) 
 
 Leu^p ) \ rancis UZ/m^von l 
 
 ~ * \ 
 
 30** 
 
 [No. 23.— Second Series, 3000.] 
 
 Indian Rights Association, 
 
 1305 Arch Street, 
 
 Phieadeephia, April, 1895. 
 
 Civil Service Reform Essential to a Successful 
 Indian Administration. 
 
 An address delivered at a parlor meeting held at the house of Miss 
 Mary Coles, Philadelphia, March 25th, 1895, in the interest of the 
 Indian Rights Association, by its Washington Agent, Mr. Francis F. 
 Leupp. 
 
 Of the entire Civil Service of the United States no branch 
 stands in more urgent need of a strict merit system of ap¬ 
 pointment and tenure of office than the Indian Service; but 
 in none is the spoils system more firmly intrenched. One 
 reason why this is so is that the Indian field service is scat¬ 
 tered over a wide area of country and distributed among a 
 number of States and Territories, each agency and reserva¬ 
 tion constituting, as it were, a little separate leasehold kept 
 in feudal subjection to the political leaders of the Common¬ 
 wealth in which it is situated. For generations past, although 
 the real needs of the service have been known to the whole 
 American people, the Indian question has been considered 
 rather as a thing apart from the common interests of the in¬ 
 habitants of the Union east of the Mississippi River, and has 
 been left to work itself out in the same happy-go-lucky fash¬ 
 ion which, until lately, has characterized the gradual solution 
 of other great political and economic problems confronting 
 our so-called popular Government. In other words, the-bulk 
 of the people have recognized the existence of an organized 
 minority known as politicians, and to this minority has been 
 ' ij left, almost without restraint, both the formulation and the 
 execution of the Government’s Indian policy. Even in cases 
 
3.nd S &/\.' 
 HD* £3 
 
 ( 2 ) 
 
 where an Administration at Washington has been induced to 
 accept a policy prepared for it by thoughtful and concientious 
 citizens who have made a study of the Indian question, the 
 task of executing it has been turned over bodily to the pro¬ 
 fessional element, with the result that the best philanthropic 
 efforts have often brought forth comparatively little fruit. 
 
 Under our peculiar system of Government, the executive 
 branch is largely dependent, at every stage of its career, upon 
 the friendly co-operation of the legislative branch. A Presi¬ 
 dent cannot make the laws necessary to carry out the pledges 
 upon the faith of which the people at large elected him to 
 office; for this he must depend upon the Senate and House of 
 Representatives. He cannot appoint even the best known 
 and most respected citizen to a responsible position under Gov¬ 
 ernment without the consent of the Senate. He cannot in an 
 emergency defend the nation against foreign assaults and en¬ 
 croachments unless Congress votes the munitions of war. 
 Such a condition of dependence was designed by the fathers 
 of the Republic merely for the purpose of restraining any in¬ 
 ordinate and selfish ambition on the part of a President. Its 
 effect has been to reduce a President whose only desire is the 
 good of the country to a condition where he must take his 
 choice between exchanging favors with influential members 
 of Congress, or letting many vital measures fail for lack of 
 their support. The terms which a Congressman offers are 
 often hard for a self-respecting President to accept. The ulti¬ 
 matum would, if liberally translated, read something like this: 
 
 < ‘ My only hope of continuing my public career rests upon my 
 ability to provide salaried places under the Government for 
 several of the men who have helped me in my campaigns at 
 home. You have these places in your gift. You help me, 
 and I will help you. If you refuse me your aid, I will join 
 with others whom you treat in the same manner, and block 
 the passage of every measure and defeat the confirmation of 
 every appointment on which you have set your heart. The 
 Constitution has given us the upper hand in a contest of this 
 sort, and we propose to make the most of it.” 
 
 The effect of such a menace has been to intimidate success¬ 
 ive Presidents, until it has come to be accepted as a settled 
 
 MAR 1 0 2000 
 
rule, having almost the force of law, that the President shall 
 not make an appointment of an officer, whose field of service 
 is to be in the United States, without first consulting the 
 wishes of the Senators and Representatives of his own party 
 within whose political bailiwick the officer is to perform his 
 duties. In the far west, where people are trained to a more 
 direct way of doing business than in the east, ordinary federal 
 appointments are no longer subject to the pleasant fiction of 
 being made by the President with the approval of members of 
 Congress, but are frankly proclaimed as made by the members 
 themselves, the President's share in the operation being con¬ 
 fined to filling in a few blank forms and signing his name to 
 them. It is a common thing, in talking to a member of Con¬ 
 gress about a federal office in his State, to be met at the out¬ 
 set with the remark: “ Oh, that’s the place to which Smith 
 was appointed last week, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know any¬ 
 thing about it. That place belongs to Senator Blank, and 
 Smith is Blank’s man.” From which an observing foreigner 
 might be led to infer that under our American system the 
 offices were the personal property of individual lawmakers, 
 and that slavery was not abolished by the Thirteenth Amend¬ 
 ment to the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 Of course, this system of barony and vassalage, instead of 
 meaning what it would have meant in the dark ages—the pro¬ 
 tection of the vassal by his lord in perpetuity—means just the 
 opposite. If anything like stability pertained to it, there 
 would be more to commend it to common sense. As it is, 
 the Administration is subject to change with each revulsion 
 of popular feeling, and when the lord ceases to be a power at 
 the Executive Mansion the vassal’s days are numbered. 
 Again, if the vassal loses any of his usefulness—not in the 
 line of work for which he is paid by the Government, but in 
 the outside activities which are expected of him by his pro¬ 
 tector—the public service knows him no more, and another 
 and more valuable vassal takes his place. How utterly 
 demoralizing such a state of things must be in any part of the 
 Government I need not explain. Even in an office which 
 deals only with correspondence or statistics it is ruinous, but 
 in a branch of the service which deals with a great problem 
 
