Casas realized that assigning “barbarian” to anyone not in your own group was problematic in its “us and them” premise. Las Casas created more distinction by arguing that the term could refer to different

48 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of the Natural Man; The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, (Cambridge University Press: 1982), 16-18. 49 Ibid, 116-117.

13 cultural groups depending on context, though he did by no means equate Indian people with

Europeans, nor destroy the term barbarian, or undo the categorization of the other.50

The othering of Indian peoples was by no means restricted to the Spanish colonial project. The French and the English made no allusions to the just war of conquest, nor appealed to the Papacy; they did however argue for God’s approval of their colonial efforts; peaceful settlement and evangelism. The British in particular, took a providentialist view of the settler colonialist project, believing the Calvinism underpinning the English revolution was intended for a universal exportation. The English in America were to become a new Rome, in the west. The

City upon a Hill they hoped to create could not include the Indian person, however. They were not unaware of Indian claims to legitimate ownership of the lands they wished to settle. Their own legitimate ownership must therefore be established as a necessary condition of a successful occupation.51

With the successful outcome of their revolution, the United States inherited England’s

Calvinist vision, and also England’s responsibilities and policies toward Indian peoples on the continent.52 The United States further built its policy by relying upon the discovery doctrine and, in addition, the Constitution’s commerce clause, which gave the president the power to enter into treaties with the various tribes and nations in the same way a sovereign king might do.

According to Vine Deloria “had Indians been able to maintain themselves apart from the whites, had they continued their traditions and customs without adopting the ways of the whites, the executive might have continued to deal with them as quasi-independent nations…and the

50 Ibid, 126-127. 51 Pagden, Lords of the World, 73-75. 52 Deloria Jr., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, 240.

14 desperate need for manufactured goods and furs in exchange for land cessions, that Congress would have to spend considerably more energy protecting Indians from themselves than in restricting the activities of American citizens intruding on Indian lands.”53 One may disagree with Deloria, in part. His proposition that maintaining separation between Indians and whites would have helped maintained the quasi-independent nature of the tribes seems wishful in the rearview mirror of settler colonialism. The point is arguable because we have no way of knowing whether a desire for trade goods and open relations would have equaled a tradeoff between culture and copper kettles. It is just as likely, perhaps more so, that Edward Said came closer when he said “There seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their

[peoples’] separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things.”54 It can also be argued quite forcefully that Manifest

Destiny as a concept held a tighter grip on the American psyche than any desire to protect in perpetuity the indigenous peoples of North America.55 The United States was built upon an intellectual grounding that had no room for the Indian person, or the Spanish, French, or African

[free or slave].56 The analysis of reasons and drivers of policy will be addressed later. For now, it is enough to know that Congress did eventually get involved and spent energy, in many varied forms.

Congressional efforts to legislate for the Indian tribes began with the Indian

Appropriations Bill of 1871 which was followed by a series of acts to secure education for

Indians, and included legislation designed to guarantee quiet title to Indian lands occupied by settlers in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The legislation was supposedly an attempt to

53 Ibid, 241. 54 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (Vintage: 1994), 336. 55 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 7. 56 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, (W.W. Norton: 1999), 77.

15 mitigate conflicts of interest between infrastructure, development and economics and good relations with the tribes in close contact with the young republic. Conflicts of interests between

Indian people and U.S. policy would eventually lead Chief Justice John Marshall to use the

Doctrine of Discovery to support his ruling that Indian tribes were not sovereign entities, but rather, subordinate to the United States via a trust relationship.57 Similar in tone to the later Dred

Scott decision handed down by Chief Justice Taney, and to Johnson v. Macintosh mentioned earlier , the idea that Indian people were not as “human” as white people was and remains, foundational to U.S. legal doctrine. The Marshall decisions required some maneuvering by

Congress and so the pre-revolution demarcation set by the British Crown was used and updated to create, out of thin air, an “Indian Country.”58 Later, Andrew Jackson’s nativist rhetoric brought the settlers xenophobia and self-centric conscience to public debate, and his removal policy marks the first political platform to become policy via the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The Act passed by a slim margin, 103 to 97, and congressional debate demonstrates that some in politics understood the monumental consequences of populist politics that promoted an imperial outlook on national expansion. William Ellsworth of Connecticut summed this up well, stating

“We must be just and faithful to our treaties. There is no occasion for collision. We will not stand justified before the world in taking any step that leads to oppression…I conjure this House not to stain the page of history with national shame.”59

With the passage of the Removal Act, pushing Indian people westward became the dominant theme in Indian Policy for the remainder of the nineteenth century and the concept of

Manifest Destiny, a container for the settler’s xenophobia and ethnocentrism, took hold. Federal

57 John J. Marshall, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1, (1831). 58 King George III, Royal Proclamation of 1763, (1763). 59 22nd Congress, “House Debate of the Indian Removal Question”, in American Indians and the United States Vol 2, 1019.

16 policy was further updated by two acts in 1834 that updated trade and commerce provisions and created the Department of Indian Affairs.60 Up to this time, based on treaties, and the evolving position of the United States concerning Indians status, the tribes had been treated as sovereign or semi-sovereign entities requiring diplomacy and executive involvement. This no longer being the case, one can argue that removal of the southeastern tribes and the creation of the Bureau of

Indian Affairs [BIA] stands as the first in a future line of activities designed to disappear the

Indian rather than deal with them as human beings on an equal footing with settlers or their colonialist government. The Doctrine of Discovery was now thoroughly cooked into the frybread.61

The unequal positionality between Indians and settlers is evidenced clearly in the Senate debate of February 22, 1867, on the best way to administer Indian Affairs. “Mr. President, I am not unaware of the difficulties which exist in the proper administration of Indian Affairs. I agree with the honorable Senator from Oregon [George H. Williams] there are difficulties…that no

Congress, no administration of the laws of Congress can entirely remove. They are difficulties which grow out of the disease itself, irredeemable, incurable, which grows, out of the contact of a superior and an inferior race.”62 The objectives of these regulations being debated were to create a functioning bureaucracy far from executive control that would, nominally, protect the interests of both Indians, settlers, and traders. To the settler mind, Indian people were quite incapable of regulating themselves in trade, or in understanding white society sufficiently to

60 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 2, Introduction. 61 Frybread is a pan-Indian flatbread made from water and flour and cooked in lard. idiom, like; proof is in the pudding. 62 James Doolittle, “Senate Debate on the administration of Indian Affairs”, in American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1457. Note: Though not explicit, one can infer form the overall discourse that Doolittle’s “disease” refers to both violent interaction, and cultural sharing or homogenization opportunities, when settlers and indigenous peoples are in close contact.

17 protect themselves from it. Andrew Jackson succinctly expressed this sentiment in his fifth annual message to Congress in 1833 when he said “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.”63 The Indian became the child of the United States, in a perpetual state of pupilage.

The removal treaties with the tribes of the southeast proposed, as a guarantee, that these tribes would not be enclosed within the borders of any state once they removed across the

Mississippi River. This was to disallow State jurisdictional concerns to outweigh tribal concerns as had happened when Georgia had claimed legal control over Cherokee land.64 The idea was also to allow time for the tribes thus removed to develop governments similar to the United

States and for Indian people to adapt to white modes of living so that the tribes might become small republics under the protection of the government and eventually represented in Congress.

While this possibility was not out of the question for the eastern tribes, it likely was for those in the west, especially the equestrian tribes of the Great Plains and Llano Escatado.65

Nomadic by nature, the Comanche and the Lakota, among others, were also quite hostile to intruders in their territories. These plains tribes were not at all interested in a sedentary way of life, and as such, resisted all overtures to change their modes of living. After an almost continuous state of war between the tribes over hunting grounds on the plains and encroachment by white settlements in the region, the U.S. Government formulated a peace policy to create a manageable state of affairs. The Medicine Lodge treaties of 1867 and 1868 were designed to

63 Andrew Jackson, 5th Annual Message to Congress, December 3rd1833. 64 John Ehle, The Trail of Tears; The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation, (Anchor Books: 1988), 134. 65 The Llano Estacado, translated as Staked Plains, is a region in the Southwestern United States that encompasses parts of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas.

18 accomplish this by relocating the warring tribes to reservations in exchange for housing, schools, and annuities; none of which were requested by these tribes. Congress seemed to have assumed that the plains tribes wanted the same things as the southeastern tribes. From education to religion, this could not have been further from the truth. While some eastern Indians welcomed missionaries, schools and farming, many western and plains tribes did not trust attempts to evangelize or assimilate them, sometimes with tragic consequences.66

Eastern tribes had a history of close contact with settlers and wished this trade and contact to continue. The Cherokee had already adopted many settler norms for living, schools, churches, republican government, and chattel slavery. The institution of slavery helped to create within the Cherokee Nation a blood-based class structure and created conflicting values and persistent factionalism within the Cherokee Nation, creating for them the same problems it had for the United States.67 The Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw also practiced a farm and plantation lifestyle similar the mixed-blood Cherokee. This was not out of the question for them as these tribes had practiced similar modes and lifeways since pre-Contact times and were quiet adept at imperialism, slavery, capitalism, and control.68 Resistance by the western tribes, settler ignorance of differing Indian political forms, firmly embedded stereotypes, and the ethnocentrism and paternalism of a society with dreams of empire resulted in Congressional action in the form of a rider to the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871, which disallowed the making of further treaties between the United States and any tribe, stating, “hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation,

66 Barbara A. Mann, The Tainted Gift; the Disease Method of Frontier Expansion, (Praeger: 2009), 83-84. 67 Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society. 1540-1866, (University of Tennessee Press: 1979), 144. 68 Robbie Ethridge, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone; The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, (University of Nebraska Press: 2009), 418.

19 tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”69 This supported an idea that Indian people must be wards of state which had been suggested many times. George

Manypenny, in office 1853-57, is one of the first BIA Commissioners to suggest this ward status when delineating duties to a subordinate in a letter to an Army commander. He wrote of a need to “apprise Agent Montgomery of the nature and extent of his duties to those untutored wards of the government.”70

Secretary of State Caleb Smith, in 1862, contended that the government had adopted a poor policy toward the tribes because “they had none of the elements of nationality” and they were within the recognized boundaries of the United States.71 This statement seems bombastic given when it was uttered. One must consider that there were thirty-four states in 1862, thirteen of which were in a state of rebellion. It is generous to say the remainder of the Continent was

U.S. territory, of which many parts were contested by the Confederate States of America. Many of the tribes lived within these contested areas. The Civil War which, in 1862 was far from a decided event, raged on. Robert E. Lee, the new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, was busy battering U.S. forces in the east as George McClellan tried desperately drilling the

Army of the Potomac into an actual fighting unit.72 The U.S. territories of New Mexico, and

Arizona were also, at least partially, in secession. Southeastern tribes in the Indian Territory were either disinterested in the events of the United States, or actively rebelling.73 Cherokee headman

Isaac “Stand” Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, was leading the Cherokee

69 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 2183. 70 Curtiss E. Jackson and Marcia J. Galli, A History of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Its Activities Among the Indians, (R&E Research Associates: 1977), 59. 71 Ibid, 60. 72 Russel H. Beatie, Army of the Potomac Vol II; McClellan takes Command, September 1861-February 1862, (De Capo Press: 2004), 275. 73 S.C. Gwynn, Empire of the Summer Moon; Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, (Scribner: 2010), 207-208.

20

Rifles against the United States in the western theater. Watie was only nominally under any control of the Confederacy and spent much of his time executing a tribal blood feud.74 Watie, a

Ridge Party Cherokee and signatory to the Treaty of New Echota, also continued to act “quasi- independently” after Lee surrendered in early April, 1865.75 Watie’s Cherokee Rifles fought on until June of that year when he grudgingly signed a cease fire agreement with the United States, being the only Confederate general never to surrender.76

In an ironic twist to the tale, it must be noted that the BIA Commissioner who convinced

Congress to add the anti-treaty rider to the 1871 appropriations bill was Ely S. Parker, a Seneca

Indian, and friend of Ulysses S. Grant. Parker penned the terms of Lee’s surrender in 1865. After

Grant had become President in 1869, he appointed Parker as the eighteenth Commissioner of the

Bureau. Parker had been co-opted by any definition of the word. A fully assimilated American,

Parker said of the tribes “The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government…they are held to be wards of the government, but they have become falsely impressed with the notion of national independence. It is time the government cease this cruel farce of thus dealing with its helpless and ignorant wards.”77

The Mount Tabor Indians, prior to allotment, lived in both Indian Territory, and their traditional tribal areas is east Texas. In 1843, Stand Watie’s kinsman John Adair Bell named our community when he and other Ridge Party Cherokee relocated to Smith and Rusk counties and

74 Brad Billington, “Foreword”, in General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1998), vii-x. 75 The Treaty was signed by members of the Ridge Party, including Watie in New Echota town, Georgia, in December 1835 and relinquished all Cherokee land claims east of the Mississippi River to the United States, leading to the removal of the Cherokee and a period of bloody civil war within the tribe. 76 Watie signed a formal cease-fire agreement and laid down arms on June 23rd, 1865, the last Confederate commander to stop fighting. 77 Jackson and Galli, A History of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 60.

21 lived among other Cherokee already there and marrying with the Yowani Choctaw.78 This exodus to Texas was made to avoid the violence associated with both the loss of the Civil War and removal associated violence.

The Mount Tabor community was formed in stages, beginning with the Treaty of Birds

Fort on September 29, 1843, then the purchase of 10,000 acres of land in Rusk County by Benjamin Franklin Thompson in the spring of 1844. This was made possible by an Executive

Order of United States President James K. Polk, allowing members of the Old Settler and Ridge

Party Cherokees to leave Indian Territory for Texas to seek lands on which to settle and re- establish a government there in order to protect their lives and that of their families from a state of war that existed in the Cherokee Nation.79 The violence erupted following the forced removal of 1838 and was inaugurated by the assassinations of Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Stand’s brother Buck, better known as Elias Boudinot shortly after their arrival in Indian Territory.80

The Mount Tabor community was not where Nannie Thompson was born, though she likely visited during her childhood. Nannie’s birthplace is un-verified. She was possibly born at

Spring Hill, Arkansas when her father, having limited funds, lived there for a time while relocating from the old Choctaw Nation lands to the Indian Territory. It is more likely that she was born at Boggy Depot in the Chickasaw Nation after her father and his white wife relocated there sometime in the 1870s.81 Nannie went to the Chickasaw school in Marlow and grew to adulthood. It was in Marlow that she met and married her first husband, a white man named

78 John Adair Bell, “J. A. Bell Letter to Stand Watie, July 24, 1855”, in Cherokee Cavaliers; Forty Years of Cherokee History as told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, ed. Edward E. Dale (University of Oklahoma Press: 1995), 80. 79 Patrick Pynes, History of the Mount Tabor Indian Community, Mount Tabor Indian Community, http://mounttaborcommunity.org/?page_id=43, accessed: June 10, 2019. 80 Ehle, Trail of Tears, 375-378. 81 This information is inferred by the author from the BIA testimony of Imogene McDonald regarding John Thompson. Copy in possession of author.

22

James Vaughan. Together they had five children. Vaughan and Nannie divorced in 1903 and he died of an unknown cause in 1904. In 1905 Nannie married Lewis Foster, a mixed-blood man of unknown lineage. They married in Kiowa, Indian Territory, and together had three sons;

Thomas, Harry, and Clifford.82 My grandfather Harry and brother Clifford were born after

Nannie and the other Mount Tabor Indians including the infant Tom were stricken from the final roll of the Choctaw, but, per her and Lewis’s desire, all three were raised as Choctaw Indians.

The U.S. Congress earnestly began debating the proposal to dissolve tribal governments and allot land in severalty in 1881, when Nannie was still a girl. These debates did not lead to legislation, but the debates of 1886, held shortly after Nannie’s father had relocated the family to

Marlow, did. The General Allotment Act of 1887 was signed by President Grover Cleveland when Nannie was sixteen years old. These two periods of debate demonstrate a stark contrast in intensity and length. Congress, unwilling to break up the reservations without Indian consent in

1881 became, in the main, quite willing to do so just six years later.83

A reading of the Congressional record of the debate in 1881 reveals that the man almost singlehandedly responsible for defeating the allotment bill before the Senate was Henry M.

Teller, Senator from Colorado. A New York transplant and Republican lawyer, Teller had moved west as a young man, spent time living and practicing law in Illinois, eventually arriving in

Colorado in 1861 as one of the principal organizers of the Colorado Central Railroad. With

Colorado Statehood, Teller became one of the State’s first two Senators.84 He strongly opposed

Senate Bill 1773 in 1881, and the General Allotment Act of 1887, accurately stating that

82 Marriage Records, Book 1 Kiowa County, O.T page 541, in U.S. National Archives, (Oklahoma Territory Marriages). 1905. 83 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1800. 84 Frank Pommersheim, Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution, (Oxford University Press: 2009), 128.

23 severalty was directed at forcing the Indians to give up their land so that it could be sold to white settlers. Among his most prominent achievements was authoring the Teller Amendment which disallowed the annexation of Cuba after the Spanish-American War, requiring the Government to support Cuban independence. Ironically, it would be Teller who would later be chiefly responsible for creating the perception that the governments of the Five Civilized Tribes were corrupt, helping secure the passage of the Curtis Act, which amended the General Allotment Act and forced the dissolution of these remaining tribal governments.85 The debates about what to do about the Indian Problem would occur periodically over the time it took for Nannie to grow from child to adult. The larger, and most significant periods of debate would be in 1881, and again in

1887.

85 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 6-7.

24

Chapter Two

The Congressional Debate of 1881

The 1881 Congressional debates about the Indian Problem would not have been something a six-year-old Nannie would have understood, or even cared about. These debates would, in conjunction with the later debates in 1887, have a life altering impact on Nannie, her family, and Indian peoples throughout the growing United States and her claimed territories. The debate of 1881 took place in a tumultuous year in front of a national backdrop woven from ethnocentrism, racial fears, spatial pressures created by a massive influx of humanity into the west, and xenophobia. During the time the Indian Problem was debated, other Congressional debates ongoing would lead to the creation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, signed by

President Chester Arthur little more than a year later. Westward expansion and pressures for land and profit had erupted into factional warfare in New Mexico Territory, and witnessed the shooting of William Bonney [Billy the Kid] at the Maxwell Ranch.86 These same spatial pressures led Sitting Bull to lead his Hunkpapa band into exile in Canada to escape a rapidly crowding northern plains region. In the southwest, a fight for resource control erupted in the infamous Gunfight at the OK Corral.87 In July of the year, Charles Guiteau would assassinate

President Garfield.

Wilcomb E. Washburn, working as the Chairman of the Department of American Studies for the Smithsonian Institution from 1968 until 1997, wrote in 1973 about the Congressional debates surrounding allotment of lands in severalty “the debate recorded included the perceptive

86 Frederick Nolan, The West of Billy the Kid, (University of Oklahoma Press: 2015), 189. 87 The killing of Billy the Kid and the battle at the OK Corral are continuously debated topics and are used here not to enter these debates, rather they are presented here to demonstrate the friction caused when more people move to smaller areas and the struggle for control of space ensues.

25 and prophetic words of Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, a moderate and Free Silver proponent.”88 Teller is a bit enigmatic as it is unclear what his prime motivation was in supporting indigenous land rights. It is possibly tied to his free sliver support which pitted him against the Railroad companies and Industrialists of the North East who overwhelmingly supported the adoption of a gold standard. Teller, a pugnacious man may simply have been poking people in the eye, politically speaking.

However arguable his motivation, Teller warned that the proposed policy was opposed to common sense and moral right. The fact that religious bodies were in support of the policy was, in Teller’s mind, deplorable.”89 Teller was certain that the proposed legislation would benefit only the land speculator and the settler, saying “when thirty of forty years shall have passed and these Indians shall have parted with their title, they will curse the hand that was raised professedly in their defense…if the people who are clamoring for it understood Indian character, and Indian laws, and Indian morals, and Indian religion, they would not be here clamoring for this at all.”90

Senator Teller’s words were certainly prophetic. In the end, the legislation would benefit mostly land speculators with mining interests in the inter-mountain west, railroad companies seeking expansion routes, and settlers seeking land. The legislation would dispossess Indian people of their land in less than forty years. As a result of the General Allotment Act, nearly two- thirds of all land in Indian hands after allotment, some 138 million acres, was whittled down to

48 million by 1934, the same year the government decided that perhaps their Indian policies had

88 Free Silver was a major economic policy issue in late-19th-century America. Advocates favored an expansionary policy featuring unlimited coinage in silver and money on demand. 89 Washburn, The American Indian and the United States Volume 3, 1686. 90 Ibid, 1636.

