| 143 trouble was with a nation who could call for arbitration, or who was able to cope with our armies.
In Congress there is a wide diversity of opinion as to the true policy. One class claims that when the whites want any country occupied by the Indians they shall have it any way. The Chicago Times well says that if this is the case then we ought to stop making treaties and not pledge the honor of the nation to do a thing, and afterwards proceed not to do it; and that, to demand their extermination, is as barbarous and foolish as to wish to wipe out Chicago because some wicked people murder and commit other crimes there.
As to wrongs, it is stated that the North Pacific Railroad scheme included, as a share of its plunder, fifty-eight million acres of land that virtually belonged to the Indians. Writers also cite the violation of the treaty in regard to the Indian Territory south of Kansas, and the rascality of those who have the management of the Indian business is evidently the immediate cause of the present difficulties.
A Times editorial of July 17 says that the cry of "extermination" is senseless, atrocious and brutal, because the criminal element among the Indians is not above ten per cent of the race, probably only five per cent who are evil disposed toward the whites. It is supposed that there are three hundred thousand Indians in the United States, and "some of these have permanent forms of government, and all of these demonstrate that they can govern themselves; that they are self-supporting and are making a fair progress toward a substantial form of civilization. When one separates the chaff from the wheat he will find that the wheat largely predominates."
Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, writes to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, as follows: "We agreed that no white man should enter the Indian country, but, in violation of this, the Government ordered General Custer to explore it. He found gold, and the white men flocked there, the Indians killed them and war ensued. Sitting Bull believes that the Indian who sells his country is doomed, and that he is doing a patriotic duty to defend it." Bishop W. says that after a trial of one hundred years our nation still "Persists in a policy which sows blunders and crimes and reaps massacre and war.
Wendell Phillips has written to the Boston Transcript, as follows:
"Why do your columns talk of the 'Custer Massacre?' During the war General Custer has fallen in a fair fight, simply because the enemy had more soldierly skill and strategy than Custer had. What kind of a war is it where, if we kill the enemy, it is death; if he kills us it is a massacre? When the farmers of Concord and Lexington, in 1775, shot the British invaders of their villages, was it a massacre? When the Southerners mowed us down at Bull Run and Ball's Bluff, there was no talk of a massacre! When the North paid them their own coin at Gettysburg and Antietam there were no columns with staring capitals 'Gettysburg Massacre.'
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