The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [160]
Naturally, at the time of Roosevelt’s inspection, tension between the Sioux residents and white guards at Pine Ridge remained high. Complaints that the Sioux were now being given poisoned food had traveled back to Washington, D.C., and landed on Roosevelt’s desk; 10 he was looking into allegations that U.S. officials were diluting and stealing foodstuffs directed toward the Great Plains reservations. (As president, Roosevelt, after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, famously took on the Chicago meatpacking industry for selling rancid beef and pork. Now, fourteen years before the Meat Inspection Act was passed, he sided with the discontented tribes who claimed they were being sold poison pork at commissary stores on the reservations.)
As it turned out, Commissioner Roosevelt sided with the Indians on most of the issues. No American, he maintained, should be deliberately served rotting meat and given poor medical attention. Roosevelt’s host, Captain Hugh C. Brown, boldly issued a meat recall at Pine Ridge, defying his military orders. The stealing of U.S. supplies directed for the reservations, Roosevelt thundered, had to stop at once. Breaking with General William T. Sherman’s philosophy that all Native Americans had to “be killed” or else “maintained as a species of paupers,” Roosevelt wanted the tribespeople fully integrated into the fabric of American life.11 To Roosevelt, the properly maintained reservations were merely a way station to fuller integration, which could be accorded in due time.
At the time of Roosevelt’s reservation tour, the number of Indians in the United States was only 250,000, drastically decreased from estimates of the population in 1492, which were in the millions. The surviving Native Americans had overcome disease, conquest, genocide, and assimilation, but Roosevelt worried that the spoils system could do them in. “The Indian problem is difficult enough, heaven only knows,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1891 to a friend who advocated Indian rights, “and it is cruel to complicate it by having the Indian service administered on patronage principles.”12
From Pine Ridge Roosevelt headed south to meet the humanitarian Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Organized in 1882, the IRA believed in the immediate and direct acculturation of Native Americans into the mainstream of U.S. society. The energetic Welsh knew how to lobby effectively on behalf of Indian welfare (or, at least the IRA’s vision of it).13 The IRA believed serious changes needed to be made in state and federal government to create a pathway to full citizenship for all Native Americans.14
Roosevelt deemed Welsh the most effective advocate fighting on behalf of Indians in America. Together, they toured the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. They also visited George Bird Grinnell’s old stomping grounds in Nebraska (where he had once befriended the Blackfoot and North Cheyenne while working on Buffalo Bill’s ranch near North Platte). In his capacity as civil service commissioner, Roosevelt inspected the Missouri River Indian agencies in South Dakota and Nebraska—Yankton, Santee, Omaha, and Winnebago—pausing at all the old Lewis and Clark campsites for curiosity’s sake. Although he stumped for President Harrison’s reelection along the way, he also denounced the abuses Native Americans were suffering in Nebraska’s reservations at the hands of a delinquent U.S. government. During this inspection