26 been incorrect and tried to reverse course with the Wheeler Howard Act.91 In less than half a century, Indian people had lost well more than half their allotted lands.92

The issue of allotting Indian land on a national level, encompassing most or all tribes, was debated twice; during the tenure of the 46th and the 49th Congress. In the first instance

Senate Bill [SB] 1773 was hotly debated and defeated in 1881. Six years later SB 54, which became the General Allotment Act, was passed after an anticlimactic and much shorter debate.

The allotment of land in severalty had been a component of many pieces of legislation. Most treaties contained the provision in some limited form. These two bills, SB 1773 and the later SB

54 were unlike other legislation as they were to operate on all Indians in North America. It would be ungainly to place every word of these debates here but is important to absorb the content of the debates through the words of the participants, so the 1881 debate will be presented in chronological, abridged form, paying special attention to the acrimonious first and third days.

The 1886 debate will have its own chapter.

In January of 1881, the House had voted favorably on their version of the allotment bill.

The Senate was entrenched in a debate. The opposition was led by Republican Henry Teller of

Colorado. Those in favor of allotting lands and dissolving tribal governments found their voice with Democratic Senator Richard Coke of Texas. The men’s debate, however, does not reflect a strictly partisan animosity, but rather an experiential one. By 1881, Texas had only a few Indians remaining, the Comanche had removed to the Indian Territory in 1875, and the few remaining

Kiowa followed suit.93 The Mescalero Apaches moved unto a reservation in New Mexico during

91 Ibid, 2210. 92 Nicklas Emmons, History, Indian Land Tenure Foundation, https://iltf.org/land-issues/history/, accessed 13 July, 2019. 93 Gwynn, Empire of the Summer Moon, 285-293.

27 the 1870s as well. Most of the remaining groups were either mixed blood such as the Mount

Tabor Indian Community and Coushatta which allowed them to exist for a time on the edges of settler society a bit longer. Others, like the Ysleta and Tewa attracted little attention from white settlers and were confined to pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley. By contrast, Colorado was still negotiating with the powerful White River Utes led by Chief Douglas. This tribe had attacked the

White River Indian Agency less than two years prior, resulting in the passage of the Ute

Removal Act. During the battle, the Ute warriors took Josephine Meeker, her mother, another woman and two children hostage.94

A cursory look at the situations in Texas and Colorado might lead one to assume that

Teller and Coke’s positions on the Indian Problem should be reversed. Upon reading their comments, it becomes clear that Teller was arguing from a position of intimate knowledge of the problems facing Indians in his State, while the positions of Coke and others in support of the bill are those of politicians not as intimately acquainted with day to day issues, their tribes having been removed to reservations or destroyed. Also vibrantly displayed on both sides of the debate is the unequal positionality between Indians and whites. The language used is paternalistic, often racist and clearly demonstrates the concepts of othering, and settler colonialist entitlement.

The session begins with Mr. Coke explaining the sections of the bill (Senate Bill 1773) and then stating “I see no possible objection to this bill…the provisions of the bill are almost identical with those embraced of the bill so much discussed in the last session…a bill that has been in force and executed, or is being executed among the Ute Indians now…satisfactory to the

Indians and the Government…I understood the he [Teller] had been informed by some of the

94 Thomas E. Dawson and E.J.V. Skiff, The White River Ute War, Colorado 1879, (Leonaur: 2014), Kindle Edition, Location(s) 739, 1080.

28 commissioners that quite a number of the Ute Indians would not have signed …but for assurances that that portion of the agreement providing for lands in severalty would be abrogated”95 Teller responded, “I would say that I did so state…no matter what may be said elsewhere or here, I am prepared to make an issue on that.”96 Senator Coke then admitted to the

Senate a letter from Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior, claiming in part “reports so far from the Ute Commission show that the agreement was signed without any condition [land in severalty] or stipulation whatsoever.”97 Teller responded saying that the he had travelled in the company of the agent [Mr. Meacham] from the Agency at White River to Ouray in order to see the situation first hand, and saying that the agent, while at Ouray, told him precisely what he had reported in the Senate, that the Ute delegation had indeed refused to sign any agreement containing a provision for land in severalty.98

George Vest of Missouri attempted to shift the debate to a proposed amendment to section seven, requesting to “strike out in line two the words Indian Territory and insert reservations of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the Indian

Territory.”99 His point was that the ceding all lands in what is now southern Kansas and northern

Oklahoma, from the Confederate allied tribes at the close of the Civil War, would include the residence places of some thirty tribes and African American Freedmen, and should be open to allotment in severalty. Vest relates that at some previous time he had been accused of attacking the treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes and the plighted Faith of the people. Teller agreed with

95 Richard Coke, “Senate Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty, January 20, 1881” American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1686-1687. 96 Ibid, 1687. 97 Ibid, 1688. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid, 1689-1690.

29

Vest’s sentiment and admonished the “present condition of the public mind” by stating that anyone who attempted to argue the Indian Problem from a rational perspective and with regard to Indians as well as whites would be accused of violating the plighted faith of the country.100

Teller proceeded to defend the sentiments of westerners and Indians alike and posited that legislation efforts were continually geared as a fix-all and fits-all, saying “I know that there is a sentiment that each man that comes from the extreme west…is in favor of despoiling the

Indians and appropriating their lands and treating them harshly and unjustly. There is a sentimental feeling that has grown up in this country which if it was allowed to prevail…would in a few years utterly annihilate these so-called wards of the nation.”101 At this point, Teller speaks of receiving a memorial in support of the bill from the Presbyterian Church of the United

States. Teller used the letter to help illustrate his contention that land allotment is not a suits all type of action, saying of the letter “The men who signed that memorial are undoubtedly acting in perfect good faith, and yet they lay down a rule to be applied to every tribe of Indians and every

Indian alike. The civilized Indian, the semi-civilized Indian, the savage Indian, and the more than savage Indian are all to be treated alike.”102

Teller addresses what he calls the failure of the Ute Bill from the previous year’s congress, which, according to Teller, was rushed through the Senate. He attacks the idea put forth in that debate that the bill would fix the Ute problem, and that the Ute’s were all “begging and crying for places on which they could place permanent abodes.”103 Teller assured his fellow

Senators that once the Indian Commission report on the Ute situation, due that day, arrived, it

100 Ibid, 1691. 101 Ibid, 1691. 102 Ibid, 1692. 103 Ibid, 1693.

30 would show that he was correct in saying that the previous year’s bill had failed because the

Ute’s refused to sign it or accept allotments.104 The Senator then requested that the clerk read a letter of protest from the Five Civilized Tribes who were also against allotment of their tribal lands. After Senator Coke reminded him that these tribes were unaffected by the bill, to which he quipped “I understand that…I’m speaking to the inherent objection in the Indian mind against land in severalty.”105

At this point, a letter was read wherein the delegation of the tribes laid out their points against individual title; local tribes recently brought to Indian Territory, receiving individual title would, work “mischief” among members of the Five Tribes. Severalty would lead to homelessness for some Indians and wealth inequality. Most of the lands in Indian Territory were suitable only for grazing, and severalty would destroy their livestock industry. And lastly, there was the danger it presented to their own treaties with the government. The last paragraph of the letter being “This experiment has seductive allurements for visionary persons who have not carefully studied the subject but is full of mischief for us. While we do not think the general policy, as at present pursued, is capable of producing anything but mischief, we only wish to call attention to the case of our own people and to appeal to you not to violate your treaties with us.”106 The delegation, led by D.W. Bushyhead, Principal Chief of the Cherokee, was clearly worried about the precedent set with the severalty bills before the Congress. They had been assured many times that their treaties were secure, only to have that promise explode in their face. It is important to note that Bushyhead himself had been a young boy during the removal period and had traversed the infamous Trail of Tears in the detachment led by his own father, the

104 Ibid. 105 Ibid, 1694. 106 Ibid, 1694-1695.

31

Rev. Jesse Bushyhead. The delegates were worried that in time, they would be included in the severalty plan, which was not unfounded, as they were included six years after this letter was written.

Senator Vest then entered documents in support of allotment from the Peoria and Miami tribes to which Teller sarcastically responded with “I have not the slightest doubt that I could go out into the Ute Nation and with a little finesse and a few presents get the whole of the Ute

Nation to sign away for a mere bagatelle every acre of land they’ve got.” He continued by asserting that this corruption of “a few of the men who make the treaties” was common and that the Senators knew quite well that the bulk of the Indians did not understand the issue. “It was said in the last session, speaking extravagantly, that the Indians were crying for lands in severalty…a patent…that we should give them a fee-simple. There is not a wild Indian living who knows what a fee-simple is. There are very few white men who know what it is.”107 This comment is the closest as anyone comes to hinting at an equal footing between whites and

Indians anywhere in the debate.

Matthew Butler of South Carolina interjected with a request for information on whether severalty had been tried before, and to ask if it had been successful. Teller’s response to this was that with a very few exceptions, the “sixty-odd” treaties of the last thirty-six years had failed on this point. That most Indians taking allotment, had later abandoned it, and returned to living on communal lands. Teller insisted that this same land tenure issue was a major cause leading to the

Nez Perce war, stating, “said one of the chiefs, they asked us to divide the land, to divide our mother upon whose bosom we had been born, upon whose lap we had been reared, to that Indian

107 Ibid, 1696.

32 it was a crime equal to homicide of his own mother…you may put them upon the land…perhaps forever, but they will occupy it without the knowledge that it belongs to them and the segregation of it and putting the title in them is, according to their religious ideas, a violation of moral law.”108 Mr. Butler then asked what may have been the most ludicrous question of the day.

After stating that the Interior Department report claimed that many Indians on allotted land were producing corn, wheat and cattle. “I should like to ask the Senator how they produce cereals unless they have some idea of a title to land?”109 To which Teller replied by giving his colleague a history of corn and vegetable production by Indians in North America, beginning with the

Pamunkey encountered by John Smith. He continued with the revolutionary period, and after, explaining that the type of land title has no bearing on the act of cultivation. Teller revisited the letter sent by the Five Tribes Delegation. In reference to their cattle and other agricultural productions, he stated, “These very men say they hold their land in common and not in severalty and they close their petition with a prayer that we shall not compel them to hold their lands in severalty.”110 At this point Senator Coke asserted that the Civilized tribes were not included because the committee “knew they did not desire it, and the bill provides for only those Indians who desire to hold their lands in severalty.”111

Unwilling to give up control of the debate, Teller began a lengthy attack on Coke’s assertion that any Indians wanted severalty. “Does it not stand to reason that if these semi- civilized tribes have not overcome the Indian repugnance to land in severalty…there will be some little difficulty in dividing up the land of other Indians? The Indians may be cultivators of

108 Ibid, 1697. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid, 1697-1698. 111 Ibid, 1698.

33 the soil just as well and have the land in common; they have always been so,”112 He then attacked the very suitability of the land that was being suggested for allotment, again, using the

Ute bill, Teller related how upon seeing the region for himself, the land of the La Plata River was unsuitable and arid in spite of the Indian Department’s assertion otherwise. Coke accused Teller of being “at war with the President, the Department of the Interior, and the Commissioner of

Indian Affairs.”113 Coke offered into the debate a letter in support from people he referred to as

“gentlemen of great intelligence…of one of the great Christian denominations” and proclaimed that the bill was not an experiment as Mr. Teller thought, and that he [Coke] thought it should be passed without confusing amendments.

It was at this time that Teller responded in length about the ills he perceived in the legislation, his distaste of religious organizations involved in the process, and made his prophecy about the pauperizing of the Indian noted by Wilcomb Washburn in his introduction of the documentary evidence cited at the start of this chapter.114 It is clear, owing to comments made by religious and philanthropic minded members of Congress at this time that at least some of these

“gentlemen of great intelligence” were later part of the so-called Friends of the Indian that would begin a serious lobby effort for allotment during the tenure of the Lake Mohonk Conferences which began two years after these debates.

The remainder of the debate was led by Alvin Saunders of Nebraska and John Morgan of

Alabama. The argument at this point ranged widely; from whether educating a few Indians as farmers and setting them on land would succeed, to initial questions about citizenship status for

112 Ibid, 1699-1700. 113 Ibid, 1701. 114 Ibid, 1703.

34 allotted Indians and the provisions disallowing alienation of property for twenty-five years and requiring two-thirds of tribal men to agree about the disposal of surplus lands. Teller and others did manage to steer the conversation back to the absurdity of a land tenure system that was both unworkable and unintelligible to the very people it was being applied to, again using the Five

Civilized Tribes and the recent troubles with the White River Utes as examples. The debate ended with Teller and others opposed to the bill completely unmoved.115

The debate was again taken up on the 25th of January. The debate was, in the words of

Washburn, “notable for the confusion expressed over the status of the individual Indian, the tribe, and the nature of the Indian title.”116 The Senators shared an expressed paternalistic desire to civilize the Indian. During the debate, John Morgan introduced two letters from Wesley

Powell, Director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology; one describing the Wyandot tribal structure, and the other delineating the vast social and linguistic differences represented in the continent’s Indian population. The Senator also introduced a letter, as he states, from an Indian girl protesting the wardship status of the Indian encoded in the two-thirds provision of the bill.117

During the session, George Hoar of Massachusetts requested an amendment to section six of the bill regarding citizenship for Indians, sparking a heated exchange between George Vest of

Missouri and Joseph Brown of Georgia, which may be the most pertinent of the discussions that day as both men used the 14th amendment and discovery doctrine to argue their cases. Vest, having felt he was accused by Brown [sometime on the previous day] for saying Indians aren’t persons, began by stating “the language of the amendment is that all persons born or naturalized

115 Ibid, 1724. 116 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1725. 117 John Morgan, “Senate Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty, January 25, 1881”, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1747-1749.

35 in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.

Nobody has ever contended, as far as I have heard, that Indians were not persons. We punish them; we drag them to Fort Smith week after week and hang them under the laws of the United

States...how could they be hanged if they were not persons?”118 He furthers his ethnocentric case by citing the Doctrine of Discovery and the legal precedent that Indians, while persons by definition, are a unique class of people, under their own tribal laws for internal affairs, and able to sue in courts of the nation for redress of grievance when a white man is concerned. His full contention was that the right to be represented in court granted the protection of the 14th amendment and that, while persons, Indians were not citizens of the United States. Lastly, he argued that due to this unique position and protection, any amendment to the bill granting such protection was not needed as the Indian already enjoyed these rights.119 Brown countered by citing the Cherokee tobacco case brought forth by Elias Boudinot in 1870 [The Cherokee

Tobacco Case, 78 U.S. (11 Wall.) 616 (1870)], also referenced the 14th amendment as a defense of his contention that Indians were citizens already despite their unique tribal situations, saying,

“My honorable friend very beautifully alluded a while ago to the fact that under that provision of the fourteenth constitutional amendment Indians were entitled to the protection of their rights in courts because the amendment says no State shall deprive any person of the right, etc. Well, if the word ‘person’ in the constitutional amendment in that portion of it embraces the Indian, why does not the word in the earlier portion of it, when it says, all ‘persons’ born in the United States embrace the Indian also?”120 This argument went back and forth for the remainder of the session with both parties arguing their unchanged assertion; the issue remained unresolved so the debate

118 Ibid, 1732. 119 Ibid, 1732-1734. 120 Ibid, 1735.

36 then centered around the letters from the ethnologist at the Smithsonian, and other issues brought up the previous day. After which time, the Senate moved on to executive session business for the day.

The importance of the question of citizenship is critical in any understanding of the policy of the Government at the time. That the Senators refused to extend the logic of Senator

Brown’s point to a natural conclusion speaks volumes about an undercurrent of ethnocentrism and racism in the United States clearly evidenced by continued efforts to suppress the African

American vote under Jim Crow laws. The hypocrisy of this position concerning Indian people as citizens is also clearly demonstrated. The citizen can vote, and if male in 1881, could vote then.

While the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution both refer to Africans and Indian people as less than human, the passage of the 14th amendment abrogated the three-fifths of a person status of freed African slaves and granted them citizenship. The 15th amendment gave them the vote. Any modern interpretation by someone wishing to, for example, deny civil rights to a class of people, may hinge on the same faulty logic but the implication is clear; if an African was now a voting citizen, so must an Indian be. The 14th amendment abrogated the previous constitutional positionality of any Indian person born after 1789 when it was ratified. If the freed

African slave [and any African American born later] was a citizen, so was the Indian person.

This puts the Government’s position regarding an Indian’s status in an extra-Constitutional limbo as will be discussed later.

The debate picked up the following day with the Senate still unresolved on the amendment offered by Senator Hoar from the previous day but quickly became a warm bit of argument on several subjects; falsified agency reporting, tribal ownership of land, and the

37 treatment of Indian people in Colonial Massachusetts.121 John Morgan of Alabama had gotten

Hoar to agree to amend his own amendment by attaching wording to ensure Indians did not lose tribal rights if they accepted citizenship rights by allotment. Hoar had apparently agreed to it before he read it and promptly requested the separation of the two issues as he felt they were distinct. Morgan agreed. William Windom of Minnesota addressed Senator Coke, attempting to get the bill tabled in favor of an appropriations bill for the Navy. It was agreed that Coke wanted to press the Allotment bill to a vote during the session, and the Naval bill was tabled.

One can imagine groaning from the chamber as Henry Teller rose from his seat and addressed the President of the Senate. “Mr. President, when this bill was up for discussion last week, I was reminded by the honorable chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, that in my opposition to this bill I was putting my judgement against that of the President, the Secretary of the Interior, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the honorable Committee on Indian Affairs of the Senate. I know the enormity of the crime of differing with such high and intelligent authority on this question…I know how futile any opposition…backed up by the high authority back and beyond the committee…I know it is not a pleasant thing to forego the smiles of approval of the Secretary of the Interior…”122 Teller, waxing sarcastic, then talked about his obligation to do what he felt was right rather than make his path easier, “to consult the committee and follow the crowd” knowing that if the measure failed they could blame the committee or the Secretary of the Interior, and insinuating that many in the Senate did just that. He admitted that the discussion was wearisome, but he was unwilling to rest his judgement with others. Ending his introductory statement with this jab “with my

121 46th Congress, “Senate Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty, January 26, 1881”, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1759-1760. 122 Ibid, 1761.

