d one thousand
acres are in actual cultivation this year--seven hundred in grain and
hay, one hundred and ninety-five in corn, and one hundred and nine
in vegetables. A farmer, assistant-farmer, and gardener manage this
considerable piece of land. When they need laborers they detail such men
or women as they require, and these go out to work. They seldom refuse;
if they do, they are sent to the military post, where they are made to saw
wood. Not one of the cabins has about it a garden spot; all cultivation
is in common; and thus the Indian is deprived of the main incentive to
industry and thrift--the possession of the actual fruits of his own toil;
and, unless he were a deep-thinking philosopher, who had studied out for
himself the problems of socialism, he must, in the nature of things, be
made a confirmed pauper and shirk by such a system, in which he sees no
direct reward for his toil, and neither receives wages nor consciously
eats that which his own hands have planted.

In the whole system of management, as I have described it, you will
see that there is no reward for, or incentive to, excellence; it is all
debauching and demoralizing; it is a disgrace to the Government, which
consents to maintain at the public cost what is, in fact, nothing else but
a pauper shop and house of prostitution.

And what is true of this reservation is equally true of that on the Tule
River, in Southern California, which I saw in 1872. In both, to sum up the
story, the Government has deprived the farmers of an important laboring
force by creating a pauper asylum, called a reservation; and, having
thus injured the community, it further injures the Indian by a system of
treatment which ingeniously takes away every incentive to better living,
and abstains from controlling him on those very points wherein an upright
guardian would most rigidly and faithfully control and guide his ward.

To force a population of laboring and peaceable Indians on a reservation
is a monstrous blunder. For wild and predatory or unsettled Indians, like
the Apaches, or many tribes of the plains, the reservation is doubtless
the best place; but even then the Government, acting as guardian, ought to
control and train its wards; it ought to treat them like children, or at
least like beasts; it ought not only to feed and clothe them, but also
to teach them, and enforce upon them order, neatness, good manners, and
habits of discipline and steady labor. This seems pla