mischief to the Indian tribes. The Indian is still, as he always has been, and will remain for many years to come, entirely incapable of meeting the white man, with safety to himself, in the field of trade and of resisting the arts and inducements which would be brought to bear upon him. He is incapable of steadily attaching that value to the ownership of land which its importance deserves, or of knowing how far the best interests of himself and family are involved in its continued possession. The result of individual Indian ownership, with power to sell, would unquestionably be, that in a very short time he would divest himself of every foot of land and fall into poverty. The case of the Shawnee tribe of Kansas affords a perfect illustration of this pernicious policy. The Shawnees were removed to Kansas under the Jackson policy, so called, and occupied a splendid reservation on the Kansas River, where they were told they were to make their home forever. But after a few years of undisturbed possession, our people, in the natural flow of population, reached Kansas, where they found the Shawnees in possession of the best part of what has since been the State of Kansas Our people at once wanted these Indian lands, and they determined to root out the Shawnees in the interest of civilization and progress. They accomplished this result in the most speedy and scientific manner, using as their proposed lever this identical plan since adopted by Mr. Schurz. First, the government was induced to re-purchase a part of the reservation on the ground that they had more land than they needed for cultivation; and, secondly, the government induced the Indians to have the remainder divided up into farms and conveyed to heads of families in severalty, with power of alienation. In 1859, when this scheme was being worked out, I visited Kansas, and found the Shawnees cultivating and improving their farms, some of which embraced a thousand acres, and owning them, too, like other farmers When next in Kansas, ten years later, the work was done. There was not a Shawnee in Kansas, but American farmers were in possession of all these lands. It was this individual ownership with power to sell that had done the work.
In managing the affairs of our Indian tribes, we must apply a little common sense to their condition. In their brains they are in the same stage of growth and development with our remote forefathers when they learned