38 observation, with my study, I believe, as the senator from Alabama [Morgan] said yesterday, this bill is fraught with evil. This is a bill that, in my judgement, ought to be entitled ‘A bill to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the Earth,’ because, in my view, that is the result.”123

Senator Teller continued speaking for about an hour, allowing only one interruption by

Senator Coke asking for clarification as to which reports he was reading from. Teller attacked the theory of the bill itself as a “pet theory” of the Secretary of the Interior and stated that the agents working in the department were bound to show loyalty and fealty to the secretary in order to keep their jobs. Using an example of an agent at the Pyramid Lake Agency who proclaimed the advancing civilization of his charges for eight years and contrasted these reports with the first report of the new agent at Pyramid Lake who wrote, “I find every year it is reported that these

Indians are making progress in civilization; but now I want, as I start out, that the facts shall be known…that if he had ever made any progress, it must have been when he started in the very lowest possible scale of human beings” and assessing his charges as “debased, and degraded.”124

Teller doggedly continued to make his case against allotment in severalty, calling it a failure, case by case, tribe by tribe. Using examples to show that tribes who had been successful farmers, a stated goal of the bill, had become so due to their holding of lands in common, or had been so from the time of first contact with Europeans. He noted failures of the allotment idea among the Cheyenne River Indians, Devils Lake [a mixture of Assiniboin, Santee, Yankton, and other Sioux], the Sisseton, the Oneidas, Umatilla, Wyandots, Quapaw, Peoria, Miami and the

Pottawattamie. He then asked the Senate to consider the result of allotment on the Navajo, a

123 Ibid, 1762. 124 Ibid, 1762-1763.

39 successful Nation with extensive agricultural and textile production who lived on a land base so arid that allotment would bankrupt them. It was at this point Senator Coke, the only other speaker that hour, asked which reports he referred to for the information. Teller responded that this was all contained in the previous session House Report 188, 45th Congress, 3rd session.125

Teller then pointed to the fact that, as he’d said the day prior, allotment was not a new revolutionary idea. It had been suggested by first by William Crawford, Secretary of War for

President Madison in 1816, and again by James Barbour, in the same post under John Quincy

Adams. Still reading from the recent House Report, he exposed the allotment provisions in

Andrew Jackson’s treaties prior to and during the removal period, and then continuing with the treaties made by BIA Commissioner George Manypenny between 1853-57, and asked that the history of these treaties be read, which it was.126 Using the House Report, Teller continued to note failures in allotment experiments among the Kansa and Delaware tribes. He made special note of language within the Manypenny treaties repeatedly referencing their supposed desire to elevate the value of their lands by granting railroad access, right down to picking specific companies and noting the Pottawattamie wished for railroad service to “carry the surplus product of their farms to market.”127 Teller compared this with later reports showing that not only were these tribes, including the Pottawattamie, not producing surplus anything to be sent to railheads, they were quite hostile toward the railroad companies and almost entirely self-removed to Indian

Territory, having abandoned their allotment lands.128

125 Ibid, 1763-1770. 126 Ibid, 1770-1771. 127 Ibid, 1772. 128 Ibid.

40

One must wonder if Teller had by now either sent his colleagues to sleep or cowed them to silence. He continued, uninterrupted, relating from the House Report the case of the treaty with the Ottawa which described land speculators as having “the most dishonorable expedients to…dispossess the Indian and…gain his land.”129 Teller then put down the House Report and picked up a report by an Army Colonel named Abert who was sent to assess the situation of the

Creek Nation in 1833, three years after Alabama State laws were extended to include the Creeks, and their lands were allotted. Abert found them to “have undergone during the last two or three years from a general state of comparative plenty to that of unqualified wretchedness and want…”130 Teller continued with the case of the Wyandot by giving a year to year look at their recession under the allotment system and their subsequent year to year improvement after their voluntary removal to Indian Territory and a common land tenure and calling out the ridiculousness of the assurance by the “friends of this bill…that these same people were now clamoring for lands in severalty.”131

As the hour wound down, Teller related the experiment in allotment made by the

Delaware. He reiterated the falsity of the claim that the Ute’s were requesting allotment and noting that while there had not passed a sufficient amount of time to assess it, it was likely to fail, and that peace was only maintained by a large contingent of soldiers at Los Pinos.132 At the end of his long speech, Teller, using the Brotherton Indians as example of a success story, makes his case that they had been civilized farmers for hundreds of years and that the process could only work by slowly acclimating Indian people to a new way of life, not by legislating it. He

129 Ibid, 1773. 130 Ibid, 1773-1774. 131 Ibid, 1775-1776. 132 Ibid, 1781.

41 finished by summarizing his position thusly. “I said before, and I say it in no unkind spirit, this bill ought to be entitled a bill to despoil the Indians of their lands and make them vagabonds on the Earth, and a few years will demonstrate that what has been true heretofore…will be true hereafter…no matter who fills the office of the Secretary of the Interior…Commissioner of

Indian Affairs…or who presides over the committee on Indian Affairs, no matter how good they may be, they cannot escape the inexorable fact that this has been contrary to the interest of the

Indian and contrary to the interest of the white man whenever it has been adopted.”133

After Teller’s lengthy depiction of the results of previous allotment experiments, Preston

Plumb of Kansas requested an amendment allowing Indians to lease their allotments to others rather than farm them, to which Henry Dawes, future sponsor of the General Allotment Act, took exception. Dawes suggested that the option to lease was unfit for the uncivilized Indian and would place him in a position of a landlord. Plumb argued that if an Indian would not work and seemed to insinuate that they would not, that leasing was as good an option as any and would provide both income for the Indian and land to till for the enterprising white farmer. Dawes retorted by saying that while he was sure the lease option was intended to ensure that no “idle white community about these Indians would spring up,” it was an idea envisioned by western men working in Washington D.C. “knowing as little about the Indian character and what is necessary for their protection and civilization as we do in the East.”134

The debate devolved quickly into a tit for tat accusation session wherein Plumb asserted that the men of the East couldn’t know all there was to know about Indians as they claimed to because their ancestors had despoiled and destroyed them long ago. Dawes countered by

133 Ibid, 1782-1783. 134 Ibid, 1784-1786.

42 suggesting that only a poor quality of white [Like the Indian person or the former slave in his perception?] would lease from an Indian anyway. The two men went back and forth for about thirty minutes, both arguing from decidedly ethnocentric and narcissistic positions while calling for the best result for whites and savages alike. Dawes arguing that the ability [forced or otherwise] to work the soil was the road to civilization and creating Indian landlords would allow them to quietly disappear. Plumb argued that “we must take the Indian as we find him” asserting that in the end, they were un-civilizable to some extent. The men finally agreed to disagree, and the Senate moved on to executive session.135 Like the day previous, the ethnocentrism and racism displayed by the Senators is quite visible in the light of some modern sensibilities, and certainly within more recent indigenous created historiography. Current political trends in the treatment for people of color and immigrants [or modern perceptions on the issue] may detract from the observers ability to assert that these were the ideas of “men of their time,” rather, it may be easier [and likely more accurate] to asses them as men of their place; white men in the settler colonial project of the United States.

The record of the debate on its last day clearly shows that the proposed legislation would likely result in the destruction of tribal societies, rather than building them up to any so-called civilization. This view is illustrated strongly by the discussion surrounding the introduction of an anthropological assessment of the government workings of the Wyandot Indians. As Washburn wrote in his introduction of the document, “the findings did not, however, inhibit the proponents of the bill, it seemed to make them more determined to strike at the root of the problem-the tribal relationship, which they realized could not be destroyed with the consent of the Indians.”136

135 Ibid, 1790-1799. 136 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1759.

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During the course of this last day, the amendment to strike the two-thirds provision in the bill failed. Senator Teller continued to argue forcefully, as before, and along the same line. His contention being that the Indian performed better under their own common use land tenure than they did under severalty, and that to force severalty upon them would be disastrous for the

“uncivilizable” Indian. Hammering away on these themes, Teller finished the debate, speaking last, he said “You are legislating not for today alone, but for the future, In 1854 it was thought that these Indians would be civilized in twenty-five years, twenty-five years have passed and they are not civilized yet, and they are not the owners of the land that we gave them in 1854 and the years following. I say now that when you have given the Indians the land under this bill and with this present notion, five years will see every Indian in the country with his land and his patent, and thirty years from that time will see every Indian in the country, with rare exceptions, a vagabond on the face of the Earth.”137

The debate had continued for four days. The Senate was no closer at the end of that time then at the start. In the end, the measure failed to achieve passage. The debate presents, in the

Congressmen’s own words, not only some sincere desire to help the Indian person, but also a hubris, paternalism, and an ethnocentric viewpoint displayed by every Senator, including Henry

Teller. The debate on allotting lands in severalty would be taken up again on December 15-16,

1886 and January 18-25, 1887. During this period, the legislation in question would be the

General Allotment Act, and it would pass, due in large part to increasing pressure from white settlers demanding lands, the desire to open up Indian Territory to these settlers, and the influence of the recently powerful ‘Friends of the Indian’ whose membership included Henry

137 Ibid.

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Dawes. As these issues influenced the debate in 1886, it is important to look at them before we examine the debate itself.

Our Indian Policy, a House of Cards- Joseph Keppler, 1881. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C.

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Chapter Three Why Allotment?

Any study into the success or failure of a project of man must begin with an understanding of what that project hoped to achieve. The case of the General Allotment Act is no different; we must assess the reasons behind the legislation. Though the Congress of the United

States was the forum and vehicle through which the Act became the law of the land, there were other parties in the debate. Some people had as their main objective to gain control over Indian lands; railroad companies, settlers in the west, and land speculators wanting to capitalize on that westward flow of humanity.

There were others who genuinely disliked the way Indians were swindled by these speculators, settlers, and businessmen and wished to civilize the Indian for his own protection.

They wanted an Indian who could stand the storm of expansion and not be its target. To do this, all agreed that the Indian must be re-made in the image and likeness of the white man, for they were themselves made in the image and likeness of God. This idea, present from the founding of the nation, has been called more than a cloak over settler colonialism or American imperial desires. Author Donald Scott quotes History and Religious Studies professor, Conrad Cherry as saying, “America is a Nation called to a special destiny by God.” Such distinctions as those made by Mr. Scott, tend to disappear in the words used by the people living an experience and show that Manifest Destiny and the supposed uniqueness of the American experience is more often than not, a cloak to hide the ethnocentrism, racism, and othering inherent in settler colonial projects.138

138 Donald M. Scott, “The Religious Origins of Manifest destiny”, Divining America, National Humanities center, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm, accessed 04 July, 2019.

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The philosophical heart of the Allotment legislation was set beating by the various missionaries, scholars, politicians, and political action groups who grew to dominate the debate on Indian Affairs in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, collectively known as the

“Friends of the Indian.” In 1883 these disparate groups were provided a common forum in which to discuss their plans for Indian legislation when Albert K. Smiley, a member of the Board of

Indian Commissioners, hosted the first of what would become the annual Lake Mohonk

Conferences.139

The goals of the General Allotment Act were several linked outcomes; the desire to civilize the Indian, disbanding troublesome tribal governments, educating the Indian to make him a farmer, teaching his children to be like the whites, and to make lands available for the westward expansion of the country. Not all these goals were those of the “Friends”, many of whom seemed to have believed they had a real desire to improve the lives of Indian people and in some small way, repair the damage done by earlier policy. Land developers, mining interests, the railroad companies, and settlers all wished to free up lands for their use.

The government’s interest was two-pronged; meet the desires of these various groups of philanthropists and lessen the need for the Army to police Indian peoples through the process of assimilation. It didn’t go un-noticed that the policy of forced reservation living, and military action had failed to either remove the Indian or pacify them and had become increasingly expensive.140 The treaty system was considered a failure by many of those attending the Mohonk

Conferences. Chief among the detractors of the system was Charles C. Painter, head of the

Indian Rights Association from 1884 until his death eleven years later. Painter presented a

139 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, Introduction. 140 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1618.

47 scathing critique of U.S. Indian Policy in 1886, calling it “an ungainly monstrosity” and proceeding to attack the policy on three fronts; treaties, reservations, and Indian agencies.141

Painter asserted that treaties were no longer needed; they were designed to “settle a present difficulty in the easiest manner possible, adjusting to difficulties and lessen dangers excited by our too great greed and unscrupulous methods of gaining land and pelf.”142 In his detailing of the reservations created by these treaties, Painter declared that rather than protecting the Indian or his land from whites, they “excluded him from what we took” and “fenced out law, civil institutions, and social order, and admits only despotism greed and lawlessness.”143 It is important to note that Painter’s ideas were clearly founded on the notion that the Indian was an ignorant savage, unable or unwilling to defend himself against white incursions into his lands. It is some mitigation of his view that Painter saw accurately that Indian people were hamstrung by the reservation system and noted that the Americans wished Indians “become industrious, self- reliant, self-supporting, and we forbid to them the conditions which make this possible.”144

The Dawes Act was debated and made law less than a decade after the annihilation of

George Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Little Bighorn River. It was also less than ten years since Quanah Parker led the last free Comanches onto a reservation, after a decade of stalemated fighting with the numerically superior U.S. 5th Cavalry. We begin our discussion first with the

141 Charles C. Painter, “Our Indian Policy as Related to the Civilization of the Indians”, Americanizing the American Indian, 66-67. 142 Ibid, 68-69. Note: The reader should understand the significance of the word pelf, which denotes something “unjustly heaped up.” It should not be overlooked that Painter chose this precise word considering its meaning. The choice of a word that assesses Indian property as somehow unjustly obtained speaks volumes about the settler colonial mindset. 143 Ibid, 70-71. 144 Ibid, 72-73.

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“Friends” as the debate of 1887 shows a huge influence by Henry Dawes on other members of

Congress who had the power to make the end of the Indian Problem a reality.

According to the nineteenth century American Historian D.S. Otis it was conclusively true that the “Friends of the Indian” had in mind the highest motives in their desire to replace tribal cultures with white settler civilization.145 This conclusion is highly debatable. Otis, commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to write a monograph on the Allotment Act, surely felt he was even handed in his assessment; however, his failure to access Indian Agency

Records or the writings of reformers make the volume only marginally useful. Likewise, his limited assessment of Indian people’s agency or even to the varying, and often competing goals of different tribes and nations makes for an indian-less book on Indians. His work is included here because it was the document used by the House Committee on Indian Affairs in 1934 during the reorganization of U.S. Indian Policy. The document is not without all merit; it offers a concise timeline of the events, and participants and can be used to demonstrate the colonialist bias, both in the material presented and in the historiography of the author.

The monograph shows a settler population who felt that their society was far superior to the “communistic” societies of the American Indian. Jesse Lee, an officer in the U.S., 9th

Infantry, and acting agent to the Yankton Sioux in 1877, wrote, “As long as the Indians remain in villages, they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent feasts, community food, heathen ceremonies and dances, and constant visitations, these will continue as long as the people live together in close communities and villages…I trust that before another year is ended,

145 Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1973), Kindle Edition. Kindle Reader Location 218.

49 they will generally be located on individual lands of farms. From that date will begin their real and permanent progress.”146

Allotment was intended also to grant the benefits of citizenship to the Indian. One important aspect of this civilization seems to have been instilling an individualistic greed in the

Indian population as a replacement for communal norms associated with most tribes. “The allotment of land in severalty will go a long way…towards making these tribes nearer the happy goal…I do not think the results of labor ought to be evenly distributed irrespective of merits of individuals for that would discourage effort…under the present state of communistic affairs, such would appear to be the result of the labor of many.”147American individualism was the key to civilization according to some of these reformers. Francis Walker, BIA head in 1873 went so far as to call it the difference between civilization and barbarism.148

The Friends of the Indian tent covered a set of diverse small groups of mostly wealthy, religious minded philanthropists, a few government appointees, and church organizations.

Organizations such as the Board of Indian Commissioners,149 the Women’s National Indian

Association,150 the Indian Rights Association,151 Temperance Union,152 and a few other smaller groups and individuals made up the bulk of the movement. Their mission was to remedy the crisis they saw as the result of increasing pressure on Indian people by the advance of a growing nation. The theme behind the mission was simple, and rather simplistic in that it failed to account for the Indian point of view. The “Friends of the Indian” were set against the very idea that

146 Ibid, Kindle Reader Location 218-232. 147 Ibid, Location 232. 148 Ibid, Location 232-237. 149 Ibid, Location 576. 150 Ibid, Location 589. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid, Location 618.

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Indian people should be treated any differently than any other American. That treating the Indian as “other” or “out there” was detrimental to the Indian. The solution, to them, was simple; destroy the “otherness” and form a homogeneous mass of citizenry of which the Indian was to be an indistinguishable part.

In 1869, Congress created the Board of Indian Commissioners. The Commissioners, appointed by the President, were to guide the distribution of funds, advise, and supervise Indian programs and focus public interest on Indian affairs.153 The President was to be the appointment authority to ensure that men of public spirit and good morals made up the board; and no one was to be paid. The board first expressed a general support for allotment in 1876 and thereafter continued such support.154 The two private Indian Associations of importance were the Women’s

National Indian Association, created in 1879 and the all-male Indian Rights Association, begun in 1883. Both advocated for the education, voting rights, and Christianization of the American

Indian for the purpose of civilization. The Women’s National Association was a loose federation of East Coast based local chapters. Each required and relied on the support of churches, pastors,

Christian citizens, and Christian editors for financial and moral support.155 The Association, while occasionally writing petitions and supporting Indian causes like voting, temperance, and honoring treaties, made their predominant work in education and proselytizing missions to the tribes.

The Indian Rights Association, formed in 1882, consisted of about forty men with three common goals; educating the public about Indian issues, protecting Indian legal rights, and

153 Ibid, Location 576. 154 Ibid, Location 589. 155 Ibid, Location 605-619.

51 dividing of Indian lands in severalty.156 Unlike the women’s group, the Indian Rights

Association relied heavily on pamphlet printing and public hearings on the issues. Their approach to the problems facing the American Indian did not concern itself with Indian education and religion; rather focused on litigation of behalf of Indian issues, lobbying the government and arousing public interest. As their goals were political and legal, this group refrained from missionary activity and direct contact with tribal entities. The secretary of the

Indian Rights Association went so far as to say “The Indian Rights Association represents the practical and businesslike aims and methods for the solution of the Indian Problem. It has no interest in extreme or eccentric theories or plans.”157

With several groups working toward common goals, it was natural for them to meet. In

1883, Albert K. Smiley, member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, summoned the first of the annual Lake Mohonk Conferences, to which lawmakers, religious leaders, Indians rights groups, and philanthropists all came. Smiley explained the formation of the conference thusly in

1885; “My aim has been to unite the best minds interested in Indian Affairs, so that all should act together and be in harmony, and so that the prominent persons connected with Indian Affairs should act as one body and create a public sentiment in favor of the Indians.”158 It was at the inaugural Lake Mohonk Conference that these groups together called for allotment of Indian lands in severalty. This became the centerpiece of the conference for the next five years.159

It is important to mention that not all people considering themselves as friendly to the cause of the Indian were considered so by others. Anthropologists were seen by some in a

156 Ibid. 157 Ibid, Location 605. 158 Ibid, Location 619. 159 Ibid, Location 633.

52 negative light. Much in the same way that Vine Deloria would write almost a century later, in

1969, “the Anthro is devoted to Pure Research. Pure research is a body of knowledge absolutely devoid of useful application and incapable of meaningful digestion.160 At the fourth Lake

Mohonk conference, Lawrence Lindley of the Indian Rights Association stated that anthropologists and ethnologists seemed to be adverse to allotment because of “the desire of the ethnological student to preserve the utensils for the study of his specialty.”161

The Indian Defense Association, of which anthropologist Alice Fletcher was part, formed in 1885. While agreeing with the overall goals of the allotment, they felt that to do it as quickly as possible would be precipitous and unwise. Their disagreement over the speed and need for full allotment was stated in their organizational documents; “the fact that powerful organizations are already advocates of the policy to be opposed, renders it necessary that the effort to counteract their influences should be an organized effort also.”162 This is not to say that all ethnologists were against allotment. Fletcher, an ethnologist and philanthropist living for nearly thirty years among the Omaha people, wrote extensively on them, and helped the tribal chief secure allotment for his people. Fletcher, ever the dynamo for Indian rights and never accepting that the

Indian might be injured by her work, would spend the bulk of her life working to allot land to the various tribes, including the Nez Pearce. She helped to draft the Dawes Act and helped to develop the curriculum for Indian children at the Carlisle School, and in 1888 wrote a special report to the Bureau of Education titled Indian Education and Civilization.163

160 Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins; An Indian Manifesto, (University of Oklahoma Press; 1988), 80. 161 Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, Location 633. 162 Ibid, Location 633-646. 163 Jane Gay, “With the Nez Perces; Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-1892”, New Perspectives on the West, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/fletcher.htm.

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Fletcher and John Powell, director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, wrote in favor of allotment in 1881 in a letter to Alabama Senator John T. Morgan that “no measure could be devised more efficient for the ultimate civilization of the Indians of this country than one by which they could successfully and rapidly obtain lands in severalty.”164 Excepting different opinions about implementation, it is safe then to say that the majority of the missionaries, politicians, scholars, and philanthropists included in the collective “Friends of the Indian” were all of a general mindset. Most everyone was enthusiastic about allotment, except the Indian.

Chief among these friends was Senator Henry Laurens Dawes of Massachusetts. Dawes remained convinced of the civilizing effect of land ownership throughout his career as a politician and in later life. During his tenure in the Senate, Dawes headed the Committee on

Indian Affairs and was a primary guest and speaker at the Lake Mohonk Conferences. After leaving the U.S. Senate in 1893, Dawes became the chairman of the Commission to the Five

Civilized Tribes, which became synonymous to such an extent that it was commonly called the

Dawes Commission.165 Dawes, like other Indian reformers of the late nineteenth century, believed that what was good for Indians was good for all Indians. The fact that the Cherokee,

Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole had been exempted from the General Allotment Act seemed anathema to the very purpose of Americanization and civilizing of these peoples. In

1893, the Commission to the Five Tribes was formed with Dawes as its chair.

The following year, Dawes spoke at some length about the need to bring these Five

Tribes into the “Indian work” of the allotment system. “It pleased the President of the United

States to ask me last fall to take charge of a new branch of this work…the Indian work does not

164 Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, Location 659. 165 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 3.

54 pertain to the tribe, but to the race. If it is necessary and beneficial for those that are now within the pale of the legislation of the United States, it is equally good and equally essential to those

Indians within the borders of the United States who are by the law of the land excluded at this moment form a share in your work.”166 While it is clear from his words that Dawes believed that all Indians should be assimilated, it is just as clear, in his use of “excluded” rather than

“exempted,” that he felt assimilation was in the best interest of the Indian.

Henry Dawes well understood the nature of American society and the inexorable westward movement of that society just as clearly as he, and others, misunderstood the Indian himself. His words to the 1886 Mohonk Conferees on the evening of October 13th, the second day of the proceedings, make the opinion he held for the duration of the Indian Problem clear.

“That he will pass away as an Indian I don't doubt, and that very rapidly. It will be into citizenship, and into a place among the citizens of this land, or it will be into a vagabond and a tramp. He is to disappear as an Indian of the past; there is no longer any room for such an Indian in this country; he cannot find a place. The Indian of the past has no place to live in this country.

Something stronger than the Mohonk Conference has dissolved the reservation system. The greed of these people [settlers] for the land has made it utterly impossible to preserve it for the

Indian. He must take his place where you have undertaken to put him, or he must go a vagabond throughout this country, and it is for you and me to say which it shall be. He cannot choose for himself, and he does not know where the ways are. The survival of the fittest is all you can ask after you have done your duty, and all that can be expected.”167 The prophecy of the Indian

166 Henry Dawes, “The Indians of the Indian Territory”, Americanizing the American Indian,317-318. 167 Henry Dawes, “Solving the Indian Problem”, Americanizing the American Indian, 27-30.

