But the surface of these activists’ lives was deceiving. While seeming to accept the government’s offer of civilization, they remained outspoken adversaries of the Indian Office. Their hostility to the national bureaucracy often confused government officials. After all, these “Red Progressives,” with their Victorian manners and polished English, seemed perfect examples of “vanishing Indians,” who would herald the final disappearance of Native cultures from the American scene. The SAI’s founders could not forget their families, however, or deny the discrimination and slights they had endured during their lives. Most poignant in this regard was Carlos Montezuma, who lived most of his life in Illinois but who later sought out and took up residence with his Yavapai kinsmen at Fort McDowell, Arizona. Sloan once testified that he and his family “have always maintained their tribal relations with the Omahas.”13 For these activists, then, the good citizenship gun was not only an instrument for their own advancement but also a tool for protecting their families and communities.
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THOMAS SLOAN’S LIFE fitted neatly with the biographies of his fellow committee members. He was born in St. Louis in 1863 to a white father and mixed-race mother, but he later testified that “during all of my life, I have been in contact with the Omaha Indians.” Sloan spent his early childhood away from the Omaha Reservation, but in the 1870s he moved permanently to Nebraska, where he joined the household of his maternal grandmother, Margaret Berda Sloan. Margaret was the daughter of Michael Berda, a trader who also served as the Omaha’s interpreter at treaty councils, and Taeglaha Haciendo, an Omaha woman who was the sister of a tribal chief.14
Sloan received a rudimentary education at a Nebraska mission school before going to work as a herder for white cattlemen who leased pastureland from the Omahas. Bright and inquisitive, the young man soon noticed that the local Indian agent and cattle company were cheating the tribe of its full income. When he complained, he later recalled, he was labeled a troublemaker. As he told a congressional committee in 1935, “My contacts have been those of an Indian and my experience of that kind. . . . [A]s a boy I had the same treatment that the full-blood Indians had.”15 That treatment included “being locked up, arrested by the police, abused and put in jail.” Upon his release, the Omaha agent sent Sloan east to be educated at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a school founded to educate freed slaves but recently endowed with federal funds to also educate American Indian students.16
Like the other SAI founders, Sloan was a model student. He seemed a living embodiment of the prediction that education could raise Indians to a new, more sophisticated life. In 1887 Hampton’s leaders took him to Washington, D.C., to attend the annual meeting of the U.S. Board of Indian Commissioners, a group of prominent reformers and missionaries that monitored the operations of the Indian Office. There “Lieutenant Sloan” proudly showed off his school uniform and good manners, lecturing the group about the lessons in “manliness” he had absorbed at Hampton. He praised Hampton’s policy of putting Indian “officers” like him in charge of governing and maintaining their own dormitory, called the wigwam. He told of the Wigwam Council he had organized to ensure that the institution’s rules against gambling and smoking would be obeyed. The future lawyer also informed the commissioners that the Indian students at Hampton had organized their own reading room and debating society. He declared that his ambition was “to get as thorough an education as possible,” and he promised that he would soon return home to find employment and “be independent.”17
When he returned to Nebraska, Sloan saw firsthand the hardships endured by traditional hunters and subsistence farmers after tribal lands had been divided into individual homesteads under the government’s new program of allotment. He also witnessed the disruptions that occurred when non-Indian settlers began buying former tribal land on the reservation. They competed with Omaha families for water, timber, and other resources, while recoiling from the prospect of sharing their schools and churches with Indians. Many other SAI founders witnessed similar scenes, but Sloan’s experience was perhaps more intense than most.
The Omahas were a particular subject of national interest. In 1879, when Sloan was sixteen, the Ponca leader Standing Bear, whose tribe previously had been removed to Indian Territory, escaped from the reservation there. He returned with his family to Nebraska and sought refuge on Sloan’s reservation. The U.S. Army quickly captured Standing Bear, but instead of physically resisting the soldiers sent to arrest him, the chief, with the help of local reformers, filed a habeas corpus suit in federal district court demanding that the local judge release him. After a brief but widely reported hearing in which his captor, General George Crook, a veteran commander who had served alongside President Hayes in the Civil War, attested to Standing Bear’s good behavior, the court granted the Ponca’s request. Judge Elmer Dundy declared that the Indians “have the inalienable right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ so long as they obey the laws. . . .”18
Once Standing Bear was freed, his local supporters organized an extended speaking tour for him. Their goal was to generate support for Indian education and citizenship by having the chief tell his story of imprisonment and freedom to audiences all along the eastern seaboard. “We are bound,” Standing Bear would cry at the climax of his lectures. “We ask you to set us free.”19 At one of Standing Bear’s appearances he met Alice Cunningham Fletcher, an aspiring student of the new discipline of anthropology, who quickly expressed a desire to visit his Nebraska reservation. Fletcher spent several months with the Omahas, learning not only about their hunting techniques and traditional ceremonies but also of their fear that they would soon share the Poncas’ fate and be removed to Indian Territory.
