Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  In October 1813, Jackson finally received a real assignment; he was told to go to Mississippi again and fight the Creek Indians, who had just attacked Fort Mims, in the section of the Mississippi Territory that is now part of Alabama, and killed 200 people. Jackson was still recovering from the bullets fired into him by the Benton brothers, but he got out of bed and put an outfit of volunteers together again, this time with 2,500 soldiers, and set out for Mississippi. He got little support because supplies and additional men promised to him failed to arrive, and some of his own men finished up the brief periods they’d agreed to serve and left for home, but he fought a battle near the town of Talladega against 1,000 Indians led by Chief Red Eagle, killing 300 Indians and sending the others scurrying. Then he followed them, and after allowing all Indian women and children to leave, he fought them again and defeated the Creeks completely, killing 750 Indians and losing only forty-nine of his own men. (Again I wish there were a better word than “only” in this context, and I use it just to show the big difference in the numbers.) As reprisal, the Creeks had to give the United States 23 million acres out of their land ownership. And in a typical Indian display of admiration for an effective enemy, they also gave Jackson three square miles of land for himself.

  I’m going to go off on another tangent here, but it’s a very important tangent because this seems to be as good a place as any to say a thing or two about the treatment that the original population of the continent received from the American people, which is as bad a blot on our history as our treatment of black people. That’s about the only thing I hold against old Jackson - not his battles with the Creeks because I suppose they were necessary to keep the Indians from going on and killing more people, but the fact that he didn’t do anything to help the Indians when he was president. The Seminoles and the Choctaws were terribly mistreated when Jackson was president, and I do hold that against him. In fact, let me go off on a tangent here and discuss our treatment of the Indians in the next chapter.

  SOMETIME OR OTHER I think I ought to write an essay about the dreadful treatment given the Indians. If I never get around to it, I’m hoping that somebody, someday, will write something that outlines the patriotism of those Indian chiefs who were only trying to save their own country from exploitation by the whites, who made treaties with the Indians and broke them every time they made one. Somebody certainly ought to take the story of all those great Indians who were fighting for their own people and their own country and make it perfectly plain that there never were a people who were more thoroughly mistreated. I don’t agree for a second with the historians who say that Indians were dirty, cruel, and lazy. There were Indian tribes on the East Coast and in central New York - the Iroquois, for example, and the Algonquins in Canada - who were working toward an organization that, in the long run, I think, would have made them great statesmen and a great asset to our country if they’d been treated fairly, which they weren’t. I’ve just read an article about those tribes that was written by a couple of men who don’t like Indians, but I came away from it thinking more than ever that the Iroquois and the Algonquins were great people.

  There were certainly Indians who developed a hatred for white settlers and went on murderous rampages, slipping up and killing white people and scalping them. But that was because they felt that their lands were being taken away from them, and they were, no question about it, and without compensation. Whenever the whites infringed on one of those treaties that we made and then broke, why, the Indians would fight back. It was a terrible thing when some family would be massacred by the Indians, but the Indians were only protecting their ownership of the property that had been taken away from them.

  The real displacement of the Indian began after the Civil War; it was then that most of the Indian tragedy took place, when one president after another, Grant and Hayes and Garfield and - for a minute I couldn’t think of the name of the striped-pants boy who followed Garfield, but I remember now that it was Chester A. Arthur - offered discharged Federal soldiers homesteads on Indian land. That homestead business was to give former soldiers a means of livelihood so that the economy of the United States wouldn’t be upset, and some former Confederate soldiers went out west for homesteads, too, and it worked. But nobody seemed to give much thought to the livelihood of the Indians; the whites just casually took all their hunting grounds and all the places where they’d lived for centuries away from them. The citizens of the United States, by way of the president, would declare an area as public land, and the whites would take it over.

  But there was plenty of mistreatment of the Indians before the Civil War as well. The early settlers had a very different attitude toward the Indians than they should have had. Many of the Indians were inclined to be friendly to the whites and were perfectly willing to make treaties with them. But the attitude of the white settlers from Europe was that the Indians were savages and an inferior race, and therefore the settlers had a perfect right to chase them off the land and take it away from them, which is what we did eventually.

  They weren’t an inferior race at all, of course. They were wonderfully wise people, and there were Indian setups in the Western Hemisphere that were almost ideal systems of government. Take the Iroquois in New York; they were an organization of five tribes known as the Five Nations, and they were organized in such a way that their representative government was almost parallel with the government of the United States under the Constitution with its states and its representatives in the national government and its state governments.