55 vagabond is ironic in that it was realized as the result of the very policies meant to prevent such poverty.

It is notable that while Dawes rightly predicted the pauperism of the American Indian at the hands of settler colonialism, he broadly underestimated the strength of Indian peoples to resist assimilation. Dawes never really stated that he thought the Indian would “become a vagabond,” rather, he seems to have assumed the monolithic Indian would choose civilization over destitution. While some did, many did not, could not, choose to forget their cultures, relationships, or government forms which were as deeply ingrained in them as Manifest Destiny was ingrained in the settler colonialist.

Most debates of the time only touch on the differences between tribal cultures and motives, if they touch on them at all. Dawes’ “communistic” Indian monolith was a fantasy at best. In the western plains alone, from the Llano Escatado to the Missouri River breaks on

Montana’s front range, were more than a dozen tribes, mostly nomadic, encompassing about fifteen languages [including some French, English, and Spanish speakers], with differing political outlooks, from the corporatism of the Hunkpapa and Cheyenne, to the Imperial aspirations of the Ute, to the outlaw biker mindset of the Comanche.168 Of course, the Comanche were not an outlaw biker gang, they, like the Ute, were an Empire minded society grouped in communal war bands.

These Ute and Comanche are exemplary of the very human condition of the Indian that lives in a space, crafting that space to fit their desire and creating their own place in the landscape as the settler colonialist does which we’ll discuss later. They also adapt to foreign

168 Gwynn, Empire of the Summer Moon, Introduction.

56 influence and economy, but history tends to assume that adaptation means losing the very things that the colonialist identifies you by, and therefore a part of yourself .169 The point is that there were no real “Indians” like the mythological ones of the allotment debates. There were many different tribes, nations, and individuals, all with differing viewpoints. The Indian was more like the European [human] than either the Friends of the Indian, or his enemies, would have cared to admit, if they understood the point at all.

The consensus view was that allotment of individually owned land, education of the

Indian Child, and a breakup of the reservation system were the keys to civilizing and saving the

Indian. While it is clear from the speeches and writings of these Friends of the Indian that their motives were, to them, altruistic, it is just as clear that their consideration of the Indian point of view was nonexistent. The idea of the savage, the backward, the untutored, was so entrenched that the question of Americanizing the Indian was never a question of if or why, but only of when. The influence these various church leaders and Christian philanthropists had over politicians of the day helped create and sustain the myths of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, which can be heard clearly in the debate of the General Allotment Act of 1887.

169 Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land; Indians and Empires in the Early American West, (Harvard University Press: 2008),3-4.

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Chapter Four The Congressional Debate of 1886

The House and Senate debated the General Allotment Act over a four-day period between the 15th of December 1886 and the 25th of January 1887. The Act became the law of the land on the 8th of February 1887 when it was signed by President Grover Cleveland. The late

Wilcomb E. Washburn, emeritus Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s American Studies program, called the final passage of the legislation a bit of “an anticlimax after the spirited debates of earlier years.”.170 This chapter will explore the House debate on the 15th and 18th of

December 1886 and the Senate debate of January 25th, 1887. The House Minority Report on the debate will also be covered as it contains the only real dissent on the legislation.

The debate in the House began with Thomas Skinner of North Carolina requesting a parliamentary inquiry to bring about debate on House Bill 54, the House version of the

Allotment Bill. James Weaver, representative from Indiana, asked the Speaker to rule on a point of order; he did not object to anything specific, but rather wished the bill to be read, concerning the appropriation portion of the bill before Skinner spoke about it. After the portion was read and briefly discussed, Weaver’s objection was upheld and the bill was read in its entirety; including amendments from the Indian Affairs Committee, after which, Skinner was able to speak at length. “Mr. Chairman, from the beginning of our existence as a nation, the Indian has been the subject of national legislation; but at no time so much as now has there been such a pressing

170 Washburn, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1843.

58 necessity for the adoption of a general Indian policy; the enactment of some measure that will lead to a correct solution of the Indian Problem.”171

Skinner spoke about the advancement of white civilization pressing upon the Indian from the east and from the west. The game animals needed for Indian sustenance were gone, as was land where they could retreat from white settlers; he proposed that the only course left to Indian peoples was “either perish, depend upon the government for support, or abandon his thrift-less habits, learn to eat bread from the sweat of his face, and finally rise to the level of the civilization that surrounds him,” the Indian must either be a starving pauper or a self-supporting American citizen.172

Skinner advised the house members of what he called the uselessness of “grieving over spilled milk” or recounting the supposed wrongs suffered by Indian people at the hands of white civilization.173 Referencing a recent report from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and comments by R.H. Pratt, Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School on the need to place the

Indian and the white in close proximity, Skinner spoke of the need to make the Indian “abandon their tribal relation and take lands in severalty as the cornerstone of their complete success in agriculture” and that “tribal relations must be broken up; and the practice of massing large numbers of Indians on reservations must be stopped; that lands must be allotted in severalty.”174

“The Indian,” claimed Skinner, had more land on his reservation than he could ever use, which the white man must possess and doing so “may come in contact with the Indians.”175 In

171 49th Congress, “Congressional Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty. December 15-16, 1886; January 18, 25, 1887”, American Indians and the United States Vol 3,1849. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid, 1850. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid.

59 his view, the best of solution would be for each trial member to take a quantity of land sufficient for cultivation or grazing. This would allow, in his words, the Indian to “shake off the shackles of tribal authority” and would give the individual, by his fee simple title, motivation and

“stimulate him to work and improve his land and accumulate property.”176 Skinner concluded by comparing the Indian to the recently freed African slave. “Twenty years ago the Negro was suddenly raised from slavery to freedom...and by long and rapid strides has been advancing in civilization…I was informed by him who knew both the Indian and the Negro, that the Indian is superior, give then to the red man, the black man’s chance.”177

Judging by Skinner’s comments about Indians and African Americans, his supremacist philosophy is clear. Also clear is the likelihood that he spent very little time considering the lived experience of either group. In the previous decade, while some advances were made by former slaves, including the election of the country’s first African American Congressman it could hardly be called “long and rapid strides.”178 Beginning with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Blacks in the United States had witnessed the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, continued political violence and voter suppression during every election cycle in the southern states. Anti-

Black Riots had occurred in New Orleans, Colfax, and Coushatta Louisiana. African Americans had been murdered in Colfax.179 African Americans also witnessed firsthand, the spread of Jim

Crow legislation and segregation across the post Reconstruction south. Indian peoples had fared no better, having faced almost constant warfare as white settlements forced their way west including the mass killings of women and children in seven states from Kansas to California.

176 Ibid, 1851. 177 Ibid, 1851-1852. 178 Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was an American publisher and politician, a Union Army officer, and the first African American to become governor of a U.S. state. A Republican, Pinchback served as the 24th Governor of Louisiana from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873. 179 Eric Foner, Reconstruction; America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, (Harper-Collins: 1988), 437.

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One could argue that “giving the red man the black man’s chance” was already being practiced.

The main difference was that while African Americans were targeted by mostly angry mobs of southern whites, Indians were mostly targeted by the U.S. Army.

Bishop Perkins, Representative from Kansas, rose next to speak. Making a case that the bill was in the best interest of the Indians and had the endorsement of the Commissioner of

Indian Affairs, and “of all those who have given attention to the subject of the education, the

Christianization, and the development of the Indian race.”180 Perkins clearly alludes to the collective “Friends of the Indians” though does not use the term. He claims that the bill is in keeping with the sentiment of the nation and adds that “almost every community in the land is asking for such legislation.”181 Perkins, after addressing two amendments that he wished to be attached, requested to strike from section one language pertaining to tribal patents to land, saying, “time for issuance of tribal patents has passed.” His second request was to strike the provision requiring the Treasury to hold the proceeds from the sale of excess Indian lands in trust for twenty-five years. Perkins suggested that it would be better to allow the Secretary of the

Interior to get the best contracts he could in each case, separately. Both amendments suggest that

Perkins was interested in making the disposal of all Indian Titles easier and placing the benefits thereof at the discretion of the government rather than the tribes. Perkins then asks that the

House proceed to vote on the bill without delay “unless some members wish to occupy a few minutes in opposition to it.”182

180 49th Congress, “Congressional Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty. December 15-16, 1886; January 18, 25, 1887”, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1852. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid, 1852-1853. Perkins is speaking of the Government making the best contracts for land sales, on a case by case basis, though his language may not be clear to the modern reader. His desire to allow a few minutes of opposition debate seems to be an olive branch of sorts to enable the bill to proceed to an immediate vote.

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Perkins’ call for a vote was delayed by questions regarding the citizenship status granted by the legislation from George Steele of Alabama, asking if such citizenship would be granted without formal application of naturalization. To which Perkins replied “it does not require it; yet it is not in conflict” assuring Steele that whether a state required naturalization of the Indian or allowed citizenship upon “qualifying themselves” as Skinner said a few minutes before, made no difference as far as the legislation was concerned.183

Just as the question of birthright citizenship had been raised in 1881, it was raised again.

This time the concern turned upon the implicit Indian sovereignty of Steel’s question. Steele alludes again to sovereignty with his follow-up question regarding New York admitting Indians to citizenship without naturalization papers, implying he understands that a strong argument can be made that Indians persons were citizens by birth under the fourteenth amendment.184 It’s not clear whether Bishop Perkins understood what Steele was getting at. He brushed the question aside when he said the bill “does not require the formality of naturalization.” What seems likely is that Steele knew quite well what he was asking; did requiring formal application for citizenship imply a sovereignty [as citizens of real nations] for all Indian people within the

United States? It is also very likely he understood the extra-Constitutional position of Indian personhood created by the semantics of the debate; an Indian could not simultaneously be a sovereign foreign national requiring naturalization, and a citizen of the United States under the fourteenth amendment. This dual positionality of being an Indian when it suited the government and being an American citizen when that was convenient placed the Indian in a non-personhood

183 Ibid,1853-1854. 184 Ibid.

62 status much the same way slaves were person-like, and counted for congressional districting and also un-counted chattel for the purposes of control and free labor.185

The debate continued, and John Rodgers of Arkansas asked why the Miami, Peoria, and

Sac Fox were exempted. Skinner answered; “Precisely because in a separate bill which has been considered by our committee and reported favorably to the House, provision has been made for the allotment of their lands.”186 After a few minutes working out potential objections and voting on the amendments, the question of allowing for a double allotment of land only usable for grazing was raised.

James Throckmorton of Texas objected to the amendment on the grounds that tribal members should be given this double amount of land outright as “we cannot expect the wild

Indians to live on as little amount of land as the white man” given that Indians were herders and not cultivators. James Weaver of Iowa disagreed on the grounds that large pieces of land would essentially retard the “natural herder” from becoming an “agriculturalist.”187 The hour set aside for the debate ran out as the House prepared to vote on this amendment. With no quorum and time expired, the House moved on to other business.

The second and third days of debate in the House were quite tame, dealing primarily with the wording of the bill and amendments. The amendment from the previous day was approved, allowing a full section, 640 acres of land to be allotted [per head of house] where such land was suitable only for grazing. The house debated the twenty-five-year alienation period, deciding that if “any Indian required more than that period to become capable of keeping his land, he would

185 Paul Finkelman, “How the Pro-Slavery Constitution Led to the Civil War”, in Rutgers Law Journal Fall/Winter 2013 vol 43 no 3, (Rutgers School of Law: 2013), 405. 186 49th Congress, “Congressional Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty. December 15-16, 1886; January 18, 25, 1887”, American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1854. 187 Ibid, 1857.

63 never be able to manage his affairs” and struck the provision from the bill. The committee, after conferring with the Senate, readmitted the provision with the interest rate on the Treasury accounts held for the tribes changed from five percent to three percent, and debated keeping the money in trust, to be used to educate tribal members rather than being paid to the tribes outright.

The House voted instead to add “at the discretion of the President” to the language of the amendment as a protection of the funds and to allow disbursement as exigencies might arise before the alienation period had expired. The Committee suggested a preference for those accepting allotment and citizenship in hiring policemen for Indian communities, which was agreed to. The previous days debate about adding the Peoria, Miami, and Sac Fox to the bill’s coverage continued, as well as a short debate over adding the Five Civilized Tribes to the legislation; both were voted down. On the morning of the 18th, the bill and amendments were ordered read, and the vote was postponed to the following day. The debate in the House was over, and excepting a Minority Report discussed later, it was done without any substantive questions being posed other than Steel’s allusion to the citizenship problem in the legislation.

The House passed the legislation, and it went into conference hearings in the Senate.188

The Senate began their debate on the 25th of January 1887 when Henry Dawes submitted the report from the House for agreement. The report was read, at which time Joseph Dolph of

Oregon asked whether the provision requiring a twenty-five-year period before an Indian could sell his allotment was changed by the House. Senator Dawes responded that it had not and stated that the only change was to the effect that “the President may, in his discretion in any particular case, extend the time after twenty-five years.”189 Dolph asked why the wording in the report was

188 49th Congress, “Congressional Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty. December 15-16, 1886; January 18, 25, 1887.” American Indians and the United States Vol 3, 1873. 189 Ibid, 1875.

64 different, and Dawes explained that the Senate’s wording had seemed “not improved by their re- writing” and was restored to the original Senate language excepting the addition of the

Presidential discretion note.190

Dolph continued, “I should like to ask the Senator another question. When the bill was under discussion, I proposed an amendment to the effect that the proceed of the lands which should be sold should be placed in the treasury…at interest…to be used at any time for educational and other purposes…but that the principal should not be subject…until the expiration of twenty-five years…I understand, if I have correctly heard the reading of the conference report, that has been changed and the provision has been abandoned and the principal as well as interest may be appropriated at any time.”191

Senator Dawes then read the Senate provision in question and stated “That was deemed by the Senate a very wise provision, it was stricken out entirely by the other House without any substitute for it. Leaving the purchase money for any portion of the reservation of any tribe to be disposed of just as the United States might choose unless the Indians who made the agreement were provident enough to make a condition of sale such as would secure it to them.”192 Dawes continued, “The conferees on the part of the House insisted that proceeds of the Indian lands were the common property of the United States. They held very strongly to the House amendment to strike out the provision, insisting that the Indians could take care of themselves in making any agreement with the United States.”193 Dawes finished by saying “It was deemed by the Senate conferees a very dangerous thing to leave it to the discretion of the Indians themselves

190 Ibid, 1876. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid.

65 after long conference the conferees agreed to substitute for nothing on the part of the other

House, and for this provision on the part of the Senate, a stipulation which the secretary will read.”194 After the stipulation was read, Dawes continued “The difference; the Senator will see, between that and the text as it went from the Senate is this: It enables the United States, where they think the exigencies of the Indians require it, to make an appropriation from time to time to these funds for the very purposes the Senator sought to secure by his amendment. It also provides that instead of its being at five per cent interest while it remains in the Treasury it shall be at three per cent.”195 Dawes further noted that he agreed with the House that there were times when exigencies may arise requiring the government to draw funds from these accounts. The argument Dawes made here was that allowing the Government to have maximum control over land sale proceeds was in the best interest of the tribes, whether they were consulted about disbursals or not. The debate centered on whether to allow the government free reign to appropriate moneys from the sale of Indian lands to benefit them, without talking to the tribes before doing so. In the end, this was exactly what happened.

Dolph then stated that he was of the opinion that the changes to his amendment were not wise ones, saying, “There are some two hundred and fifty thousand Indians in the United States who are wards of the government, we control their persons, their property, and we make large annual appropriations out of the Treasury for their maintenance.”196 Dolph then explained his very real fear of this appropriation power, stating, “What I fear is, if the reservations are allotted in severalty to the Indians and made alienable after twenty-five years, the residue sold and money placed in the Treasury and from time to time appropriated for them, as soon as they [the

194 Ibid, 1866-1867. 195 Ibid, 1877-1878. 196 Ibid.

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Tribes] come in control of these lands, they will pass out of their control, be sold, the proceeds squandered, and the proceeds of the sale of their lands will have been exhausted by

Congressional appropriations for their benefit in the meantime.”197 Dolph felt the result would create “a quarter of a million paupers, or more, on the hands of the Government.”198 Dawes responded “The Senator goes upon the ground that there will not be any future Congress as wise as this…we have got to trust future Congresses in a great many things, and while I agree with the

Senator that I would like to put this beyond the reach of future Congresses, I would not give up the whole bill for that.”199 Here Dawes did what politicians do, he made the argument that the end would justify the means to get the bill passed.

Dawes then spoke in reference to the committee process explaining that suggestions came from the Executive Branch and others, some later than others, and that the process was a compromise, finishing with “I make this statement so that those who are interested in these suggestions of improvement will know why they do not appear in this bill. It was not because the suggestions were not wise in themselves, but because they came too late to be incorporated in the bill.”200 Dolph’s last question was “why not make appropriations from the general fund in the

Treasury as we do now in such cases?” Dawes, somewhat humorously replied, “If the Senator will go upon the Committee on Appropriations and get a little experience in that matter, he will see why anybody on that committee does not like to trust to that source.”201 With that, the

President Pro Tempore asked for a concurrence on the committee report, got it, and the debate was ended.

197 Ibid. 198 Ibid, 1878-1879. 199 Ibid, 1879. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid.

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It would be incorrect to assume there was no debate; there just wasn’t much. Both the

House and Senate seemed willing to make many compromises to get this legislation passed. This was good for the functioning of the U.S. Government, but, in the end, not so much so for Indian people. It would also be incorrect to assume there were no arguments made against the

“Humanitarianism” of the legislation; the House Minority Report of the Committee on Indian

Affairs attacked the proposed bill on both points. The report called the bill an “experiment without practical basis” as well as a “hobby of speculative philanthropy” once again doing for the indigenous what the settler felt best, without consultations with those they were supposedly doing good things for.202 The minority opinion argued by William B. Allison. Senator from Iowa and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs wrote that the whole idea cut against the grain of Indian agricultural traditions; he could not be made into a farmer simply by adding a quarter-section of land. The report further accused the majority, led by Senator Dawes, of judging the Indian person from their perspective rather than his own. The report called the bill illogical by assuming that the Indian person was like the whites and then placing so many restrictions on his allotment that he would remain a ward of the Government.203 The report concluded with its most damning claim, penned by Senator Allison. “If this were done in the name of greed, it would be bad enough. But to do it in the name of humanity, and under the cloak of an ardent desire to promote the Indian’s welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse. Of all the attempts to encroach upon the Indian, this attempt to

202 202Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis; Christian Reformers and The Indian, 1865-1900, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1976), 245. 203 Ibid, 246.

68 manufacture him into a white man by an act of Congress and the grace of the Secretary of the

Interior is the baldest, the boldest, and the most unjustifiable.”204

The differences between the debate in 1881 and the debate, or rather lack of debate in

1887 are easily seen. The long and detailed questioning of the policy itself had all but disappeared. The intervening six years had brought a change in the Congress. One could argue that it was a different Congress, but that is only partly true. Many of the same men held the same or similar positions within the Senate, and turnover in the House was not total. Something else had changed. The influence of the “Friends of the Indian” is not adequate to explain the shift. An increase in settler population, mining, railways and others placed demands on the government for land. The ingress of white settlement had, from a steady stream, become a raging torrent by

1886. The “Friends of the Indian” were not the only lobby in Washington. On the 3rd of

February 1887, the President signed the General Allotment Act.

The General Allotment Act had at its core four basic provisions; 1) the grant of land in severalty to heads of house, adults over eighteen, and minor children. 2) a patent in fee simple to be held in trust by the government for twenty-five years, during which it could be neither sold nor encumbered, 3) a four-year period for eligible persons to choose their piece of land, after which time, allotments would be chosen for them, and 4) the granting of U.S. citizenship to allottees and to any other Indian abandoning their tribe and “adopting the habits of civilized life.”205

204 Ibid. 205 49th Congress of the United States, The General Allotment Act of 1887, sections 1 through 6, Transcript of Dawes Act (1887), Ourdocuments.gov. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=50&page=transcript, accessed 20 July 2019.

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The provisions of the Dawes Act, as detailed in section one required that each head of house was to receive a quarter section of land or 160 acres; each single adult over eighteen, not a head of house, an eighth section or 80 acres and each minor child, a sixteenth section or 40 acres.

