Tepee Neighbors

This volume was published in 1917.Excerpts from the Preface:The objection has often been made to these sketches that they are too sad. "People won' t read such pain- ful stuff," editors have said to me. Then I slowly look over and consider my pages. Am I justified in chang- ing this, or that? There is only one response possible for me to make. "I m sorry, but they' re all true. I cannot alter them." And I gather up my manuscript with a sigh because I know so intimately and so well from my own personal experience as a near neighbor to the Indians that these glimpses of them are indeed ac- curate. Every incident, I think, and almost every character, I have drawn from my life and experience of nearly ten years spent with the Indians of Wyoming. Not everything, of course, happened just as it is set down, incidents and events have been combined, the sex and names of characters have been altered, but the whole has its basis in gloomy, even desperate fact ; for I have seen and heard and handled, and my memory is stored with much harrowing evidence. For indeed one of the most appalling, even crushing experiences that can come to a person, is to live for a while in close touch with the Indians on a typical reservation crushing and appalling, of course, vicariously and in direct ratio with one' s interest in the Indians, for it is a noteworthy fact that a great many people live long on reservations who, at the end, are far indeed from being either appalled or crushed. I will try to elucidate a little this statement. In the first place the Indians are surrounded by white people mainly of two unfortunate attitudes of mind. The first is the man who hates the Indian. He lives gen- erally across the boundary line of the reservation; he toils on his side while the Indian idles on the other; he pays his grudging taxes while the Indian exists free of charge; he sees loads of government freight driven into the agency for free distribution, and he envies. Of course this freight was bought with the Indians own money, at the discretion of the government, not the Indian ; without indeed the consent or even knowledge of the owner of the funds. His mind is full of the old evil stories of the past, told always from the side of the Indian s enemy. And he broods and he draws conclusions and he condemns. There are not many of him, but he talks and harrangues out of all proportion to his relative importance in size. Then there is the far larger class of neighboring whites whose attitude toward the Indian is one of ab- solute indifference and uninterest. Familiarity of an entirely external sort has bred in them a kind of com- fortable contempt. The Indian is tolerated only on account of his not inconsiderable by-products; free house-rent, free service, a free automobile, almost free beef in these days of soaring prices; and so on, and principally because he offers a field wherein many indifferent and incompetent individuals may safely work a little and worry not at all, for in that field there exists no danger of competition, and once in it is almost impossible to be ousted. Thus does the Indian know the white man ; thus, and in the light of his own old evil stories of the past. It is not to be wondered at that he regards him as an altogether unadmirable individual. The sketch called Civilization is entirely typical of his mental attitude toward his white neighbor.By far the most harrowing fact of reservation life is the great, omnipresent, overwhelming and constant nearness of death. Indeed, death is no more at home on the river Styx itself than within the boundary lines of the ordinary reservation. The statistics tell us that the normal death rate among the whites of this country is annually fifteen per thousand. That means that in the little middle- western town in which I now live, we may look for about one hundred and fifty deaths during the year.