An ardent supporter of individual landownership as a key instrument for promoting the tribe’s civilization, Alice Fletcher began lobbying for passage of a special allotment bill that would divide the Omaha Reservation into homesteads and extend U.S. citizenship to the tribe. Under Fletcher’s proposal, Indians would hold federally protected “trust” titles to their homesteads for twenty-five years. These titles would make their property tax exempt. At the end of the twenty-five years they would receive fee simple titles, and their land would be added to the local tax rolls. Her proposal received a warm welcome in Congress and became law in 1882. As Thomas Sloan completed his studies at Hampton, the Indian Office assigned the anthropologist to oversee the survey and division of the Omahas’ homeland.20
Nebraska’s Indians remained in the national spotlight in 1884, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of John Elk, an Indian resident of the city of Omaha, who had attempted to vote in local elections. Elk argued that the Fifteenth Amendment’s protection of the right to vote should extend to Indians like him who had chosen to live apart from their tribes. Despite enthusiastic support from Alice Fletcher and other reformers, the High Court denied Elk’s claim, noting that because Congress had never defined the Indians’ legal status, he was “no more ‘born in the United States’ . . . within the meaning of the . . . Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government. . . .”21 To correct this decision, Congress stipulated that the Omahas receiving allotments under Fletcher’s bill would be recognized as U.S. citizens. In addition, when Congress passed a comprehensive law, the General Allotment Act, in 1887, it extended this citizenship provision to any Indian accepting an individual homestead. From the perspective of former Indian boarding school students like Thomas Sloan and his colleagues in the Society of American Indians, the prospect of a secure title to their own land, together with the protection of American citizenship and the enthusiastic backing of a network of non-Indian reformers like Fletcher, promised a future in which they would be able to fulfill a desire for a life of “manliness” and “independence.”
Sloan returned from Hampton to Nebraska in 1889 amid this atmosphere of official optimism. Under Fletcher’s direction, the Omahas’ Missouri River homeland was
rapidly being divided into individual farms, transforming their pastures and hunting grounds into agricultural real estate. Tribal members were becoming citizens and registering to vote in local elections with the blessing of federal officials who seemed genuinely committed to supporting their entry into the American legal and political arena. Would this enthusiasm endure? According to the Indian Rights Association, allotment had “thrown wide open the door to Indian citizenship.”22 Fletcher called the new law “the Magna Carta of the Indians,” but many Indians outside the circle of educated young English speakers worried that this new status would fail the Indians as quickly as it had the nation’s former slaves.23
A series of unprecedented events soon forced U.S. authorities to define the meaning of Omaha citizenship. A rail line suddenly bisected the tribal homeland, bringing hundreds of white homesteaders to the area and spurring the growth of new towns along its tracks. The arriving settlers quickly set about buying up the tribe’s “surplus lands” (reservation land left unassigned after allotments had been distributed to tribal members) and leasing Indian-owned trust property to expand their farms. Finally, in March 1889, the newcomers organized a new political entity, Thurston County, to govern their community. Named for a prominent railroad attorney who soon became a U.S. senator, the new county seemed barely viable; the bulk of its land base consisted of federally protected tax-exempt Omaha allotments.
In a few years a tribal homeland was transformed into a center of commercial agriculture whose economy was dominated by newcomers. Theoretically, Native citizens on the reservation would continue to enjoy federal protection for their tax-exempt land while also participating freely in the political life of Thurston County. But the extent of that protection and the nature of the freedom they would enjoy remained unclear. At first Sloan participated eagerly in the life of the new county. He worked as a census enumerator, a county surveyor, and an office clerk. He settled and voted in the new railroad town of Pender. Following the advice of his mentors at Hampton, the young graduate seemed eager to “travel the white man’s road.” Like many others who were drawn to the Society of American Indians, Sloan accepted the promise of citizenship. He understood that promise was vague and that he was taking a great deal on trust, but at least at the start of his career, the citizenship gun seemed to offer the means to a bright future.
EXPLORING THE POWER OF CITIZENSHIP
Sloan soon discovered the limits of U.S. citizenship. Immediately after his arrival in Nebraska, the young graduate learned that Alice Fletcher, the reformer who had been appointed special agent to oversee the allotment of the tribe’s lands, had declared him ineligible for a homestead. She announced that both because of Sloan’s Missouri birth and the fact that his grandmother Margaret had earlier received a homestead at the Nemaha Agency in southern Nebraska, the Indian Office no longer considered him a tribal member. The young graduate insisted that he had been a reservation resident at the time of the allotment law’s passage and that he had no other family but his grandmother. Fletcher refused to hear Sloan’s appeal, and the local agent declared the case closed. Sloan refused to remain silent. An Indian Office inspector named Arthur Tinker reported in December 1890 that Sloan had told him “he cannot be driven off the reservation.” Tinker reported that Sloan “laughs at the order” from Washington, D.C., demanding that he leave the reservation. “This young man has some education,” noted the inspector (apparently unaware of Sloan’s stellar performance at Hampton), “and thinks, or seems to think, that he knows more than any one on the reservation. He is said to be a disturber, and should be moved off if he does not belong here.”24
Hiram Chase, another educated young man of mixed ancestry, was a childhood friend of Sloan’s who also had recently returned from the East. Like Sloan, Chase had been labeled a troublemaker, and he too had left the reservation in search of an education. Chase had not attended a government boarding school; with the support of his non-Indian relatives he had attended the University of Cincinnati, graduated from its law school, and been admitted to the Nebraska bar. Outraged by Fletcher’s action and the Indian Office’s intransigence, Sloan decided to read law with Chase. He was admitted to the bar in 1892.25 This seemingly impulsive decision established Sloan’s lifework. As he told a congressional committee in 1913, “I took up the study of law in order to enable myself to make fights against the agent [and] to protect myself and my people. . . .” 26 Throughout his career Sloan returned again and again to the federal courts, believing that only they could protect Indians from the arbitrary actions of the Indian Office.