The Act stipulated further that orphaned children receive 80 acres. These allotted lands were to be ‘advantageous” for grazing or farming and of equal or near equal value. Any reservation that did not have sufficient land mass to be allotted to the total of tribe members was to be allotted pro rata.206

Section two of the Act required the Executive, in cases of previously allotted land by treaty, to assess these allotments for farming quality and, if required, make further allotments if that land was good only for grazing. Indians were to choose lots for themselves and their minor children. The Indian Agent or an appointed Special Agent was the chooser for orphans and for those who failed to select an allotment by the end of the four-year time frame. Lastly, these

Agents would decide all cases equally between any two or more persons who had already improved lands within the reservation if they could not agree on the division amongst themselves.207

Section three outlined the appointment of Special Agents or the assignment of

Reservation Agents to make the allotments to individuals according to their choice, and to certify the allotments to the Department of the Interior, and finally to record the allotments in the

General U.S. land office. Section four covered the process for Indian persons residing at-large on non- reservation lands. This section allowed that these people, upon settling any unencumbered

206 Ibid, Section I, 1. 207 Ibid, Section II, 1.

70 or un-surveyed land in the United States, could apply to the government for an allotment and have it granted under the same terms as people on the reservations.208

Section five required the government to hold allotments in trust for twenty-five years before passing the fee simple deed to the allotted Indian or their descendants in case of death.

Furthermore, the section allowed for the sale of homestead lots, not to exceed 160 acres, to bona fide settlers, the issuance of allotments to churches working among the Indians, also no more than 160 acres, and a provision of money for Indian education from the proceeds of these sales.

This was only to be accomplished after all eligible Indian people in a given tribal area had received their allotments.209

Section six guaranteed the extension of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to any Indian living apart from a tribe and to all Indians accepting allotment. The section was to extend the rights and privileges of citizenship upon the Indian. Section seven dictated the requirement for the Department of the Interior to ensure that water and water rights were extended on an equal basis for Indian and non-Indian settlers in such places where water was required to make the land suitable for agriculture.210

Section eight excluded from allotment the lands of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek,

Seminole, and Chickasaw. In addition to the Five Civilized Tribes, the Miamis, Sac and Fox,

Osage Nation, and the Peoria were excluded from allotment as being considered “well civilized” already and able to maintain their own assimilation into greater America as time passed. Section nine set aside a sum of one hundred thousand dollars to survey and execute the allotments. The

208 Ibid, Section III-IV, 2-3. 209 Ibid, Section V, 4. 210 Ibid, Section VI-VII, 5.

71 sum was to be recouped by the Treasury from the proceeds of sales to settlers of un-allotted

Indian lands.211

Section ten allowed Congress sole authority to grant rights of way for railroad, highway, and telegraph lines through any portion of Indians lands deemed necessary. The section further gave Congressional authority for the condemnation and confiscation for public use of any Indian lands deemed to be required in the best interest of the public. Section eleven specified that nothing in the act would prevent the removal of the Southern Ute Indians from southwestern

Colorado to a new reservation.212 Yes, they were still trying to figure out how to handle those pesky Utes.

The work of allotment could begin. What was hoped and assumed to be an answer to the

“Indian Problem” was, by 1886-87, far easier to create than it was in 1881, but creating legislation is easier than implementing it. Two of the chief problems of implementation lay in the very real possibility that the various tribes and nations would not cooperate, and, the assumption, made by members of Congress, that land allotments would make something like white settler

Citizens of Indian people. Citizens: what did that even mean? Was there really any faith among reformers that the Indian would be like them in time or was the Allotment Act simply a means to an end, land for colonial expansion? Was John Trudell correct when he said “when the whites asked us who we are, we said human beings, they didn’t understand because the concept of that term was no longer a part of their conceptional reality”213 What did it mean to be an American citizen? Was the national character of the United States reflected by the Christian and

211 Ibid, Section VIII-IX, 6. 212 Ibid, Section X-XI, 7-8. 213 John Trudell, “What Happened to the Tribes of Europe, YouTube Video, 11:00, Living on a Higher Vibration, September 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEyPjfzG1bU&t=2s, accessed 1 July, 2019.

72 philanthropic reformers? Perhaps by the eloquent eastern man, Senator Dawes? Maybe the poorly educated, rough and tumble, frontier settler? Precisely who was an American?

The point that Trudell makes is that European settlers, from those first arrivals, including

Erikson, Columbus, Cortez, Weston, Cabot, Cook, and a host of others crossing the globe from the Azores to Polynesia, had forgotten that they too had ancestors wearing beads and feathers?

They were too busy being colonizers to see that their ancestors had at some past time been indigenous somewhere, it just was not where they colonized. In colonized areas they were the invader and no longer understood what it was to be [just] human. Trudell wrote further, “This memory loss was refined further through transnational conquests, colonialism, crusades, the dominion of the Church in Europe, the Reformation, and the advent of the scientific and industrial revolutions and the opposing societal structures posed by Smith and Marx. They were smelted into an alloy called Europe, they were too busy being Englishmen, Frenchmen,

Spaniards, Christians, or Westerners to remember their basic humanity.

How does the American, coming together from a thousand other places, share some memory in common? It must be created somehow, and it must be something identifiable.

Georges Henry Erasmus, Diné from occupied Canada, said in 2002 “Where community memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community, where community is formed, common memory must be created.”214 What did these so-called

Americans have in common? When one looks closely, the ingredients of the American pie, so to speak, become visible. The original settlers of what would become the United States were, in the main, Anglo-Europeans of British ancestry. America began as a colony of Great Britain. In

214 Georges H. Erasmus, “Lafontaine-Baldwin Lecture, 2002”, The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures; a Dialogue on Democracy in Canada, vol 1 ed. Rudyard Griffiths, (Penguin: 2002), Introduction.

73 addition to the English, there were Scotsmen, Irishmen, Spaniards, French, German, Dutch, and others including African slaves.215 But is a similar European background enough to create a nation? The answer is, probably not unless they create some form of the common memory

Erasmus talks about.

The effort to create that community began when the United States declared independence from their own British metropole. Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” that all men held a right to live, to be free, and to be happy and The Declaration of Independence uses some pronoun denoting a commonality in the colonies. “we, our, us, etc.” in excess of fifty times.216 The Constitution begins with, “We the People.”217 In 1787, John Jay, the nation’s first

Chief Justice, said of the United States, “This country and this people seem to be made for each other.”218 This sentiment is justifiable in the context of a fairly homogenous set of colonies. As the United States became the future metropole for her own colonies [territories] and considered immigration to this new republic, from Europe or elsewhere, essentially a requirement, the national opinion showed a bit less liberality and a desire that immigrants assimilate into the “we, our, us.”

If the colonial settler brings with them their culture and works to make it part of their place in the landscape, they also bring their problems and prejudices. Benjamin Franklin wrote about immigrants from Germany, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our

215 Though we must consider slaves in any counting of those that settled North America, the use of the word settler implies an acquiescence to their condition that we also must consider, to wit; is an unwilling captive really a settler? 216 Declaration of Independence, 1776. 217 Constitution of the United States, 1787. 218 John Jay, Federalist Papers 2, 1787.

74 complexion.”219 His view was not uncommon. In 1802 Alexander Hamilton penned a warning against unfettered immigration “The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.”220 The idea of a common history, a common story, and a requirement for the newcomer to assimilate to that shared story, that common memory, in defiance of lived experience were planted in the new soil of the new nation at the time of its founding. Also planted in that soil was the idea of the “Other.” Any immigrant wishing to be part of the new nation must shake off the unacceptable parts of their culture in order to fit into the new created landscape. In other words, not every settler is necessarily equal, some are more “Other” than others.221

When the colony becomes the metropole, colonial rule is at an end, not necessarily the colonial experiment. Where England once was the administrator, the United States was now. In shaking off the colonial troops, agents and legislators, the United States needed to replace them with the Army, the Territorial Governor and the Indian Agent. The country would need these same apparatuses of colonialism to expand westward and create the Manifest Destiny that John

O’Sullivan wrote about in 1845. They began to see the country as something unique and began to share [and create] common future memories of their “free development of their yearly multiplying millions,” by the act of assimilation of the immigrant, and later the indigenous they

[we] would no longer be Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Germans. Just as Trudell claimed that the tribes of Europe had done, the United States were being smelted into an alloy; making itself into something that would know the answer to the questions first asked of the

219 Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., 1751. 220 Alexander Hamilton, The Examination VIII, January 1802. 221 Jean M. O’Brien. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, (University of Minnesota Press: 2010), Introduction.

75 indigenous people encountered by the explorer, who are you? If the country were successful, they would have an answer; Americans.222

The question of what makes one an American is one that lacks an answer if we wish to say something more accurate than American. The term itself implies an arrogance and self- centrism when used by U.S. citizens. Canadians are Canadians, Mexicans are Mexicans, etc.

These terms designate a nationalism, a citizenship. The term American does neither, there is no

America, only a United States of America. The term used by Spanish speakers [the predominant language of the American continents] to reference U.S. citizens is Estadounidenses [literally;

Staters]. To be an American requires U.S. citizenship only in the U.S. citizens mind and there are

Americans from Patagonia to Point Barrow Alaska. Most of this land is not U.S. territory.

The debates surrounding the Dawes Act were an extension of this arrogance of belief that

U.S. citizens were the only people here that mattered. The Act was a colonial tool to create

“Americans” out of indigenous peoples that occupied lands the settlers wanted. Just like John

Trudell’s first colonizers, the citizens who were members of Congress were too busy being

“Americans” and politicians, Protestants, or Texans, etc., to see that Indian people were [and had always been] Americans by any logical standard, they lived in the Americas. So, what is an

American? To the mind of those who debated the fate of tribal governments and people under the

Dawes Act, the answer was, only us or those who will become like us.

222 The first public mention of a “Manifest Destiny” is generally credited to John O’Sullivan, the editor of both publication where it appeared; the New York Morning News, and the Democratic review.

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Chapter Five Who is an American?

In the preface of the second edition of his 1960 work Westward Expansion, Ray A.

Billington, an American Historian and staunch supporter of Frederick J. Turner’s Frontier Thesis wrote “America’s unique characteristics stemmed from no single source; the European heritage, the continuing impact of ideas from abroad, the mingling of peoples, the spread of the industrial revolution, and the growth of class consciousness all contributed. Yet no one force did more to

“Americanize” the nations’ people and institutions than the repeated rebirth of civilization along the western edge of settlement during the three centuries required to occupy the continent.”223

The historian certainly made a few salient points worthy of our attention, and in so doing echoes the theme of common memory.

The notion that many sources of stress and change helped to shape the country and the people living within its bounds is certainly true. That American characteristics were then, or now, unique, is a bit more questionable if we compare these characteristics to other experiments in colonialism and the follow-on experiments of nation building by former colonies in the United

States and the Americas at large. This idea of American exceptionalism may not be so exceptional after all. With the end of the Spanish colonies in South America came a wave of state creation not dissimilar to what was happening in the United States; the search for nationhood by establishing government, securing territory, and defining populations to gain a measure of authority or sovereignty.224 That Billington assumes the uniqueness of America

223 Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion; A History of the American Frontier, Second Edition, (The MacMillan Company: 1960), 1. 224 Diego Acosta-Acarazo, The National verses the Foreigner in South America; 200 Years of Migration and Citizenship Law, (Cambridge University Press: 2018), 65.

77 demonstrates the power of the common memory of the colonial project; even the historian is not immune as the statements of Billington make clear. These colonial experiments have been conducted by other ostensibly free nations too. I say ostensibly free because the colony, whether it is far flung or close to home, requires resources, “Blood and Treasure,” if you will, to seize, to maintain, and to pacify.225 In the words of Herman Lebovics, Professor of history at Stonybrook

University, “Being tied to a colony, regardless of what one gains from the colonial exercise, implies a state of restraint, compulsion, and obligation standing in observed opposition to the self-reification of the settler as they act out the frontier experience and seek their own local sovereignty. Colonies have gifted Europe [and the United Sates] with economic subsidies, with cultural contributions, with workers and soldiers, and with contemporary domestic social pluralism [to such extent it actually exists.]…[but] Imperial strivings harm the chances for an egalitarian social order…Colonies are dangerous to the health of democracy. They act as a sweet but poisoned pill to the states that have eagerly gulped them down.”226

The expansion of transportation networks and the hunt for natural resources of wood, water, coal, gold, and arable land had brought the country, once again, face to face with the

“Indian Problem”. Less than a half century after the creation of the Indian Territory and a decade since the Peace Commission had created the reservation system, both espoused as permanent solutions, the country had at last come up [again] with a plan that was touted [again] as the best solution; create an assimilated citizen where an Indian person once stood. It can be assessed a failure when referencing the creation of Indian Territory and the Reservation system but perhaps a better term is to call them unrealized solutions to the united States percieved “Indian Problem”.

225 The concept of “Blood and Treasure” is generally attributed to Petrarch. 226 Herman Lebovics, Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies, (Duke University Press: 2006), Preface.

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The creation of the Indian Territory and the various reservations, by the metrics of the tribes and nations inhabiting such, can be argued as a nominal success [for them]. The tribes were able to re-assert their political sovereignty, both regarding internal tribal policies, and externally through continued government to government relationships with the United States.

The government had, in the case of the Cherokee, stipulated that in addition to the seven million acres west of the Mississippi River they received in exchange for their eastern home, they would “guarantee to the Cherokee Nation a perpetual outlet west, and free and unmolested use of all the country.”227 In her seminal, and controversial 1940s book And still the Waters Run,

Angie Debo described the Five Civilized tribes as a “set of intensely nationalistic small republics with distinctive customs and institutions,” which is a clear attestation of the success of these nations.228 Why then, did the United States consider itself to still have a problem? It can be said with some intellectual honesty that there was still a problem for the United States because there was still an Indian.

Earlier efforts at controlling Indian peoples had failed, unfortunately though, not in every instance. Miners in California and the intermountain west had had some degree of success in decimating the Paiute, the Digger, the Snake and the Bannock. By contrast, the Utes,

Comanches, Navajo, Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota, all equestrian tribes of formidable warrior status had fought the Army with varying degrees of success, culminating with the destruction of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry at the Greasy Grass River.229 A state of war had been almost constant since the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867 began the process of

227 “Treaty of New Echota”, The Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Frederick E. Hoxie ed., (Houghton Mifflin: 1996), 649-650. 228 Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run, (Palala Press: 2016), 7. 229 The Slapeji, translated as “Greasy Grass” is the Lakota name for the Little Bighorn River in Montana and Wyoming.

79 reserving lands for Indian peoples. The failure of this Treaty was of the government continually reducing these territories as white settlement, mining interests, and railroads placed settlers and

Indians in close and dangerous contact.230

The expansion of the post-Civil War United States had far-reaching repercussions based largely on a population explosion. “Never before had so many Americans faced the hardships of pioneer life.”231 The period between 1840 and 1900 experienced a massive influx of immigrants, mostly from Europe, which increased the country’s population from some 17 million people in

1840, to a staggering 62 million by the time the General Allotment Act was signed into law.232

Sixty-four percent of this population was rural, spreading from the upper midwestern region, across the plains in search of land.

In 1867 when the American Peace Commission negotiated a series of three treaties collectively known as the Medicine Lodge Treaty the process of confining Indian tribes to reservations was begun. The goal was three-fold; keep the Indians from warring with each other over resources, protect westward migration routes to California and the Northwest, and make land available to white settlement and railroads.233 The west was being filled with immigrants and native-born whites alike. Towns began to spring up like grass along the new Intercontinental

Railroad from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Sacramento, California, North Platte and Ogallala,

Nebraska, Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming Territory, Ogden, Utah Territory, and many smaller

230 Billington, Westward Expansion, 653-657. 231 Ibid, 724. 232 U.S Census Bureau, U.S. Population Schedules; 1840 and 1900, in National Archives; US Census Records (Department of Commerce Records: 1840 and 1900). https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html 233 “Medicine Lodge Treaty”, The Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Frederick E. Hoxie ed., (Houghton Mifflin: 1996), 648-649.

80 towns, some of which, like Ogallala, became north-south transit hubs across Indian Territory as well.234

Even a superficial examination of the American settler makes it exceedingly difficult to say with any truth that all these people migrating into the west were the same. Social and economic standing and cultural traditions from their countries of origin varied widely, as did levels of education. So, what did they have in common? The vast majority were of European descent. They came from Germany and England, but due to relaxed emigration in eastern Europe they also came from Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia and from agriculturally overpopulated regions like Ireland, Norway, Italy and Hungary.235 They were, in the main,

Protestant by faith, or quietly Jewish or Catholic, and literally all of them, native born or immigrant, were seeking some better life than they’d previously lived, or at least the chance of it.

The key to that imagined better life was land. Whether to build a business, or to farm, land was the first ingredient for a chance at surviving, maybe thriving, in a growing capitalist economy.

This reasoning also makes clear the lines of distinction drawn between these new

“citizens” and the various ways in which they considered their own positionality with their new government. Diego Acosta’s summation of the reality of open borders in the new South

American nations certainly applied to those crossing state and territorial borders within the bounds of the United States in creating a situation fraught with racial, demographic, and economic implications.236 The influx of settlers, for the government, was a means of state creation and legitimization, as these populations can be said to have been used as a means to

234 Elaine Nielson, Ogallala; A Century on the Trail, (Bison Books: 2011), Introduction. 235 Bruce Garver, “Immigration to the Great Plains, 1865-1914; War. Politics, Technology, and Economic Development”, in Great Plains Quarterly, Summer 2011, (Center for Great Plains Studies: 2011), 182-183. 236 Acosta-Acarazo, The National verses the Foreigner in South America, 65.

81 sovereignty for the national project, and political security for themselves. Carrie Hyde, in her book Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship she calls the settler citizen was a sovereign unit of a form of territorially delimited collectivity who exercised a mediated rule through the election of representation. This was a far different form than that of many of their collective origin countries, where they were subjects, owing a one way allegiance to the state.237

This concept also creates a definition of the state based on the demographic of the population group in question; in this case they were predominantly white and Christian from central and western Europe. These were not nationals in the sense Acosta uses; they were citizens, with all the rights associated; voting, land ownership and some degree of loyalty from the state.238 All these markers of citizenship, while not denied to others by law, were denied in other ways. The

Fourteenth amendment hardly mattered to the black or brown farmer under the constant threat of lynching and dispossession. The Indian was excluded from citizenship rights entirely until the passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1924.

The concept of citizen and of one’s nationality evolved out of the French revolution and can be said to be both similar and very different states of being; the national [non-citizen] has a political bond to the nation and associated obligations, the citizen, by contrast, has these as well as political rights and representation.239 It is crucial to our understanding that the situation in

Indian country prevailing at the time of the allotment debate was one where Indian peoples had both the bonds and the obligations placed on them by U.S. laws [whether they wanted or recognized them] while they also had voting rights within their respective tribes. The political wishes of these tribes, as we have seen, were observed only at the pleasure of the U.S.

237 Carrie Hyde, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship, (Harvard University Press: 2018), 20. 238 Ibid, 67. 239 Ibid, 67-68.

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Government. The various settlers invading the territory had constitutionally supported rights that the indigenous did not enjoy; the settler is made a citizen while the indigenous is considered the other, the “national” and therefore the problem in the path of the settler colonial project. The land is the both the prize of the immigrant and the birthright of their children.

What do you do if the land is occupied? Herman Lebovics also tells us that the French tried desperately to control these occupants [the indigenous African] by keeping them separate from and subject to the colonial government. Acosta relates the Spanish attempts to control and convert, creating ties both physical and spiritual. The United States worked to replace the occupants where they found them. As the settler society replaced the indigenous, they [colonial settlers] began to develop a distinctive identity, a similar sovereignty. Unlike the Indian Agent, the Army Soldier or the Territorial Governor, the settler colonialist comes to stay, permanently.

The homogenization of these varied settlers begins to identity them as Americans [or Canadians,

Australians, etc.] and creates the personal sovereignty required to live in peace with other settlers and to justify replacing the original and becoming their proxy.240 This settler colonialism was not a single event; it was a structured, ongoing series of events designed to replace people with other people. The elimination of indigenous populations is a continuous process, as is the assertion of authority and jurisdiction over lands still occupied by the indigenous population, and eventually supplanting the indigenous population entirely.241

What happens if the original inhabitants can’t be replaced so easily? This had proven to be the case with North America’s first peoples, from Alaska to the Yucatan. The people involved in settler colonialism needed to find new solutions to the problem. In the United States, the

240 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism; a Theoretical Overview, (Palgrave Macmillan: 2010), 69. 241 Ibid, 70.

83 solution was assimilation; the same assimilation that made Ben Franklin’s worrisome German into an American. The average frontier settler was unable to destroy their Indian neighbors. The

Army could not be everywhere at once, and the experience of Red Cloud’s war, the resistance of the Nez Pearce, and the battles of Rosebud Creek and Little Bighorn had demonstrated the impossibility of a fully permanent military solution. It is important to consider that the assimilation of the Indian was not simply a way to get rid of the Indian. There is ample evidence that many Americans, especially East Coast mainstream Protestants [Episcopalian, Methodist, and Calvinist] honestly felt that the Indians had been treated poorly. Many people did feel an altruistic desire to save indigenous peoples from extinction, but only through assimilation. It is just as important to remember that this in no way acts as an excuse for the activities of settlers, government agents, or others. The Indian Fighter and the “Friend of the Indian” shared their settler sovereignty; some were simply attempting less violent methods to achieve similar results.

