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“FRIENDS” AND FISTFIGHTS: FEDERAL INDIAN POLICY DEBATES AND LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STATE DEVELOPMENT1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa*
Affiliation:
George Mason University

Abstract

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Type
Forum: Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Adapted from Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War by C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. © 2012 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu.

References

NOTES

2 For a full account, see C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 120–24.

3 Senier, Siobhan, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema's Successes and Shortcomings,” American Indian Quarterly 24:3 (2000): 420–40, 422CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001).

4 Francis P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 147. The idea that the reformers were “well-intentioned” runs throughout this literature. See, for example, D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973) [revised addition, originally published 1934]; and J. P. Kinney, A Continent Lost—A Civilization Won: Indian Land Tenure in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937). Henry Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963). See also Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). For an alternate interpretation, see Wilcomb Washburn, The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) on 1887 (New York: Lippincott Comp., 1975).

5 Benjamin Johnson, “Red Populism?: T. A. Bland, Agrarian Radicalism, and the Debate over the Dawes Act” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America, eds. Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnson, 15–37 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 18.

6 Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Elliot West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also West, Elliot, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 2003): 726CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Constitution and By-Laws of the Indian Rights Association, 3.

8 The Pendleton Act established the United States Civil Service Commission and is understood as the official end of the patronage politics. The impetus for this legislation was Garfield's assassination by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker. However, it is also important to note that many politicians initially criticized this law significantly.

9 For more, see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 81–82 and 113–14.

10 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 81.

11 Address of Herbert Welsh, Corresponding Secretary of the Indian Rights Association, Delivered before the Mohonk Indian Conference, October 14th, 1886, IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882–1968, Reel 102—IRA Pamphlets, 1883–1892—Subseries A 2–4.

12 General R. H. Milroy to Herbert Welsh, September 17, 1885, IRAP, Series 1-A—Incoming Correspondence, 1864–1968, n.d., Reel 1.

13 Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 88–89.

14 Herbert Welsh, A Sketch of the History of Civil Service Reform in England and in the United States (1889), IRAP, Series II. Organizational Records, 1882–1968, Reel 102—IRA Pamphlets, 1883–1892—Subseries A, 6.

15 For more on the Civil Service in United States History and Civil Service Reform, see Ronald N. Johnson, The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Democracy: The Economics and Politics of Institutional Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Patricia Ingraham, The Foundation of Merit: Public Service in American Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and David A. Schultz and Robert Moranto, The Politics of Civil Service Reform (New York: P. Lang Press, 1998).

16 Welsh, Herbert, “The Meaning of the Dakota Outbreak,” Scribner's Magazine 9 (1891): 439–52, 440, 441Google Scholar.

17 Welsh, “The Meaning of the Dakota Outbreak,” 452, See also Johnson, “Red Populism?,” 29–30.

18 Painter, C. C., Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (1889), 8489Google Scholar. This source is part of an edited collection of documents of the “Friends.” See Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, 114–21.

19 C. C. Painter, The Dawes Land in Severalty Bill and Indian Emancipation.

20 See Leonard Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Lands: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).

21 For more on Welsh's other reform interests, see Hagan, The Indian Rights Association, 49, 98.

22 “How Shall the Indians Hold their Lands,” Council Fire 8 (Oct. 1885): 139Google Scholar.

23 Willard, A. J., “The Dawes Land-in-Severalty Bill,” Council Fire 10 (Jan. 1887): 13Google Scholar.

24 Willard, A. J., “Indian Jurisdiction After Division in Severalty,” Council Fire 12 (Mar. 1889): 4647Google Scholar.

25 Johnson, “Red Populism?,” 18.

26 Thomas A. Bland, Farming as a Profession (Boston: Loring Publisher, 1870; and Thomas A. Bland, M.D., The Life of Benjamin Butler (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1879). See also Behrens, M.A. Thesis, 79. He also published a short biography of the greenback party members of Congress in 1879 called The Spartan Band.

27 Thomas A. Bland, Reign of Monopoly (Washington DC: Rufus H. Darby, Printer and Publisher, 1881), 10.

28 For more on the National Greenback Party, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

29 See also Behrens, M.A. Thesis, 80. For more on the significance of railroads in United States history, see John Stover, American Railroads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulations, 1877–1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Sarah Gordon, Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997); and Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

30 See Behrens, “In Defense,” 80. Thomas A. Bland, People's Party Shot and Shell (Chicago: Charles M. Kerr and Co., Publishers, 1892).

31 For more on populism, see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

32 Scholars of American Political Development suggest that reevaluating the evolution of the state in the nineteenth century is of critical scholarly importance. For a good overview of the history and current direction of the APD school, see Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

33 For the best critical study of the Office of Indian Affairs in this period, see Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the Indian Service, 1869–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). An earlier institutional history is Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of an American Institution, 1865–1900 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1979).