the President and “all his people were ruled,” and neither “just” nor “equal:” laws forbidding them to go beyond certain bounds without a pass from the agent; laws making them really just as much prisoners as convicts in a prison—the only difference being that the reservation is an unwalled out-of-door prison; laws giving that agent power to summon military power at any moment, to enforce any command he might choose to lay on them, and to shoot them if they refused to obey.[1] “The same just and equal laws by which the President himself and all his people are ruled!” Truly it is a psychological phenomenon that four men should be found willing to leave it on record under their own signatures that they said this thing.
Farther on in the same report there is an enumeration of some of the experiences which the Nez Percés who are on the Idaho Reservation have had of the advantages of living there, and of the manner in which the Government has fulfilled its promises by which it induced them to go there; undoubtedly these were all as well known to Chief Joseph as to the commissioners. For twenty-two years he had had an opportunity to study the workings of the reservation policy. They say:
“During an interview held with the agent and the treaty Indians, for the purpose of ascertaining whether there were sufficient unoccupied tillable lands for Joseph’s band on the reservation, and for the farther purpose of securing their co-operation to aid us in inducing Joseph to come upon the reservation, facts were brought to our attention of a failure on the part of the Government to fulfil its treaty stipulations with these Indians. The commission therefore deem it their duty to call the attention of the Government to this subject.
“1st. Article second of the treaty of June 9th, 1863, provides that no white man—excepting such as may be employed by the
- ↑ Witness the murder of Big Snake at Fort Reno, Indian Territory, in the summer of 1879.
