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 plain enough, but it will never be done by “Indian agents,” selected from civil life, be these ministers or laymen.

An army officer, methodical, orderly, and having the habit of command, is the proper person for superintendent of a reservation; for drill and discipline, regular hours, regular duties, respectful manners, cleanliness, method—­these are the elements of civilization that are needed, and which an army officer knows how to impress without harshness, because they are the essence of his own life.  But under our present Indian policy the army is the mere servant of the Indian agent.  If it were not for the small military force at Camp Wright, Mr. Burchard, the agent, could not keep an Indian on his reservation.  But the intelligent, thoroughly-trained, and highly-educated soldier who commands there has neither authority nor influence at the reservation.  He is a mere policeman, to whom an unruly Indian is sent for punishment, and who goes out at the command of the superintendent, a person in every way his inferior except in authority, to catch Indians when no mob is at hand to drive them in.