  And the Indians had some very great leaders. Some of the greatest leaders this country ever produced were the leaders of the Indian tribes, men like Pontiac in Michigan and Wisconsin, and Tecumseh of the Shawnees, and Geronimo down in the Southwest, and Chief Black Kettle of the Cheyennes, and Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Sioux, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, who performed one of the greatest military maneuvers in the history of the world. He took his whole tribe - I think it was something like 1,800 men, women, and children - and outmaneuvered practically the whole cavalry of the United States, including one of the great strategists of the Civil War, General Oliver Otis Howard, moving his people more than 1,000 miles up toward Canada, going from the valley of the Salmon River out in Idaho, to Montana, east of what is now the Glacier National Park, which is a record that has never been equaled. Howard’s outfit and another force of soldiers headed by another general were four miles apart, and neither of those generals knew where the other was, but Chief Joseph knew where both of them were and he got his people all out.

  Finally, after the cavalry kept chasing him and killed off many of his people, he surrendered, but old Joseph out marched them all. The big dam out in Montana, the Chief Joseph Dam, was named for that great old Indian who outmaneuvered the cavalry of the United States for 1,000 miles, and they never did catch up with him, not really. (Howard, incidentally, was a pretty good fellow in many ways. He developed considerable respect for Chief Joseph, even though they were on opposite sides of the fence, and in 1881 wrote an admiring biography of the Indian leader. And he was also one of the first white men to work for the welfare of the black people. He was chief commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, created by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, and then he founded and was the president from 1869 to 1873 of Howard University, that excellent school in Washington whose student body and faculty are mostly black people.)

  The Indians also had a high regard for the individual and the dignity of the individual, even where the enemy was concerned. The individual in the great Indian tribes was a man of dignity and poise and had a right to his say before the council, and his rights were always respected. The Indians also were very fond of children, and they were very good to their youngsters as they grew up. They tried to train them, both male and female, to the duties that they considered their proper place in life. I don’t like the fact that they made the women do all the heavy drudgery that needed to be done, but after the women became old, they were place
d in the council as part of the government of the tribe. At least that was true in the Iroquois tribes, and I think that women in the other tribes, after they reached a certain age, were looked up to and respected as councilors.

  Mostly, Indian lands weren’t individually owned. For instance, the Sioux had hunting grounds in various places and followed the buffalo north and south. And Chief Joseph and his people, in the valley of the Salmon River and the Snake River out in Oregon and Idaho, moved various places during various times of the year for fish on the Columbia River and for hunting grounds wherever game was most plentiful. The Indians just felt that they owned the whole country, and I think they did because they were the first occupants. But it was finally decided that the West was a part of the United States, and the presidents issued orders in which titles were given to settlers who would go in and stay for a certain period of time, and it worked out that the people who got the worst of it were the Indians.

  The local Indian governments were substantially independent of each other. Each tribe had a chief equivalent to our president, and a council equivalent to our cabinet, and they also had a separate war council, an organization of fighting men known as the war leaders, which was international in the sense that the tribes sometimes banded together for defense and protection, though, like the operation of the United States, civil control never got out of the hands of the civil government. They didn’t have any compulsory military service. The fighting men were highly honored, and Indian youngsters were told practically from birth that it might be necessary for them to defend their own people when the time came, and it was considered the greatest honor in the world for the warriors to fight for the benefit of the whole tribe. It was a volunteer organization entirely, and that’s the reason they were so highly respected.

  But it was a losing battle almost from the start, and the Indians didn’t really have a chance because of the superior weapons and the murderous approach that many white settlers made toward them. The list of mistreatment and treachery toward the Indians is almost endless.

  Practically every great chief ended up murdered or a prisoner. Tecumseh was shot in the back. Black Kettle made several treaties with the Americans and did his best to live up to them, agreeing to move his tribe to a reservation, and then General George Custer, the showoff and the Douglas MacArthur of his day, attacked the tribe without warning and without reason and Black Kettle and his whole family were slaughtered. The man who ordered the actual killing was another officer and a gentleman, an old Baptist preacher who was also a colonel of a regiment out in Colorado. He was just a fanatic. That man did some things for the country during the Civil War and was pretty well thought of at the time, but I never thought much of a man who would kill an old Indian and his whole family when they were about to obey the law, and an unjust law at that.

  Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were called to a conference by General George Crook, a man who was perfectly named, and Crook quoted the president and said the Indians would get everything they wanted. They didn’t get anything they wanted, and in the end, they were both assassinated, killed by Indian police who were hired to work for the soldiers. And Geronimo, the Apache chief who was such a fierce fighter that they were all afraid of him, ended up practically under house arrest in Oklahoma. When I was stationed in Fort Sill in 1917, they showed me the little brick building in which he lived during the last part of his life. It’s still there, and if you want to see it, they’ll show it to you and brag about that’s where Geronimo lived. At the same time, of course, they’ll call him a murderer and a cutthroat, and he may have been in some ways, but he was only trying to protect his own territory for his own people. And I don’t have anything against him for doing that.