Sloan challenged Fletcher’s decision by filing a lawsuit against the United States. Seeking “the aid of the court for the protection of his rights,” he demanded that the farm he and his grandmother had cultivated since 1880 be deeded to him as an allotment. The Indian Office responded by seeking a dismissal of the suit, asserting, essentially, that individual Omahas had no right to challenge the government’s authority. Its motion read in part that “the management of Indian affairs was entrusted to the Department of Interior” and “the court should not interfere” with the agency as it carried out its work. At the case’s first hearing in federal district court in 1899, Judge Oliver Perry Shiras rejected this assertion of invulnerability, noting instead that the Omaha allotment act was fundamentally a contract between the tribe and the United States. Should Sloan be considered a member of the Omaha tribe, he wrote, “then it must be held that he comes within the class of persons entitled to allotments in severalty. . . . The complainant’s right . . . to an allotment . . . is not inherited from his father or other ancestors,” the judge added; “it is a personal right, conferred on him by reason of his being an Indian of the Omaha tribe.”27
The Indian Office managed to reverse Sloan’s victory on a technicality, but the young lawyer returned to court and won again. In its second ruling on the matter, the district court noted that federal officials had no authority to ignore a congressionally authorized procedure for challenging their actions, nor could they declare unilaterally that “children of free-born parents take the legal status of the father. . . .” Clearly irritated by the Indian Office’s expansive view of its own power, Judge Shiras declared that there was “no good reason” to deny [Sloan] his property. Even though Thomas Sloan “is by habit, mode of life, and education a white man,” the judge concluded, “that fact does not deprive him of the right to claim an allotment . . . as he was at the date of [the act’s] adoption living on the reservation and is in fact of mixed blood.”28 The government appealed Shiras’s decision, providing Thomas Sloan the opportunity to be the first American Indian to argue a case before the United States’ highest court. The justices there upheld the district court’s ruling, and Sloan received his land.29
As he prepared his allotment claim, Sloan also became embroiled in reservation politics. The Omahas were deeply divided over both the allotment process and their evolving relationship with the settlers migrating into their territory. At one extreme were tribal members who rejected the idea of becoming farmers, preferring to subsist by hunting and leasing their allotted land to cattlemen and large-scale farming operations. Opposing these traditionalists were people, like Sloan and Chase, who sought individual land titles and the elimination of the supervising presence of the Indian Office. The political battle lines between these groups shifted regularly as each side sought alliances with groups of competing cattlemen, farmers, railroad employees, and government agents. Membership in these rival groups was also fluid because it rested on family loyalties as much as on ideology or economic self-interest. Neither side had a monopoly on virtue. Those favoring the retention and leasing of trust lands, for example, often gravitated to wealthy ranchers, while those calling for allotment and individual independence allied themselves with enterprising small farmers. Because Sloan was an attorney with ties to both the tribe and businessmen in nearby Pender, he was frequently accused of wrongdoing. Sloan also served as the legal guardian
of the estates of minor or elderly tribal members. These estates were typically leased to local non-Indian farmers, and guardians often attracted criticism. Given the unregulated, competitive atmosphere of the era, it is certainly possible that Sloan profited inappropriately from his work. Corrupt guardians of Indian real estate in Indian Territory attracted national attention in the early twentieth century, and the same practices could well have occurred in nearby eastern Nebraska. On the other hand, Sloan was never charged with being a central player in any of the reservation scandals. His actions over the more than four decades of his career suggest that he had little interest in personal wealth or corporate enterprise. He may well have been an opportunist, but he was probably not a crook.
It seems more likely that Thomas Sloan attributed the chaos and suffering at the agency as much to incompetent agents and patronizing reformers like Alice Fletcher as to the shady loan sharks and real estate speculators who were a growing feature of reservation life. His actions in the 1890s and the first years of the new century reveal an activist who believed that court-enforced rights were the Indians’ best weapon against disruptive outsiders, be they government agents or unscrupulous swindlers. Just as Sloan had insisted on his personal right to an allotment of property, so he would argue in other settings that legal protections were the Indian community’s most effective tool for preserving its property and autonomy. As a consequence, Sloan publicly supported causes that benefitted his own private economic interests as well as those that opposed government paternalism. He argued, for instance, that the Omahas had the right to sell and consume alcohol. Sloan insisted throughout his career that the rights derived from U.S. citizenship, not federal benevolence, provided the most effective protection for Indian people.
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