It became an article of faith among these self-professed “Friends of the Indian” to privatize ownership of property as a powerful tool to bring about the desired assimilation.242 “The more ethnocentric reformers had no qualms about destroying what they saw as an inferior culture in order to save the Indian.”243

Reservations and Indian Territory required colonial control. This was true in 1850, and it remained true in 1887 and was embodied in the form of the Indian Agent. The earliest Agents operated under the direct supervision of the President and were assigned by treaty obligation prior to the Indian Department Appropriations Act of 1871. By the mid-nineteenth century,

Congress legislated the appointment of Agents through appropriations to the Department of the

242Carter, The Dawes Commission, 1. 243Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 232.

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Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The U.S. Government adhered to Henry Knox’s doctrine on the civilizing influence of the Agent. Knox, as President Washington’s Secretary of War wrote to the President in 1789 “missionaries of excellent character should be appointed to reside in their nation, who should be well supplied with all the implements of husbandry and the necessary stock for a farm. These men should be made the instruments to work on the Indians…they should, in no degree, be concerned with trade or the purchase of lands, to rouse the jealousy of the Indians, they should be their friends and fathers.”244

Like George Orwell’s and George Gauthereu’s Elephant hunt stories presented by

Herman Lebovics in his essays on the colonial experiences of the British and the French, Indian

Agents in the west of the Mississippi River often found themselves in similar and equally difficult situations; waiting for permission from department heads, entertaining inspectors, waiting for funds or assistance from Washington, distributing treaty commodities [beef and flour], entertaining visitors, and even dealing with Buffalo, the “Elephant” of the Plains. While

Orwell’s and Gauthereu’s stories involve the killing of marauding Elephants to appease the local indigenous and save the face of colonial administration, Indian Agents more frequently had to deal with white Buffalo hunters on Indian lands. The Indian Agents, some of them anyway, rationalized that their political responsibilities in dealing with their charges required that they create sensory attunements and affective affiliations with the indigenous in their region and exercised a kind of colonial common sense.245 According to Columbus Delano, Secretary of the

Interior in 1873, “serious complaints are made to the department relative to the presence, upon

Indian reservations, of white men, who go there for the sole purpose of killing Buffalo, which are

244 Jackson and Galli, A History of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 20. 245 Ann Laura Stoler, “Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense,” in Philosophical Forum Vol 39, 3 (Wiley Blackwell: 2008), 361.

85 thus destroyed in large numbers. While I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the

Buffalo…yet these encroachments by the whites…is one prolific source of trouble.”246 Delano went on to recommend stricter controls and punishment for white trespassers. The two cases, of course, are only nominally similar on the face of it. If we look closer though, the poison pill of empire Lebovics spoke of can be seen. As the Agents tried to control the frontier, their grasp grew weaker. The end result was an inability to control even occasional incursions by settlers into areas they were supposed to avoid.

Underlying these amusing stories of dealing with locals and animals lies the real issue;

Agents had to deal with a hostile population in many respects. There is, of course, a difference;

Orwell was forced to appease the desires of the local “colonized” population. The U.S. Indian

Agent, as often as not, was required, by the action of settler colonialism, to appease the replacement population, leaving appeasement of the indigenous as a secondary concern. The

Lebovics essay also reveals something important when considering the Indian Agent; whether consciously or unconsciously, the agent was the local representation of a revival of, in this case, an American political aristocracy in control of the colonial empire.247 In one way, the Buffalo, like Gaudreau’s Elephant, represents the wild and uncontrolled herd animal that can harm the unarmed farmers.248 In a more profound and realistic way, the Buffalo represents the “wild and uncontrolled” savages the settlers thought Indians to be. In the settlers’ minds, both the Buffalo and the Indian must die, one to be replaced by the cow, the other by themselves. This theme, to some degree, underlies both Orwell’s and Gaudreau’s Elephants and Delano’s Buffalo requiring that use of force replaces rational administration, and all three stories represent an avenue of

246 Columbus Delano, Report of the Secretary of the Interior 1872-73, U.S. National Archives; Interior department Collection, page 688. 247 Lebovics, Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies, 10. 248 Ibid, 13.

86 potential failure for the colonial project.249 In the end, the Indian Agent could no more control

Indian peoples than he could control the settlers encroaching on Indian lands.

The Indian Agent of the late nineteenth century was an appointee, nominated by various

Christian denominations in accord with President Grant’s 1871 peace policy. These nominees, in true bureaucratic method, were also recommended by the Board of Indian Commissioners and approved at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, subject to informal approval by members of Congress and the Secretary of the Interior. Their mandate included providing Indian people with the desire and opportunity to work, an education in farming and the English language, prohibition of alcohol use among Indians, and issuance or denial of permits to leave reservation lands.250 Indian people became, more and more, the subjects of white rule. This colonial rule, as Lebovics points out, is predicated on the Imperial Super-Ego, an unerring need to control land and population was firmly fixed in minds of the ruling class and their administrators, from Congressman to

Indian Agent. The administrator must know how to punish and reward, must be the conscience of those ruled, and cannot be in a state of rebellion against social authority or feel empathy with the ruled. “He must fully believe in the legitimacy of command and subordination.”251

The encroachment of white settlement, legal and otherwise, is a feature of almost every

Interior Secretary’s Report from 1870 to 1890. Delano mentions illegal white settlements in every annual report of his tenure.252 These settlements were established by people coming from

“Back East” or “The Old Country” of Europe which provided a mythical point of reference or

249 Ibid. 250 U.S. National Archives. "Indian Census Roles, 1885-1940". Legal and Administrative Background: The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/native-americans/1885- 1940.html 251 Lebovics, Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies, 18-19. 252 Reports of the Secretary of the Interior, U.S. National Archives; Interior department Collection. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/059.html

87 anchor to allow for the indigenization of the immigrant settler.253 These settler populations were well imbedded in Indian Territory by 1887 when the General Allotment Act was passed. So much so that they would become a real problem for the Agents working to allot Indian lands especially later during the allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes. Many settlers claimed land rights based on their long-term occupancy in the region or attempted to enroll as members of the tribes, or made claims of indigeneity both in Oklahoma, and the Carolinas.

Lorenzo Veracini states in Settler Colonialism: A theoretical Overview, that settler colonialism requires that settlers crave an affinity with home, but this home is both the old and the newly settled home, allowing them to invest in their “place” in the landscape. There is a dynamic created by the occupation of the [indigenous] place in the new home while simultaneously attempting to re-create familiar European life ways. The indigenization process fills the need to transform from “we came here” to “we are here.”254 This settler perception manifests itself in three distinct ways: the imagined community, the symbolic backdrop, and the real.255 The imagined community is organized and peaceful, a community devoid of disturbances or dislocation where the settler can return to what was lost in some previous place or life. The symbolic backdrop takes the form of the “Frontier” or the “wild prairie” where the settler creates something from nothing, tames the savage nature of the land as well as the savage inhabitants.

The reality is much less convenient; an expanding capitalist economy with winners and losers, deprivation of commodities and comforts of the imagined prairie home, and if you’re far enough west, the very real possibility that a Quahadi war party will raze your homestead to the ground and kill you.256 This last occurrence was unlikely after 1875 when Quanah Parker led the last

253 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 21. 254 Ibid, 22. 255 Ibid, 75. 256 Gwynn, Empire of the Summer Moon, 278-280.

88 free Comanches to Fort Sill and is used only as the extreme example of frontier violence. By the time of the General Allotment Act, it was more likely that one would be subjected to violence from within the settler community itself.

The imaginary peaceful society served two purposes; to help in the disavowing of foundational violence inherent in the colonial project, and to re-create what the settler collective perceived themselves to have lost or had taken from them in their pre-settler lives. This narcissistic drive to create the perception an idyllic, non-violent settler society and political situation makes the disavowal of foundational violence mandatory as a defensive mechanism, both in terms of relating to the metropole and the indigenous “other.”257 A retracing of an historical line through the United States makes this a very cogent assessment. The loss of the

Civil War “took” from the southern settler community their birth right of a place in the landscape, and the “savages” later did the same on the Frontier. The government “took” freedom of movement and acquisition of property from the frontiersman like the British Crown “took” representation from the colonists, and spinning back down the years, and on.

In 2013, when John Trudell said “when the whites asked us who we are, we said human beings, they didn’t understand because the concept of that term was no longer a part of their conceptional reality” he was referring to the imagined peaceful project, the “uncorrupted version of the original social body.”258 The reification of the settler life acts as an inoculation for the sometimes-painful conflict between the fantasy and the real. After all, the colonizers’ imagination tends to disavow or repress the foundational violence of colonial projects which created the various European metropoles that were conducting colonial projects. However, this

257 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 77-78. 258 Ibid, 78.

89 inoculation did not work to help the settler remember that they had been, at some distant point, the indigenous other. As Trudell stated so eloquently, “what happened to the tribes of Europe?

At one time, everybody wore beads and feathers.”259

The colonial project of the United States, taken over from the British Crown upon independence, had reached its almost perfected state by 1890. The tribes were being allotted in severalty. The settler colonial project was finally going to civilize them. Indian children were sent into the government school system to expedite the assimilation process. The savage “other” would become an enterprising and obedient citizen. There remained one obstacle to the settlement of the entirety of U.S. controlled North America: the Five Civilized Tribes of the

Indian Territory. Manifest Destiny required that America be “Amber waves of grain” from “Sea to shining sea.”260

Underneath the lands occupied by these remaining semi-sovereign states was coal, oil, and other riches. Railways needed building to feed the trans-continental line. Immigrant populations were still clamoring for land, and though tribal ownership was guaranteed by treaty, these various groups supported allotment for mostly personal economic reasons.261 While this was an imagined peaceful project, it was in front of a very real backdrop that Congress authorized a commission to convince the remaining tribes to cede their lands, dissolve their governments, and accept land in severalty as the others had done. The Commission to the Five

Civilized Tribes was headed by the same Senator Henry Dawes of the 1887 debates, now retired, and so the Commission was more commonly called The Dawes Commission.

259 Trudell, “What Happened to the Tribes of Europe”, YouTube Video, 11:00, accessed 1 July 2019. 260 These are partial lyrics of America the Beautiful written by Katherine Lee Bates, originally as a poem entitled Pikes Peak for her Church congregation in 1885. 261 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 2.

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Chapter Six The Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes

Kent Carter, Southwest Regional Administrator for the U.S. National Archives in Fort

Worth, Texas, and subject matter expert on the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, writes.

“It became an article of faith among the self-proclaimed Friends of the Indian that private ownership of property was one of the most powerful tools to bring about assimilation.” And in doing so quoted Francis Paul Prucha, “The more ethnocentric reformers had no qualms about destroying what they saw as an inferior culture in order to save the Indians.” Carter correctly claims that his book focuses on the procedures of the Commission, unlike Angie Debo’s And still the Waters Run which documents the human tragedy.262 In detailing these procedures, Carter naturally exposes the settler colonialist project that drives it.263

The advent of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, hereafter referred to as the

Dawes Commission or Commission, shines a bright light on the settler colonialist project. The debates of 1881 and, to a lesser extent 1886 show clearly this in the language used. Their words support the imagined [we] while legislating the indigenous [other] and struggle with the constitutionality and morality of Allotment in the process. In 1881 George Vest and Henry Teller had a spirited debate with Richard Coke and sided with these tribes when Coke suggested adding them to the language of SB 1773. In 1886, Congressman Throckmorton of Texas led another debate on adding these tribes to the pending General Allotment Act. Both times allotment had been suggested, the language used about Indian peoples cannot be said, in any case, to have been complimentary or based on a sense of equality. By 1894, Henry Teller, defender of the tribes in

262 Debo. And Still the Waters Run. Second Edition, (Princeton University Press: 2020), 2. 263 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 1.

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1881, was drafting reports claiming that the governments of these same tribes were so corrupted that they were denying equal protection and civil rights to their citizens and to aliens in the

Indian Territory alike, and suggesting that Allotment was the fix.264 The ethnocentrism, paternalism, and, in some cases, open racism of the various congressmen and other government officials is clear when reading their own words. Teller, erstwhile defender of Indian rights in

1881, was now arguing for allotment and being less than complimentary.265

In the Indian Territory, the new rail-lines, allowed by Congress in 1870, had made the intrusion of whites not only easy, but spectacularly so. The tribes were inundated with farmers, miners, merchants, railroad crews, land speculators, whiskey peddlers, and a variety of criminals; all enticed to the Indian Territory by railroad company advertisements promising great opportunities. The tribes did allow residency permits, but most of the settlers in the Indian

Territory were there uninvited. When the tribes attempted to stem the flow of this illegal immigration, they began restricting immigration permits and approached the Agency at

Muskogee requesting these intruders be removed. The Agent and staff were of little help as they lacked the authority and likely the will to remove the squatters, many of whom were now indigenizing themselves by claiming tribal citizenship.266 The Agency was eventually instructed to take no action against anyone with a pending tribal citizenship claim. This colonial agent had been denied his face-saving elephant hunt, and the settlers were moving ahead with creating their place in the landscape.

The General Allotment Act was to have solved the “Indian Problem”, but as the

Congressional record shows, legislation to convert the remaining Indian Territory into one or

264 Ibid, 6-7. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid.

92 more States had been introduced at every session of Congress from 1870 forward.267 A statehood bill for Oklahoma, attempting to incorporate the last sovereign Indian lands, was introduced by

James Berry of Arkansas on March 15th , 1892.268 The bill, designed to provide better economic opportunities for his constituents, and providing for the creation of a committee to negotiate with the Five Civilized Tribes, died in committee. This prompted George Vest to introduce a resolution to appoint a commission to treat with the Five civilized Tribes and induce them to take allotments in severalty Ironically, Vest, like Teller, had defended these tribes a decade earlier.269

During the debate on this resolution, the former champion of these tribes called allotment a

“herculean task due to Indian prejudice and white greed”, and went so far as to call the Indian

Territory a “menace to civilization” though his reason for the change of opinion is not clear from his writings on the subject.270

Though both Berry’s bill and Vest’s resolution failed to gain enough traction to make it out of session, the idea was firmly planted and on March 3rd, 1893, Congress passed the annual

Indian Office Appropriations Bill which contained, in section 16, an authorization for the

President to appoint a committee to negotiate allotment with the Five Civilized Tribes.271 The attachment of amendments or riders to appropriations bills became the Government’s new tool in attacking tribal sovereignty for the remaining Indian Nations. With no debate, the Dawes

Commission was authorized. The bill had passed on Benjamin Harrison’s last day in office nd signed by Grover Cleveland eight months after being sworn in on November 1st, 1893. The

Dawes Commission was official. The President appointed retired Senator Henry Dawes to lead

267 Ibid, 2. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid. 270 Ibid. 271 Ibid, 2-3.

93 the Commission, and appointed Meredith Kidd of Indiana and Archibald McKennon of Arkansas to fill the other two seats. The Senate confirmed the nominations on the same day.272

Historians have assessed Henry Dawes as a sincere apologist for equal rights for African

Americans and American Indians. His public statements on these issues make it difficult to say otherwise. These same public statements, however, make it just as clear that Dawes was as ethnocentric and colonialist as any of his peers.273 Kent Carter suggests that the motivations of

Archibald McKennon and Meredith Kidd, both former Confederate officers, are harder to gauge by their public records, though, like Dawes, they appear quite willing to “other” Indian peoples, whom they believed the white man’s inferior.274 Both men also sided with the secessionists during the Civil War which shows more than a tacit approval of slavery when viewed from a modern sensibility.

The Commission reported directly to the Secretary of the Interior, a position filled at that the time by Hoke Smith whose idea of success was detailed in his private instructions to the

Commissioners in November 1893; “success in your negotiations will mean the total abolition of the tribal autonomy of the Five Civilized Tribes and the wiping out of the quasi-independent governments within our territorial limits. It means also, ultimately, the organization of another territory within the United States and the admission of another state or states [sic] in the

Union.”275 Smith concluded with his anticipation that the negotiations would be ended quickly.

President Cleveland, who wanted nothing done without the consent of the tribes, nonetheless approved the instructions and met with the Dawes Commission on the 5th of December 1893.

272 Ibid, 3. 273 Dawes, Americanizing the American Indians, 27-30. 274 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 3. 275 Ibid.

94

The men packed their bags and headed for the Indian Territory. The President anticipated quick success and tribal cooperation; he would receive neither.

In the Indian Territory, the Commission made their case, first to the Cherokee who were opposed to any kind of policy change, and, would use all means in their power to prevent allotment.276 Meetings with the Chickasaw and Choctaw, in February and March, produced no better results. The Choctaw delegation walked out of the initial meetings and Chief Jefferson

Gardner informed Dawes on March 28th that the tribe would not consent to any changes in status.277 The Creek delegation voted no to allotment in April, as did the Seminole. This pattern of outright refusal to negotiate, and later delay and fail to answer letters continued into July. The

Commissioners began to bypass government negotiators and speak to Indian peoples at-large in the Territory, operating from their headquarters in South McAlester, Choctaw Nation. This move tended to infuriate the tribal councils and chiefs, especially when the Commission excused their own bypassing of government to government meetings by saying the tribal governments were corrupt, to which the Cherokee council at Tahlequah responded “your legislatures and your congress are just as corrupt as our legislature.”278

This first attempt in the Territory dragged on without success into 1895. Kidd was replaced for his “blunt manner” and apparent discord with the other Commissioners. The

President still wanted tribal consent, and so Congress made no significant changes other than adding two members to the Commission; Alexander Montgomery of Kentucky and Thomas

Cabaniss of Georgia.279 Dawes fell ill and spent the bulk of the year at home, McKennon [and

276 Ibid, 5. 277 Ibid, 5. 278 Ibid, 6. 279 Ibid, 9.

95

Teller] continued the attacks on tribal governments with multiple charges of corruption which the tribes vigorously denied, but, these attacks began to shift opinions in Congress.280 The

Commission began meeting with tribal delegations that fall, when they could find anyone willing to meet them.281

It was apparent in Washington that something had to be done. The President held steadfast in his desire for a negotiated settlement, and several bills aimed at the reorganization of

Indian Territory died in committee or in the general session of the Congress. In February of

1896, the Congressional Committee on Indian Affairs drew up their annual appropriations bill; it did not contain the funds to continue the Dawes Commission. Orville Platt of Connecticut added an amendment on April 23rd, 1896, which allowed for the Dawes Commission to begin accepting applications for enrollment from individual citizens within the Five Civilized Tribes. The appropriations bill, still containing this provision, was passed into law on June 10th, 1896. While debates on the corruptness or lack thereof of tribal governments in the territory continued, the

Indian Rights Association, long-time members of the “Friends of the Indians”, submitted a report supporting the Dawes Commission’s claim of corruption. Though this report was also debated, that didn’t change that Congress had given the Dawes Commission the authority to bypass tribal governments and deal directly with individuals. The confusion caused by the grant of this extended authority contributed to the tribes’ downward spiral to capitulation and the impetus for denying many enrollment applications accepted by the tribes themselves with the flood of applications from all over Indian Country. Things were going to be easier for the Government

280 Ibid, 12. 281 Ibid, 10-12.

96 now, but much more difficult for the Dawes Commission and the tribes, for whom things became eventually impossible.

The Dawes Commission returned to Indian Territory in May 1896 and set up an office in

Vinita, Cherokee Nation. In addition to their continued efforts to negotiate with the tribes, they had the added responsibility of enrolling individual Indians, as well as responding to requests for applications to “get Indian land” from all parts of the United States.282 The Commission sent letters to the tribal governments on the 1st of July, stating that they would be enrolling people until September 10th and requesting delegations to negotiate with. The Cherokee answered almost immediately, but it took a month to receive responses from all five; the Choctaw not responding until the first week of August. Each tribe, some of which were pending elections, promised to send representatives once their various councils had approved them. By July, the

Commission was also swamped by enrollment applications, requiring them to request citizenship rolls from the tribes. This would prove to be one of the Commission’s biggest challenges.283

Most tribal leaders ignored the request for rolls, but as it became clear that the Dawes

Commission was moving forward, the Cherokee and Choctaw provided some rolls in September.

These rolls, like those later obtained by the Commission, were either incomplete or unreadable, divided into rolls by blood, intermarriage and freedmen. In rare cases [the Choctaw specifically] were politically driven documents where political enemies of the tribal leadership were removed entirely.284

For the remainder of that summer, the tribes and the Commission played a game of hide and seek with the Commission’s attempts to meet. By September 10th, the deadline to apply, the

282 Ibid, 15. 283 Ibid, 16. 284 J.C. Thompson, (MTIC Tribal Court Chief Justice), in discussion with the Author, June 14th, 2019.