  And things weren’t helped much when the government created Indian bureaus for the alleged protection of Indian rights. Every one of our Indian bureaus in Washington was saddled with crooks and cheats. Once in a while, you would have an honest man on the job, and then the difficulties would be exposed, and for a short period, things would be all right. But it never lasted. There were several men who tried their best to do justice to the Indians, but they didn’t have much of a chance because the crooks were always standing at the door ready to take what was loose. The Indians didn’t understand the approach of the white man in business dealings, and they got cheated every time they got into a trade with a white man.

  And in a sense, you might even say that we had fewer excuses for our mistreatment of Indians than of blacks. Everybody with any common sense at all, no matter what his position was or where he lived, knew that slavery was wrong, but at least the flimsy argument could be made that they’d been brought into the country to serve as the laboring force of the South and that many of the plantation owners tried to behave decently toward them and at least fed and clothed them properly. But there wasn’t even that much of an answer to the way we behaved toward the Indians. It was total callousness and greed and nothing more. They were the owners and the occupants of the land, and they were treated as a conquered people, with their land taken away from them and distributed by the government of the United States to homesteaders and settlers.

  The Spaniards were even worse in their treatment of Indians in North and South America. The slaughter of Indians by the Spaniards was another of the most terrible events in world history, particularly the slaughter by Cortez in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. They were ruthless in their treatment of the people who had developed two of the greatest empires in history. They were wonderful people, both the Aztecs and the Incas, and the Spaniards enslaved them. In fact, the Spaniards were the first ones to introduce slavery on the American continent, not only by importing the blacks from Africa, but also by enslaving the Indians who were already here.

  All I can say about the conquest of the two great empires south of us is that the people who point out Geronimo’s house and talk about him as a cutthroat ought to do their talking about the real cutthroats, the men who murdered and enslaved the Aztecs and the Incas. All they were interested in was the gold those people had, and they got it by destroying civilizations that were far ahead of the Egyptian civilization we read so much about.

  In North America, the French made friends of the Indians because they wanted them on their side against the British, and they treated them reasonably well. But the Spanish never did; they treated the Indians like dogs. And the attitude of the Spanish toward the Indians hasn’t changed all that much over the years. There’s been a certain amount of intermarriage and absorption into a mutual society between Spaniards and Indians, but not to a very great extent. You’ll find that the people who control the governments made up of the Peruvian empire, Peru and Ecuador and Colombia, are the Spanish citizens who kept their bloodline more or less clear, and that’s also true in Venezuela.

  The same thing is true in Argentina and Chile. In Brazil, the Portuguese did more mixing with the Indians than any other group in South America, but the white Spaniards are still on top and run much of the country. And it really isn’t any different in Mexico. I’ve been in Mexico on occasion, and they’re fine people, but I think you’ll find that what might be called the Spanish strain still runs the government. Juarez was an Indian and brought about the freedom of Mexico from the French, who were in charge at that point, so there were times when people of Indian descent were important in Mexican history. Still, the people who run the Mexican government in almost every administration are those who claim direct Spanish descent.

  But the citizens of the United States were bad enough, and I suspect that the only reason we didn’t enslave the American Indians was because the American Indians wouldn’t be enslaved. There was never any slavery in the Indian tribes; even when they conquered another tribe, they never tried to make slaves out of the people of that other tribe. And I think the only reason we didn’t try to make slaves out of the people we conquered with our superior weapons is that we knew that an American Indian would rather die than be anybody’s slave. An American Indian considered him
self as good as any two white men, and in many instances, they were.

  In the end, of course, we did conquer the Indians, and most of them were herded onto reservations, driven out or marched out, and others just died out. In the Southeast, the Cherokees and the Chickasaws and the Osages were simply moved off their lands and brought over to Oklahoma, which nobody thought was any good at the time. (It turned out to be one of the richest lands in the world and made many Indians equally rich, but then the white man stepped in to cheat them of everything they had and succeeded in most cases.) The Iroquois Five Nations held out longer than most other tribes, but they also were finally put on reservations in New York and elsewhere and had their lands taken from them and given to whites; and the last time I looked it up, there were 16,000 Iroquois left and 11,500 of them were still on reservations. And the great Sioux tribe of the Northern Central Plains were pretty much wiped out, and so were the Apaches in Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California.