Continues, 'we will leave our bones on the ground, that our Great Father
may see where his Dacotah children died!' [He has seen many such
shambles, O thou eloquent Indian! eloquent to ears of flint and hearts
of granite! and I never heard that the 'Great Father' ever shed a single
tear over them.] He goes on: 'We are very poor. We have sold our hunting
grounds, and with them the graves of our fathers. We have sold our own
graves.' [Out of all those hundreds of thousands of acres, not six feet
of earth, which they could call their own, left for any one of them!]
'We have no place to bury our dead, and you will not pay us the money
for our lands.' I give this interview, and what transpired there, as a
sample of the treatment which the Indians were in the habit of receiving
at the hands both of the General Government and the State authorities.
Not the wisest kind of treatment, one would think, this which Red Iron
received, taking all the circumstances into account. The reader will be
surprised, however, that Governor Ramsey, not content with 'breaking'
the chief, as he called it--the greatest dishonor which he could inflict
upon an Indian of rank--sent him, when the council broke up, to the
guard house, under an escort of soldiers! This impolitic official ought
to have remembered that the fire was even then ready for the kindling,
which finally burst out in such fearful devastation over his devoted
State; that it was enough to have cheated the Indians, without thus
inflaming their already excited passions, by heaping so great an
indignity upon the person of their chief. But he was regardless of
everything except the display of his own power and authority. No doubt
he thought he was acting for the best, and that the dirty redskins
needed to be held with a high hand. But it was bad thinking and doing,
nevertheless; a most shortsighted and foolish policy, which came
wellnigh, as it was, to an Indian outbreak. The braves of Red Iron
retired under the leadership of Lean Bear, a crafty fellow, eloquent in
his way, and now irreconcilably mad against the whites; and when he had
led them about a quarter of a mile from the
|