97

Commission had received more than seventy-five thousand applications, many from non-Indian people which complicated the Interior Department’s mandate to adjudicate the applications within 90 days. Many Indian people also waited until the last moment, hoping for some other solution to the government’s demands for allotment. The Commission received 2,572 Cherokee applications in the first week of September alone, just days before the deadline.285

The mountain of cases, the sorry state of tribal rolls, tribal lawyers, and the exigent nature of the ninety-day approval process acted like a burst of accelerating air to a fire. The

Commission wasted no time, literally spending mere minutes for each case. The Commission reviewed 142 Cherokee cases on the first day and denied them all.286 The Commission heard

5,297 Cherokee cases and 136 Chickasaw cases in the first ninety days. Creek Chief Isparhecher, recovering from a stroke, had failed to respond on the legitimacy of claimed citizenship for the many Creek applications within the thirty days, which led to a delay, until the Creeks were told the Commission would proceed to enrollment without tribal input on who or who was not an actual Creek citizen. The Creek legislature finally provided a response on November 10th.287 By the 28th of November 1896, the Commission had adjudicated 5,869 applications, had 1,431 pending and had less than two weeks to make their deadline. In a mad rush at the end of the month, the Commission heard the last 1,418 Choctaw applications, including Nannie

Thompson’s and the other Mount Tabor families’, in seven days; most were denied.288 By the end of the year, the Dawes Commission had rendered their decisions on over seven thousand enrollment applications representing in excess of seventy-five thousand people, more than a third

285Carter, The Dawes Commission, 19. 286 United States National Archives, Microfilm, M1650, Washington D.C. 287 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 20. 288 Ibid, 21.

98 were denied outright. The speed at which they heard cases, and the workload on the clerks led to almost no written records of any decisions. This would come back to haunt the government.289

The year 1897 began with the Dawes Commission and Indian delegations from all five tribes in Washington; the first of the enrollment appeals were working their way through the U.S. appeals courts, which would last until 1899 and beyond. The year also marked the beginning of a new regime in Washington. Grover Cleveland was on his way home. William McKinley, the new President, had no problem in forcing the hand of the tribes. There would be no more prolonged negotiations. The new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who the Dawes Commission would now answer to, was William Jones, a former teacher who supported allotment and believed in “the inevitable absorption of Indians by a stronger race.”290

In June, Commissioners’ Cabaniss and Armstrong resigned. They were replaced by

Thomas Needles of Illinois and Tams Bixby of Minnesota. Henry Dawes was now so ill that he did not participate in the activities of the Commission. In time, the driving force of the Dawes

Commission would become Tams Bixby, who was known as the “most celebrated and hated man in Indian Territory.”291 During the year, many clerks and secretaries were also employed as the pace of work did not decline, but rather increased from 1896. The attempts to find and obtain tribal census rolls continued, and the tribes continued to drag their feet causing Bixby to write that he would begin a census himself.292

The appeal of enrollment denials began as the Commission spent the summer trying to finalize tribal census rolls. Lawyers for both claimants and the tribes accused the various tribal

289 Ibid. 290 Ibid, 23. 291 Ibid, 25. 292 Ibid, 28.

99 citizenship committees of corruption, either for adding names for payments and gifts or outright bribery. Also argued was the veracity of the rolls themselves as their condition was poor and they were likely incomplete due to mismanagement and tribal government corruption.293

Choctaw and Chickasaw appeals were heard by the courts for the central and south districts of the Indian Territory, at McAlester and Ardmore, both towns in Choctaw country. The Tribes hired the law firm of Mansfield, McMurray, and Cornish to represent them. The contract was huge, both in profitability and prestige so the firm vigorously fought each appeal; yet when the appeals were heard from 1897 until 1901, the courts added 2,154 Choctaws and 591 Chickasaws to the rolls. Tribal attorneys complained that the courts were too overloaded to investigate properly and that the claimant’s private attorneys had more money and simply outspent them or had committed fraud. The persons admitted to the rolls by these two courts, some undoubtedly

Indian people, some not, were all together referred to by the tribes as “court citizens” and called a “Horde of Adventurers” by attorney Melvin Cornish.294

Unsuccessful claimants were not any happier than the tribes and complained of differing legal standards in the courts and poor record keeping. The Dawes Commission investigated these accusations and found the court records at McAlester and Ardmore to be in horrible condition, and likely to have been tampered with. Many attorneys, who had worked for the Commission the previous year, and understood how things were supposed to work, used the state and accuracy of these court records to litigate their cases for more than a decade.295 Meanwhile, the Commission was still trying to negotiate with the tribal governments for their own dissolution, finally getting the Creeks to negotiate in August. The Choctaws and Chickasaws were split about whether to

293 Ibid, 28-29. 294 Ibid, 29. 295 Ibid.

100 accept the dissolution agreement they had negotiated earlier that year, called the Atoka

Agreement, and the Seminoles, for the first time in four years, sent a delegation to meet with the

Dawes Commission. Just about the time the tribes looked to be cooperating, Bixby received word that Congress was running out of patience with the slow pace of progress and he was summoned to Washington to report “accurate information about the real condition of the

Territory.”296 It is interesting to note that by the middle of the century, the Seminole, Creek,

Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee had been interacting with society for so long that they well understood the frustration of the government at this point. Most of these nations had, by this time, some form of democratic “anglicized” government. They were just as frustrated with their own more traditional citizens who still feared the settler, did not speak English, or the workings of their own tribal governments beyond the clan level, as the U.S. Government was frustrated with them.

The tribes had put off the inevitable as long as they had been able though court actions, unavailability and outright refusal to negotiate with the U.S. Government. During the spring of

1898, Charles Curtis introduced a series of bills for the “protection of the people in Indian

Territory and other purposes.” Curtis, a Kaw Indian, was Representative of Kansas and was looking out for the interests of his white constituents, whether legally in the Territory or not.

Aided by Senator Richard Pettigrew, Curtis nursed, amended, and revised a series of legislative efforts that culminated with the passage of the Curtis Act on 27 June 1898. The President signed it the next day.297 The passage of the Curtis Act broke the backs of the tribes. Their tribal governments were dissolved, and the United States would now act unilaterally to enroll and allot

296 Ibid, 30. 297 Ibid, 34-35.

101 the remaining lands in the Territory. Congress directed the Dawes Commission to make accurate tribal rolls and begin the allotment process. The Government may have thought this would make things easier, but it did not. Indian people tend to be stubborn; “like the weather, you may know all about it, but you can’t change it.”298 Kent Carter writes that “Armed with the ambiguous but very considerable powers conferred on it by Congress, the Dawes Commission set out on what became an eight-year odyssey…they would feel intense pressure from Indians and their friends, who wanted enrollment and allotment to be done fairly, and the “boomers” and their powerful supporters who wanted the job done quickly so that the land and resources could be developed and a new State created.”299

298 Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins; an Indian Manifesto, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1988), 1. 299 Ibid, 38.

102

Chapter Seven Enrollment

Resistance to enrollment, sometimes by force, mostly by litigation from tribal lawyers, hindered the Dawes Commission from the early days of the process until the early twentieth century. Each of the Five Civilized Tribes, like all those who had been and were still being enrolled and allotted before them, faced a bureaucratic attack on their very personhood. When

Charles Curtis had drafted his bills’ citizenship provisions, he already knew that Congress assumed authority to make and un-make Indians. Curtis had himself been removed from the Kaw

Roll by his own Indian Agent for failing to meet the residency requirement set by Congress before he was elected to it.300 Like Ely Parker, Curtis may have become a fully assimilated

American, though we cannot know what they thought, both men’s public comments and actions make their assimilation obvious.

The tribal rolls were still the first order of business. The Commission was attempting to enroll, so they could begin to allot, many thousands of people spread across a territory the size of

Maine, crossed mostly by unimproved roads making accessibility an issue. Existing rolls were considered inaccurate, were in poor condition or in the hands of tribal officials reticent to turn them over or missing entirely. Moreover, hundreds of people were still battling in the courts after the first round of enrollments; energetically trying to get their names added while tribal attorneys argued just as energetically against it.301

300 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 39. 301 William E. Unrau, Mixed Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1989), ix.

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The results obtained in 1896-7 convinced the Commission that while house to house surveys were impossible, they would need to get out to the country and meet the enrollees, as well as new enrollees, face to face. Fear of the Commission, especially among full bloods, was also a real factor. While the Commission felt they were attempting to educate them on the process, many older full bloods took it as trying to bully them into doing what the white men wanted. These problems made it clear that Congress had completely underestimated the requirements of the Commission’s task.302

Enrolling the Creek Nation, a loose confederation of over forty separate bands, each in their own town with their own Mingo became a highly complicated and time-consuming affair as the Creeks had retained their political divisions after removal.303 Their 1859 enumeration showed

13,5737 people, divided among the upper and lower Creeks, along the Canadian and Cimarron

Rivers, respectively. In 1890 they had done another enumeration in support of a per-capita payment to account for missing names and children born since the end of the Civil War.304

Enumerations were taken again in 1893 and 1895, both for per-capita distribution. The

Commission chose to make their enrollment cards based on the 1895 per-capita roll. They only needed the Mingos to come in and verify the names for their towns. These enrollment cards became the standard for all tribes. As enrollments progressed, still hindered by questionable accuracy of many rolls, the process became more like a circus attraction. White liquor sellers, speculators and settlers attempting to enroll showed up at most enrollment centers creating a hectic atmosphere. As Bixby would later say of the Muskogee office, it became a “Mecca of

302 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 40-41. 303 Mingo (Chief) is a Mvskogee (Creek) version of Minko, meaning Chief in the Choctaw language. 304 Creek Census Data, Oklahoma Historical Society, Microfilm- CRN 1-20.

104 every phase of humanity which the broad domain of the Indian Territory supports.”305 Numbered tickets were issued for crowd control and access, usually resulting in a brisk trade for line placement. Once inside, the applicant’s testimony was taken after being sworn in. The information was noted directly on the now, standard enrollment cards, to be transcribed later

[which didn’t always occur]. The cards were, and remain today, the official record. Each applicant was checked against the Commission’s accepted roll, or supplemental roll. If the names matched, the applicant was given a certificate of citizenship and sent to a map room to pick an allotment. This seemingly simple process would lead to years of litigation. The Commission had almost no way of effecting the situation after a claimant left with their certificate. After eleven years of constant debate between tribal political factions, the refusal of the highly traditional

Snake faction to ever support enrollment, the travelling circus spectacle of the Commission, and a gunfight which some newspapers called an “Indian uprising,” the Commission had finally enrolled 18,702 Creeks, including 6,807 Freedmen, and had rejected 2,683 applications.306 The

Commission also enrolled some 2,800 Seminole. Some of the rejected applications would continue to be on court dockets for years, but the Creeks were enrolled.307

The enrollment and allotment of the Cherokee should have been easier than the other tribes; though much larger by number of citizens, the Cherokee were also the best enumerated tribe in the United States. The Commission waited a year and a half after the passage of the

Curtis Act to begin the Cherokee enrollment. The size of the tribe being a major factor and the

Cherokee had the potential to cause major problems because of this, and, like the Creeks, they

305 Ibid, 45. 306 The “Snakes” were led by a man named Chitto Harjo who was a leader in the four mothers society, an intertribal religious movement [Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw]. This group sought to revive the traditional practices and solidarity between related tribes that had been relocated to Oklahoma from the southeastern United States. 307 Creek Census Data, Oklahoma Historical Society, Microfilm CRN 40.

105 continually refused to negotiate. The Commission’s work was easier in the Cherokee Nation as the Cherokee census was considered accurate, and mostly complete, though not without its share of fraud claims from interested parties. The Cherokee census was the only tribal roll certified explicitly by Congress as the standard for enrollment.308

Another imposing issue for the Cherokee enrollment was the Freedmen population.

Cherokee had, for generations, willingly participated in chattel slavery. It is important to note that the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw also participated to varying degrees, but nobody owned more slaves than the Cherokee. The mixed blood citizens of the Nation in particular, were slave owners. In the early-nineteenth century these families ascended to the leadership of the nation on the back of chattel slavery and created new western forms of governance. Their increased wealth compared to the average citizen helped them gain respect of fellow Cherokee and positioned them to deal more effectively with the United Sates Government.309

The Freedmen issue for the Cherokee was a sensitive subject. It can be honestly said that many Cherokee were just as prejudiced against their former slaves as white men were.310 The

Nation refused citizenship to their slaves after the Civil War until the U.S. Government forced the issue in 1866.311 The Cherokee continued to dispute the provisions of the treaty as they felt that they were being singled out, and perhaps they were, as no land owners in any Confederate aligned State were required to share their titled property with former slaves. Other problems facing Cherokee enrollment were the presence of adopted Shawnees and Delwares in the Nation,

308 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 105. 309 Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866, (University of Tennessee Press: 1979), 59-60. 310 J.C. Thompson, in conversation with the author. 311 “Cherokee Treaty of 1866, Article 9”, The Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Frederick E. Hoxie ed., (Houghton Mifflin: 1996), 540.

106 as well as many hundreds of white settlers that the Cherokee had been trying unsuccessfully to dislodge for years. Cherokee enrollment came with the usual crowd of speculators, whiskey peddlers, and settlers looking for opportunities, most attracted by advertisements, posters, and news articles sponsored by railroad companies.312 Two other large problems for the Commission arose from the Cherokee legal status of intermarried whites after 1877 and the children of the

Keetoowah or “Nighthawk” Cherokee. The Nighthawks were full bloods adamantly against the enrollment for themselves or their children. Jack Christie, brother of the more famous Ned

Christie, issued a statement through an interpreter and recorded on his application card “we oppose the present method of the Daws [sic] Commission of dividing [sic] the land of the

Cherokees…we propose to do nothing in the way of giving the names and ages of our children for the purpose of having them enrolled…if we loose [sic] our lands and all monies rightfully ours, on account of our negligence or ignorance, we shall not depend on you or anyone for sympathy or assistance.”313 Though some Cherokee officials were happy to block the

Keetoowah, the Dawes Commission saw it otherwise and worked to enroll them anyway. In

1906 the courts ruled in favor of the Cherokee and disallowed whites intermarried after 1

November 1877 but ruled in 1912 against the Cherokee Nation and admitted 5,605 newborn

Keetoowah children to the rolls.314 The Commission received 53,724 Cherokee applications by the deadline to enroll, accounting for the enrollment of 41,798 people, including 4,924 Freedmen and 8,698 full-bloods including the stalwart Keetoowah refusers.315

The Mount Tabor Indians, by the very nature of their tribal organization consisting of intermarried Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek, and their location, resulting from the

312 MWardell, A Political History of the Cherokee Nation, (University of Oklahoma Press: 1977), 225-227. 313 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 108. 314 Vine Deloria Jr., American Indians, American Justice, (University of Texas Press: 1983), 42-43. 315 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 122.

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Dancing Rabbit Creek and Bird’s Fort treaties, some in Texas, and some in Indian Territory, were especially hindered by the lack of complete tribal roles, the rules for enrollment, and geography. Most of the Cherokee living in the Mount Tabor Community had returned to

Cherokee Nation by the time of the General Allotment Act. They had been allowed to relocate to

Texas by Presidential decree to avoid the violence in the Indian Territory resulting from the removal period and the fight between the Ross Party and their own Ridge Party. After the death of Chief John Ross, the Nation had passed legislation allowing for right of return to these ex- patriots in Texas, and most took the trip back to Indian Territory. All those remaining were the descendants of Annie Thompson, Caleb Starr, John Ellis Bean, and George Harnage. These

Cherokee families were denied enrollment by the Dawes Commission due to their location in

Texas making them ineligible.316

A majority of the Creek Indians living in the Mount Tabor Community had also left, either during, or shortly after the Civil War. Most returned to the Creek Nation before 1860 and were eligible to enroll as Creeks once the Nation finally came around to negotiate and begin the process. One family, that of Berryhill/Posey remained in the community, and, like the few

Cherokee, were denied enrollment by geography. The larger part of the community was of the

Thompson Choctaw, Choctaw-Chickasaw descendants of Margaret McCoy like Nannie, and the intermarried Cherokee Thompsons. This was a highly mixed and intermarried community remaining in Texas. The Choctaw and Choctaw-Chickasaw families relocated to Indian Territory at various times prior to passage of the General Allotment Act. Traffic between Atoka, Marlow,

316 J.C. Thompson, in conversation with the Author, June 14th, 2019.

108 and Rusk, Texas, was frequent. My Great Grandmother Nannie spent various amounts of time living in these three communities.

Nannie’s case is exemplary of many the Mount Tabor cases heard by the Dawes

Commission. After the initial round of denials by the Dawes Commission in the summer of

1896, Nannie was enrolled by the Choctaw Advisory Board, set up by the Choctaw Tribal

Council. This enrollment, though made by the Tribe, fell after the Commission imposed deadline and was thus considered by the Dawes Commission to have been done without authority of law,

These words were written across the front of her enrolment card.317 This raised a jurisdictional dispute that would be argued for over a decade. William Clyde Thompson, Nannie’s great-uncle, was also refused by the Commission based on his enrollment being after the June 10th, 1896, deadline. The June 10th “deadline” meant that the Commission considered the tribes later decisions on September 18th and October 10th to be null and void for the purpose of determining citizenship status. The Assistant U.S. Attorney General disagreed and admitted W.C. Thompson for enrollment in March 1905. Attorney for the Choctaw Nation, Melvin Cornish, argued that the enrollment was the result of fraud, thus reigniting the debate on the accuracy of the tribal rolls.318

William’s case and the poor state of enrollment cards and record keeping had both positive and negative effects on the enrollment process for all the tribes. As the Commission began to wind down and Bixby thought their work was nearing its end, a Chickasaw named John Goldsby whose case was making its way through the courts, relied on the W.C. Thompson decision.

317 Nannie S. Vaughan, “Dawes Choctaw Enrollment Card R725”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906). https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 318 Carter, The Dawes Commission, 92.

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Goldsby’s had enrolled in 1896, after the deadline, because his name had been found on the 1893 Chickasaw payroll. In 1902, the Choctaw-Chickasaw citizenship court declared

Goldsby and many other enrollments void. Goldsby did not appeal to the citizenship court, so the tribe claimed him now ineligible. The Commission took the opposite view and reinstated him and his wife, an intermarried white woman.319 He was considered a double positive result as a

Chickasaw with a white wife, both enrolled. However, he was once again stricken from the rolls on the day they closed because of the William C. Thompson decision which was misinterpreted by everyone. Thompson, like Nannie Foster, was both Choctaw and Chickasaw. He had been found eligible for enrollment as Choctaw only, along with his wife and children and seventy other Mount Tabor Indians by the Supreme Court of the United States, though he could claim

Mississippi Choctaw and Chickasaw. This confusion resulted in Goldsby’s dis-enrollment, as well as Nannie’s. Goldsby sued and won on the grounds that he deserved an appeal as he’d not been afforded due process when he was stricken on the closing day of enrollment.320 Goldsby had the funds to continue litigation, as did W.C. Thompson. Nannie and others did not. Nannie’s case was amalgamated with that of Franklin M. Harton et al v. Choctaw Nation. This was due to her mother, Susan Aaron, an intermarried white, being connected more closely with that case.

The entirety of Nannie’s extended family was combined into a single case. Harton, a white man, had married Nannie’s sister Martha Ann [aka Mattie]. Nannie and Mattie’s mother

Susan Aaron, now a widow, and the rest of the family was attached to the case. This included

Nannie’s sister Narcissa and her husband William Percival, and their children, sister Sarah Jane, her husband Charles Darken and their children, and Nannie and her children, including Thomas

319 Ibid, 99-100. 320 Ibid.

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Foster, my great uncle and Nannie’s brother John D. Thompson III and a couple of other families from the Marlow and McAlester area.321 The various members of the family had enrolled at different times and places, and their original cases, Percival et al. Vaughan et al. etc., had been later combined with that of Frank Harton. John T. O’Quinn had been combined with this case after he had claimed he was originally part of the William C. Thompson case.322

Nannie’s original case, No. 1394, had been heard, and denied by the Commission on the

8th of December 1896. But after the 1906 testimony given in Muskogee, Tams Bixby reversed the original decisions in all the Thompson cases, excepting John D. Thompson, who was again denied enrollment.323 Around the same time, Martin Luther Thompson had received a copy of a letter sent to his daughter Newton Hill from attorney J.J. Humphreys requesting that she “get her father’ and come to Atoka as soon as possible, with his original card from the Choctaw Advisory board. Humphreys felt that the W.C. Thompson decision would ensure the enrollment of any

Mount Tabor Indian based on familial relationship.324 Thompson, however, was busy in his role as Mount Tabor Tribal Chairman and could not find his original enrollment card. He discovered when he finally arrived in Atoka that the Commission copy of his record had disappeared entirely; this happened to be the case for many Mount Tabor families’ records.325

In keeping with the ambiguous nature of the Commission’s guidelines and the requirement for approval at the Department of the Interior, Bixby’s decision on the Harton case was overturned, though he was authorized to re-hear the cases involving Nannie’s extended

321 Nannie S. Vaughan “Harton et al v. Choctaw Nation; Decision, Dawes Application Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906), 1. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 322 Ibid, 3-4 323 Ibid, 10-11. 324 J.J. Humphreys, Letter to Newton Hill; Antlers I.T. February 15, 1906; copy to Martin L. Thompson; Overton Texas. Copy in possession of the author. 325 J.C. Thompson, in conversation with the Author, June 14th, 2019.

