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By Root 1854 0

Ex parte Crow Dog (1883), was something of an anomaly.61 Crow Dog, a Sioux, had killed another Sioux. The killing took place on Sioux land, in Dakota Territory. A territorial (federal) court tried him and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court reversed. The white man’s courts could not try him; they had jurisdiction solely over crimes that crossed tribal lines and reached white society or property. The natives were “a dependent community ... in a state of pupilage, advancing from the condition of a savage tribe” to a better status, “through the discipline of labor and by education.” They were “members of a community separated by race, by tradition, by the instincts of a free though savage life”; it would be unfair to subject them to “the restraints of an external and unknown code ... according to rules and penalties of which they could have no warning.”62

The doctrine of the case did not stand for very long. Two years later, Congress gave the regular courts jurisdiction over murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny, even when these were native-on-native crimes, and took place on reservation land.63 Yet the goals of policy were the same as the goals expressed in Crow Dog’s case: pupilage and assimilation. The noble savages were to be brought into the mainstream—kicking and screaming, if necessary. They were to become “regular” Americans. The only questions were when and how.

Assimilation was also the aim of the “allotment acts,” the cornerstone of land policy; these laws aimed to break up reservations and turn them into little clusters of American farms, run by natives, but otherwise quite mainstream. In retrospect, all these policies seem vicious and disastrous: cultural genocide. But respect for native culture would be too much to ask for in the typical nineteenth-century mind. And the policy goal—“civilizing” the tribes, assimilation—stands in sharp contrast to the white man’s law in the southern states. The black was never allowed to assimilate; he was segregated, suppressed, reduced to serfdom. There were, after all, millions of blacks; and they formed the basis of the labor system. The natives were relatively few and, when the guns fell silent, no threat.

In the far West, after the Civil War, there was virulent hatred against the Chinese population. Sometimes the hatred turned into bloodlust. In 1871, a mob in Los Angeles killed nineteen Chinese. In the 1880s, riots in Rock Springs, Wyoming, left twenty-eight Chinese dead; whites in Tacoma, Washington, put the torch to the Chinatown in that city; and there were outrages in Oregon, Colorado, and Nevada.64

California, which had the largest Chinese population—there were twelve thousand Chinese in San Francisco in the 1870s—was the focal point of this hate wave. There was a frenzy of punitive laws and ordinances. In the 1860s, “anti-coolie” clubs sprang up all over the state; members agitated for boycotts of firms that hired Chinese workers. The city fathers of Oakland and San Francisco turned the law-books against this pariah population.65 The “Queue Ordinance” of San Francisco (1876) required the hair of every male prisoner in the county jail to be cut to within one inch of his scalp. The point of this was to inflict shame on Chinese prisoners.v The ordinance was declared unconstitutional in 1879.67

Another ordinance made it unlawful to run a laundry business without the “consent of the board of supervisors” except in a “building constructed either of brick or stone.” Almost all laundries were, in fact, in wooden buildings; if a Caucasian owned the building, the supervisors gave their approval, but if a Chinese owned the laundry, the answer was invariably no. The Supreme Court struck down this discrimination as a “denial of equal protection” in the famous case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins in 1886.68

Such victories, alas, were rare. The Chinese minority continued to suffer under the lash of race hatred. Newspapers in California and elsewhere were, on the whole, racist to the core, reflecting majority opinion. The Chinese were