American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Late in 1881, as third-term US congressman Thaddeus Coleman Pound was residing in Washington, D.C., the editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune opined on a not insubstantial problem then afflicting the nation. The “rapid development of the Pacific roads, North and South, as well as of other projected roads, is bringing white immigration into direct contact with the Indians,” the editorialists explained, “and they [i.e Indians] are in the way.” The dilemma was serious, as “railroads are bringing them as it were to our very doors, and in their present condition they are not welcome visitors to have round.” The resort to military force at times referred to as “extermination,” enlightened planners acknowledged at the time, was proving both a failure and an embarrassment; Indian peoples continued to resist the American onslaught, rendering the costs greater than the benefits, while the brutality of the US expansionist campaign was increasingly viewed as unfit for a self-professed civilized nation. The Tribune noted perceptively that “in almost every case it is only the non-laboring tribes that go upon the war-path,” and thus counseled, among other policy prescriptions, the concentration of Indians on several reservations, “where they can be more easily handled,” the performance of compulsory work so as to avoid “mischief,” the allotment of tribal lands, the subjection of tribal members to local laws, the severance of Indians from traditional institutions, and the education of youth in non-Indian ways. Taken together, it was a prescription for resolving what the editorialists, Pound, and others casually referred to as the “Indian question,” and its constituent parts gradually merged as the reformist assimilation strategy of the following decades.