111 family. The Interior Department specifically called into question the lack of supporting evidence attached to Bixby’s decision. They did not see things the same way McKennon had when he interviewed her.326

Nannie’s case went back to the Commission, which then received more testimony, including a letter from William C. Thompson attesting to the familial relationship.327 A letter from one Imogene McDonald clarifying the origins of her father John Thompson, stating, “John

Duncan Thompson, Jr. was born 1837-1838 and raised on the old Choctaw Reservation in Alabama, had started to the Choctaw Nation but was detained in Arkansas by financial straits, sickness and the war. Thompson later continued to his brother's place (James Thompson) at

Stony Point (later "Old Boggy Depot"). John Duncan held lands under the tribal laws of the nation at different times both in Chickasaw and Choctaw country and resided in Choctaw Nation,

Indian Territory late 1860's [after 1870] until death circa 1892-93. Thompson was buried near

Tuskahoma (Wade County, Apukshunnubbee District). At that time of his death he was either divorced or estranged from his wife. Thompson was also reported by a son-in-law (1905) [Likely

Harton] to have died at Tuskahoma just before lease district payment was made in 1893.”328

With the new information obtained, Bixby wrote back to the Interior Department in April

1909 suggesting that the case was analogous to that of William C. Thompson. Bixby listed the events that had transpired with regard to the Thompson case, which had had the same effect on

Nannie’s case as the Goldsby case. It was Bixby’s contention that the misunderstanding in the

326 Nannie S. Vaughan “Letter, Interior Department D.C. 13107-1906/I.T.D. 1272-1905, Dawes Application Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906),1-4. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 327 J.C. Thompson, in conversation with the Author, June 14th, 2019. 328 Ibid.

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Thompson case which led to Goldsby being stricken, also caused Harton to be dismissed.329 The

Secretary of the Interior disagreed with Bixby, holding that the case was not similar, despite the familial evidence, nor was it, in his view, analogous with the Goldsby case. Nannie, however, was now out of money to pay legal fees, and that was that. She received a final letter from the

Dawes Commission, signed by then acting Commissioner Thomas Ryan which read, “You are hereby advised that on June 2, 1909, the Secretary of the Interior held that the Choctaw enrollment case of Franklin M. Harton et al., with which your case was consolidated, is not analogous to that of John E. Goldsby (211 U.S. 249) and that he can take no action looking to the enrollment of any of the applicants therein under the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United

States of November 30, 1908, in the said Goldsby case. Respectfully, Thos. Ryan, Acting

Commissioner.”330 Nannie Foster was no longer considered an Indian person by the Government of the United States.

Charles Painter, “Friend of the Indian” said, “Let us forget once and forever the word

Indian and all that it has signified in the past and remember only that we are dealing with so many children of a common father.”331 The “Friends of the Indian’s” design which had started with the first Mohonk Conference in the fall of 1883, had finally been completed, the annihilation of the Indian as a people apart. The Tribes had been moved, consolidated, and assimilated by allotment, or so it was hoped. What had been touted as sharing the blessings of

Christian civilization with those who lacked them was accomplished, at least legally, and in the

329 Nannie S. Vaughan “Letter, Tams Bixby to Department of the Interior, April 1909, Dawes Application Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906),1-3. https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 330 Nannie S. Vaughan “Letter; Thomas Ryan to Nannie Foster, 1909, Dawes Application Record 6063”, in U.S. National Archives; Dawes Enrollment Records, (Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes: 1906). https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.ancestorNaIds=268520&sort=naIdSort%20asc 331 Charles C. Painter, “The Indian and His Property”, Americanizing the American Indian, 121.

113 eyes of the Government, when the final rolls for the last free tribes were closed and the allotments of land made based upon those rolls. Indian people’s children were being educated at boarding schools from Pennsylvania to New Mexico and California. And the Indian was now a farmer, a citizen, but not really.

The Five Civilized Tribes had fought at the end to avoid the fate of the other tribes, but finally, they were allotted too. The allotment process for the other nations had been ongoing since 1887 in similar fashion, but without the legal hurdles faced by the Dawes Commission.

Many of these other tribes had not had treaty rights or resources to fight in the courts as the

Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, or Nannie Foster and the other Mount

Tabor Indians had done. The Nez Pearce and Chief Joseph’s story is typical. They had resisted assimilation, and they had resisted confinement, going so far as making a run toward Canada.332

In the end they were confined to a reservation but not in the Wallowa Valley they considered home, and were allotted by none other than “Friend of the Indian” and one of those who helped create the General Allotment Act of 1887, anthropologist Alice Fletcher whom the

Nez Pearce called the “measuring woman.”333 Accompanied by her friend Jane Gay, Fletcher spent four years surveying and allotting homesteads for the Nez Pearce. She left the tribe in 1892 to take on a fellowship at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. She had made two-thousand allotments. Chief Joseph refused to take an allotment; he died in 1904 homeless in an alien land on the Colville Indian Reservation.

Jane Gay’s notes on the allotment and dealing with white settlers and cattlemen demonstrate the settler colonial project and the desire behind the encroachment on Indian lands.

332 Alvin M. Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, (Yale University Press: 1965), 632. 333 Gay, “With the Nez Perces”, https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/fletcher.htm

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“A good many of them have come in person to announce their wishes and to "sound" the Special

Agent as to her purpose. What they want to know is: Are they to be defrauded of their rights to free grazing on the Reservation; is the cutting up of the Indian's land into homes for the people to cut also into the ranges of these cattlemen, or will Her Majesty kindly locate the Nez Perces down in the canyons where they belong?” and “It would be a waste of words to say all this to these superb old colossals, who stand upon their treaty as their own hills upon their basaltic foundations.” 334 “Nor is it worthwhile to try persuasion upon the chiefs who, Her Majesty says, oppose because land in severalty breaks up completely their tribal power and substitutes civilization and law.”335

334 Ibid. 335 Ibid.

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Chapter Eight After Allotment

United States Indian Policy in the twentieth century would take many forms. The General

Allotment Act was not the end of policy as the U.S. Government hoped. Indian legal battles continued in the courts. There were water rights cases like Winters v. United States in 1907 which clarified a water rights dispute between Indians and white settlers on the remnant of the

Fort Belknap reservation in Montana. The United Sates v. Santa Fe Railroad Co. established the government as the sole authority in extinguishing Indian land title.336 These and other cases were litigated prior to reorganization under the General Allotment policy of assimilation.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 re-established tribal governments and reservations, excepting the Indian Territory and Alaska villages whose titles had been permanently extinguished leaving them no land base. This act ended the official government assimilation policy; many tribes were in a disillusioned state after almost fifty years of forced assimilation. Many Indian peoples had left their allotments over the years, being unable to feed their families on them. The attempt to make farmers of them had failed, leaving Indians either impoverished or in diaspora in urban centers across the country.

Reorganization didn’t last long. Less than ten years had passed when the official policy of the United States turned back to assimilation and termination of tribal governments. Between

1940 and 1950, six laws were passed giving states criminal jurisdiction over Indian people, who had been only under Federal jurisdiction since 1830-32 based on decisions in Cherokee Nation v.

336 Winters v. United States, 1907 and United States v. Santa Fe Railroad Co., 1941, in American Indians and the United States; A Documentary History vol 4, (Random House: 1973), 2726 and 2730.

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Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia.337 In 1956, Congress created the Indian Relocation Act in an attempt to encourage Indian peoples to abandon their traditional homes and seek economic betterment in urban centers, leading to the estimated relocation of a quarter million Indian people between 1956 and 1980.338 Many tribes avoided termination, others were unable to do so. All tribes [except the Choctaw] within the bounds of Oklahoma were terminated.

This second round of termination policy lasted until the 1970s when terminated tribes began to regain their semi-sovereign relationship to the U.S. Government. Though attempts to reestablish some forms of termination have continued to be introduced, some tribes are still waiting to be re-organized. This is a task made exceedingly difficult at present due to the claims of a multitude of fraudulent organizations, mostly populated by Anglo-Americans and other disaffected peoples attempting to call themselves Indian people.339

The Mount Tabor Indian Community, though not recognized by the Government since the Cleveland Administration, has remained continually in existence from 1848 to the present day. The tribe is currently in the process of preparing our documentation to submit to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and once again establish official government to government relations with the

United States. J.C Thompson, descendant of Martin Luther Thompson [1896 Choctaw Roll] is our Attorney General. Cheryl Diorgano, a Choctaw Descendant of Atahobia is our current Tribal

Chairman. As of this writing I, a descendant of Nannie Foster [1896 Choctaw Roll] have recently finished my two-year term as President of the Tribal Council. We are not assimilated. Like our

337Edward C. Valandra, Not Without Our Consent, Lakota Resistance to Termination, (University of Illinois Press: 2006), 34-36. 338 Ibid, 87-90. 339 Jaqueline Keeler, “The Real Problem with Susan Taaffe Reed and Fake Indian Tribes”, Daily Beast, October 2nd, 2015, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-problem-with-susan-taffe-reed-and-fake-indian-tribes, accessed 10 July, 2019.

117 ancestors who walked from Alabama to Indian Territory on the Choctaw Trail of Tears during the removal said when asked how they had fared on the journey, we say “Chahta Ahaya Moma;

Many Choctaw Standing.”

As for Nannie Foster, she remained in the new State of Oklahoma, keeping house wherever Lewis Foster could find work sharecropping. During this time, my grandfather Harry

“Hatchet” Foster was born in Comanche, Oklahoma, in 1907 and my great Uncle Clifford in

1909. Nannie had no more children after that.340 In 1935 when the depression forced both Lewis and my Grandfather Harry, now married and a father himself, to seek employment with extended family in Texas, Nannie and Clifford moved to Oklahoma City where she worked as a housekeeper until my great Uncle Tom, having found work in Phoenix, Arizona, driving a taxicab, brought the aging Nannie to live with him.341 Lewis Foster returned to Anadarko and spent the last twenty years of his life there, only communicating with his wife via letters; they never saw each other again. My Grandfather followed his older brother to Arizona bringing his wife and child with him. The depression had caused a strain in their marriage and my

Grandmother divorced Harry and took my father and went to Hollywood, intent of making a career in the movies. She was unsuccessful and returned in 1947 after my father Charles had graduated from high school and joined the Navy. In 1955, Harry and my Grandmother, reconciled and remarried, moved to Taos, New Mexico, at the request of Hattie Vaughan,

Nannie’s oldest child, who had discovered the quiet community some years before. Tom Foster

340 Nannie Foster, “Fourteenth Census of the United States, Enumeration District 35, Sheet 3A, Caddo County, Oklahoma”, in U.S. National Archives; U.S. Census Collection. https://www.fold3.com/title/645/census-us-federal- 1920 341 Nannie Foster, “Sixteenth Census of the United States, Enumeration District 7-136, Sheet 121A, Maricopa County, Arizona”, in U.S. National Archives; U.S. Census Collection. https://1940census.archives.gov/

118 never left Arizona, claiming it was better than to return to Oklahoma because it made Nannie sad to be there. Lewis Foster died in 1956.

Nannie refused to return to Oklahoma or the old Chickasaw country around Marlow. She didn’t like the white people who had settled there and was likely still bitter from her experience with the Dawes Commission. Nannie helped Tom’s wife keep house in Phoenix and spent her free time complaining about the food she was no longer allowed to eat as she got older. She died in 1946, according to my Grandfather, of a broken heart at the age of 69. She is buried in the

Camelback Cemetery in Phoenix.

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Conclusions

On the fourth day of May in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a Bull named Inter Caetera, establishing what would become known as the Doctrine of Discovery. In the Bull, the Pope made clear that any land not occupied by Christians was available for “Discovery” by Europe’s various

Kingdoms. This discovery of land, inhabited or not, made it free for the taking. The Bull declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”342 This new doctrine would become the basis of many European land claims in the Americas, north or south. The Doctrine of Discovery was also foundational in creating and spreading the Settler Colonialist project of the United States when

John Marshall ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh that “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to all lands in the New World.”343 Indians living in North America were considered by the United States to be occupants only, their land title subject to the superior title of the discoverer; in this case, the new republic.

This doctrine is found in both the Declaration of Independence and the United States

Constitution. When it was combined with the commerce clause in the Constitution, it became the foundation upon which all treaties with American Indians were made, from the first Treaty with the Delaware in 1787 to the last Treaty with the Navajo in 1868. The cession of Indian land is part of almost every major treaty with the U.S. Government, and stands on this doctrinal bedrock that makes the status of the Indian person one in which they become a ward of the state.

342 Alexander VI Inter Caetera; 1493. 343 John J Marshall, American Indians and the United States Vol 4, 2537-2540.

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The United States, by purchasing other European land claims from France, England,

Canada, Russia and Spain, acquiring Texas by annexation, and the remainder of the contiguous land mass by war with Mexico exercised control of almost 3 million square miles.344 Almost all of this land mass was occupied by millions of Indian peoples in some six hundred tribes. This mass of humanity was subjected to the Doctrine of Discovery and considered wards of the state by the United States.345

With the advent of Manifest Destiny as a concept, the settler colonialist project of the

United States began. Americans began moving west; first in small spurts, then later, in massive floods. As these settlers encroached further into Indian lands, the Government began the treaty process to create places for them to settle. The young nation began to place Agents and Soldiers among the Indians and the settlers to keep peace. With the purchase of the Louisiana territory, the push west could begin in earnest as soon as Indian people were out of the way. The Jackson

Administration effected the removal of the remaining tribes in the east and created the Indian

Territory along the way in what amounted to an ethnic cleansing of the southeastern forest region, four thousand Indian people died. In the Indian Territory and other western regions, the peace was difficult to keep; the Indians were so different, not like the Americans these settlers came to believe themselves to be. The self-sovereign mythical frontier of the settler colonialist project had no room for the other.

By the end of the Civil War, however, the colonial project was too large to control without the cession of the last of Indian held lands, and so the United States came up with the solution for their living-space problem; the allotment of lands in severalty to individual Indians.

344 Not including Alaska and Hawaii, on any non-contiguous territories. 345 Pre-Columbian population figures range from 2 to 18 million people.

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This panacea of a plan would surely solve their problem. The Indians, who had yet to be pacified, could be assimilated. They could be turned into farmers, and citizens and the land would be open to everyone. It didn’t matter that many Indian people were already self-sufficient farmers or that they did not subscribe to the land tenure of the settler; they would learn to farm the way the settler farmed and be industrious as the settler was industrious, making their bread from the sweat of their faces. These lands were part of the rights of the citizen; to own and possess. These rights were exercised by the immigrant in ways that the indigenous were denied.

The interloper became the citizen and the indigenous the national.

The colonial project attempted a series of Indian wars of pacification along with their treaties. These wars proved ineffectual at either pacification or eradication of the Indian. The tribes held fast to their traditions and demanded the United States honor the deals they had made.

The continual steady push of settlement acted as a catalyst for these campaigns, and the inability of the Government to affect a military solution led to a Peace Commission and the advent of the reservation system. This too proved only a temporary respite from the persistent “Indian

Problem”.

In 1881, the Congress maintained a vigorous debate about whether a plan of allotment and assimilation would even work. They had their doubts as the historical record shows. Just as clearly shown is the hubris of a government “of the people” playing semantic word games about the definition of “people” and exposing their willingness to legislate their personal, and often racist bias into a definition that, when we consider the supposed American ideal that “all men are created equal,” was morally extra-Constitutional, if not purely illegally so. They proved quite willing to define the Indian as a person for the purpose of controlling him under the rule of law, while simultaneously calling him less than a person where the law would protect him from the

122 legislation they were considering or disposing of his property. Just as the country had done with former slaves and their descent, they did to the Indian.

The promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was, and to some extent is, denied to the Indian person. While the Indian could live, they must do so as the settlers decided, without the liberty to change their position or place without the expressed consent of the

Government. Their languages were extinguished along with the communal title to their lands; lands that had been their sole possession and mother for thousands of years.

What the Congress failed to accomplish in 1881, was at last done in 1886. The intervening years had seen the growth of the settler colonialist project reach the very doorstep of

Indian Territory. The Indian Territory was being eaten away by white settlement and capitalists in railroads and mining who needed more resources. The clamor for land required that the last treaties be abrogated by an Act of Congress in support of the colony project’s need to fill the land from sea to sea.

To control the Indian Territory became the full-time occupation of the Indian Agent, who in the role acted not as an emissary to a sovereign nation, but rather as the colonial officer; he was responsible for appeasing the savage to keep the peace and to punish wrongs done by his wards while simultaneously addressing the fears of the settler population. The agent turned a blind eye to settler activities as they created their myth of themselves as a natural and manifest part of the landscape they were creating within the Indian Territory as railroads and their associated towns encroached farther into Indian country.

The “Friends of the Indian,” some sincere, some perhaps less so, could see the crisis on the frontier. They could see the burdens placed upon the Indian as the settler project pushed

123 against his land and ate away at his sovereignty. These “Friends of the Indian,” convinced of their own superiority over the mass of savage and strange people all shared a desire and the ability and resources to destroy the Indian in order to save him. In the words of Francis Prucha,

“they had great confidence in the righteousness of their cause, setting about to solve the Indian

Problem by doing away with the Indians’ Indian-ness and preserving only the manliness of the

Individual Indian.” They saw no positive values in Indian cultures and set about with a frightening level of ethnocentrism to Americanize the American Indian.346 The reformers lacked the ability to see what Prucha also seems to have missed; this was not a unique set of circumstances nor a unique solution; it was the same settler colonialism that was taking place in

Canada, Australia, Hawaii, and other places where Anglo-European explorers had planted their flags, claiming the land in name of Christian Kings and in the authority of a Doctrine of

Discovery.

This colonial setter project required immigrants to the United States to assimilate as well and assimilate they did. They had to assimilate for their own good. The native-born and revolutionary Americans demanded it. The government ensured that settler population alone would and could conform by creating a limited immigration system that allowed those with a shared memory to immigrate. The government further solidified the settler position by differentiating between the settler as citizen and the indigenous national with respect to rights and obligations while simultaneously subjecting the freed slave to Jim Crow legislation to curb their access to the rights of citizenship bought by the fourteenth amendment. Those few without a shared memory, those from the un-civilized tribes of Europe had to learn to be American, to blend. They produced their own myths of their places in the landscape and created a sovereignty

346 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, Introduction.

124 of similarity with native-born whites, as they smelted themselves into the alloy of Americanism and created the dreams of the peaceful communities they now occupied.

Allotment of the remainder of Indian Territory, and with the tribes on their various reservations, accomplished the opposite of its intent when all was said and done. Rather than create an American where an Indian once stood, it created impoverished and un-assimilated communities in diaspora. Like Nannie Foster, these Indian people did not give up their traditions, their languages, or their beliefs. All they really lost, and not by their design, were their homes, their land, and in some cases, their hopes for the future. In the end, they lived, and continue to live their lives on a new frontier assigned to them with allotment on the fringes of the greater fabric of the colonial project called the United States of America. Like Nannie Foster, and Chief

Joseph, and untold others, they died and were laid, not in Indian graves, but in American graves, in places that were alien to them, their seeds scattered among so many American lives.

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Note on Sources

Sources used in this work are intended to give a broad view of the General Allotment Act, the political debates surrounding it, and the aftermath. As a rule, sources are those of Non-

Indigenous American Historians as this is not an Indian History. It is rather a history of a colonial settler project and therefore rightly requires the essences of source material derived from within that context. American Indian scholars and philosophers are represented as well where a strictly Indian point of view seems required, and for a lived experience point of reference.

Sources such as the Declaration of Independence are noted without archival locations as they are ubiquitous.

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Alexander VI, Pope. Inter Caetera. 1493. Alexander Hamilton, The Examination VIII. January 1802. Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., 1751. Creek Census Data, Oklahoma Historical Society, Microfilm- CRN 1-20. George III, King. Royal Proclamation of 1763.

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Indian Peace Commission, Medicine Lodge Treaty. 1867. James Madison, Constitution of the United States. 1787. John Jay, Federalist Papers No 2. 1789. John Ridge, Treaty of New Echota. 1835. Old Hop, Cherokee Treaty of 1866. 1866. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence. 1776. 45th Congress of the United States, General Allotment Act of 1887 United States National Archives, Population Schedules. U.S. Census Records. Dawes Enrollment Records. William C. Thompson et al. v. Choctaw Nation. M.C.R. 341. 1905.

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