Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs: For the Year 1863 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs: For the Year 1863

In view of the disturbing causes that have existed, our relations with the various Indian tribes arc as favorable as could reasonably be expected. The experience of the past few years, however, clearly demonstrates the necessity of important changes in the policy hitherto pursued towards them.

While the regions of country occupied by the Indians remained uninhabited by the whites, the plan of setting apart separate reservations for different bands of the same tribe, or for small tribes possessing similar habits and customs, and privileged to roam over common hunting grounds in quest of the means of subsistence, as in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska, seemed wise and to promise success; but as the country becomes settled, their dependence upon game and the spontaneous productions of the earth becomes more and more precarious, while the necessity for their keeping within the limits of their reservations increases. The Indians are thus left without their accustomed resources, and in the midst of a population with whose customs and arts of life they are wholly unfamiliar. They consequently become discouraged, and, looking solely to their scanty annuities from the government, or to begging and pilfering for the necessaries of life, fall an easy prey to the sharpers and whiskey traders who gather around their reservations for the purpose of obtaining their moneys. The smaller the reservation the greater are the facilities for the exercise of this pernicious influence, and hence the necessity of concentrating scattered hands and the smaller tribes of similar habits, language, and customs, into as large communities as possible, and their location upon the more remote portions of the public domain. They will soon become extinct unless they acquire the arts of civilized life, and to this end it is indispensably necessary to place them beyond the reach of any influence save that of their agents, teachers, and assistants. The vast emigration to the newly discovered gold-bearing regions of the interior has brought us into more immediate contact with large and powerful tribes, with whom no treaties other than those of amity have yet been negotiated, and all the energies which the department can possibly exert in that direction will scarcely be adequate to the pressing demands that will be made upon it during the next few years by the exigencies of the Indian service in those regions. Immediate steps should be taken to prevent collision between them and our own people, to provide suitable locations for the Indians, and to induce them to settle upon them and engage in the cultivation of the soil, and the rearing of domestic animals, and in the mean time to furnish them such supplies as may be absolutely necessary to prevent starvation.

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