The document details a superintendent’s view into various native goings-on. He seems particularly concerned with the “Snakes”, a tribe who murders white people and steals from their neighbors.
If we look at this through the lense of a group resisting an occupying force, it seems like a very reasonable coures of action to kill the interlopers and steal from your former compatriots who have turned on you.
The Warm Springs Agency was once (1859) captured by them, the whites driven out, many friendly Indians killed, all the Government stock stolen, the principal building at the Agency burned, and a large number of horses belonging to friendly Indians driven off.
They also detail how they had taken two chiefs as prisoners.
They had been taken prisoners by late Agent A. P. Dennison at Warm Springs and turned over to the military for safe keeping. Appearing to be well disposed, they were employed as guides, but when in the vicinity of Harney Lake they decamped, taking with them several horses and two good rifles which doubtless were afterwards the instruments of death to many a white man.9
As they waged war, the troops were unsuccessful when they couldn’t make the natives fight their way.
These Troops were usually victorious when the Indians could be brought to battle, but that was seldom done. The Indians carried on a guerrilla warfare to which our troops were quite unaccustomed, and the facility with which they moved over their vast country, their intimate knowledge of all its strongholds and hiding places, with their ability to endure long marches without food or clothing, gave them enormous advantage.
They additionally committed what we would consider today as war crimes.
With ample forces and supplies, the Indians were pursued almost literally night and day, summer and winter. The war was relentless, cruel and bloody. Two thirds or more of the entire Tribe were killed or perished of starvation. Men, women and children perished alike.
They additionally forced western ideas on the native internal war practices.
The friendly Indians attempted to make slaves of them, according to the old Indian custom, but I forbid it.
Prisoners faced a variety of conditions, from surveiled and fed to the following.
These Indians are in deplorably destitute condition, both as regards food and clothing. They are absolutely without clothing. At the time of my visit to them there were not in the entire camp enough garments of all descriptions-including blankets, dressed skins &c. to equal the amount of clothing two adult whites would ordinarily wear. Although the weather was intensely cold, ice freezing every night thick enough to bear our horses, nearly all of the children were entirely naked, and all of the adults nearly so.
I find it particularly interesting that the rations that they are provided is solely of beef. They’re expected to forage for any other foods they may need. Many groups gathered seeds in the fall, but didn’t have excess. It is made more difficult in that these foods are dispersed across the countryside, which they can’t visit because they’ve been stuck on reservations.
[Some specific roots] are very nutritious and if the Indians could obtain a plentiful supply they would thrive, but the little marshes which furnish them are scattered all over the country, and to permit the Indians to visit them would preclude the idea of gathering them upon a reservation.
They were able to reach a tenative peace, but noted that if those conditions deteriorated, so too would the peace.
The Indians appear to be sincere in their professions of peace at this time, and if properly managed and treated they will probably remain so. But if maltreated, or neglected we may expect to see them on the war path next summer.
The creation of a reservation also blatantly ignores the native perspective here.
The arguments in favor of [establishing a reservation] are that it involves no very great expense of removing them and it will be more satisfactory to them than to receive them to some distant locality with which they are unacquainted. The objections to it are that an agency then must always be enormously expensive owing to the great cost of transportation and the climate being intensely cold is unfavorable to agriculture.
Additionally, the violence of the unsettling of these people is so casual and matter-of-fact that it’s rather gross. They talk about de-homing a group of people who live in the mountains to coastal areas.
But the chief argument in favor of taking them [to a reservation on the coast] is this that when once there they are permanently located forever. There will be no possibility of their ever escaping through the settlements of the broad Willamette Valley and across the Cascade mountains with which they are entirely unacquainted. They will be in small compass where they can be easily controlled and they will be entirely isolated from whites and Cheaply supported.
Open questions:
- Some things in the document are underlined. Why?