of race destiny like the Indian question it is nothing short of 
 devilish. To handle the affairs of an Indian agency as they 
 should be handled requires not only honesty, intelligence, 
 decision of character and a good ordinary education, but a 
 considerable knowledge of the Indian as a human being, of 
 tribe customs and traditions, of the local environment both 
 physical and moral, and of official precedent. Such knowl¬ 
 edge is not born with men; it comes by experience only. 
 The effect of frequent changes of agents, therefore, is to edu¬ 
 cate a series of pupils, some competent and receptive and 
 others not, for a position which no one of them is to hold 
 after he is educated for it. In a century of service more 
 good could be done by keeping in office four dull men for 
 twenty-five years each, than twenty-five bright men for only 
 four years each. The dull man at least could have ground into 
 him, by a certain daily routine of work, some ideas devised 
 by persons of greater intelligence,' and would have time left 
 in which to make practical use of them; but the bright man 
 would no sooner have absorbed such ideas and prepared to 
 put them into practice than he would have to make way for a 
 successor who in turn must begin his education de 7 iovo. 
 
 Throwing aside even the question of acquired dexterity in 
 handling business, and coming down to the mere human or 
 social phases of the subject, the agent and his Indians must 
 become acquainted in order to establish those relations of 
 sympathy on the one hand and confidence on the other which 
 are essential to a successful agency administration. The In¬ 
 dian inherits from many generations of ancestors a sense of 
 self-sufficiency which makes him intolerant of domination by 
 a member of another race, and suspicious of the sincerity even 
 of well-meant advances from his superior. A horse with any 
 natural fire in him is bound to be injured by a frequent change 
 of drivers, and no one need be told that the more sensitive 
 human animal whose spirit is not yet broken is better for be¬ 
 ing guided by one hand than by a hundred. I have some¬ 
 times fancied that the success which has attended the admin¬ 
 istration of army officers as agents in places where a succes¬ 
 sion of civilians have proved failures, may have been due not 
 entirely to a difference in the men and their methods—for 
 
( 5 ) 
 
 there are individual differences between army officers as well 
 as civilians—but that it might be traced partly to the military 
 uniform. In this one respect at least a series of arnry officers 
 are alike. In dealing with uniformed officers, the Indian 
 does not have forced upon him in quite so pointed a way the 
 fact that he has been passed from hand to hand. 
 
 The evils of a condition as chaotic as that which prevails in 
 the administration of our Indian agencies can best be illus¬ 
 trated by a few cases in point. In 1884, Mr. V. T. McGilli- 
 cuddy was agent of the Pine Ridge reservation. He had the 
 reputation of being one of the best agents in the employ of 
 the Government, notwithstanding the efforts of a number of 
 persons whom he had antagonized to break him down. He 
 had an immense influence over the Sioux, a tribe who needed 
 an agent with a firm hand, and some of whose most unman¬ 
 ageable members, veterans of successive campaigns against 
 the whites, were gathered at Pine Ridge. The election of Mr. 
 Cleveland and the transfer of the national Administration to 
 a new party occurred at a time when a spirit of unrest was 
 manifesting itself among even those Sioux who had begun to 
 show some aspirations toward the civilization of the whites. 
 It was enough for the new authorities of the Indian Office to 
 know that Mr. McGillicuddy had held his place under a series 
 of Republican Administrations: that fact doomed him to dis¬ 
 missal as an offensive partisan. His good service of many 
 years counted for nothing; for a certain Mr. Gallagher, a re¬ 
 spectable elderly Democratic politician from Indiana, was felt 
 to deserve at his party’s hands a place with just about the 
 salary attached to the Pine Ridge agency; so out went Mc¬ 
 Gillicuddy and in went Gallagher. For all that I know, Mr. 
 Gallagher was an honest and well-meaning man, but he knew 
 almost nothing of the Indians; and, as he doubtless reasoned 
 that he would have to give place, in his turn, to some other 
 politician when the next Administration came in, he took no 
 particular pains to make their acquaintance. This expecta¬ 
 tion, the sequel shows, was quite justified. In 1888- a Re¬ 
 publican President was elected. The insufficiency of the 
 appropriations made by Congress for subsistence of the Indians 
 resulted in some serious economies in food at Pine Ridge. 
 
The Indians, when they suffered from hunger, resorted to 
 slaughtering their own breeding stock, and Gallagher was too 
 tender-hearted to forbid them, although, of course, it gave a 
 bad backset to their advance in the ways of civilization. On 
 the heels of these misfortunes came the outbreak of the 
 Messiah craze, which caused the Indians to drop everything 
 else and join in the exciting ghost dance. On the plea that 
 Gallagher had proved too mild-natured to cope with the rebel¬ 
 lious spirits of the tribe, he was removed at this critical 
 juncture. His removal would have been worthy of all appro¬ 
 bation if it had been for the purpose of putting McGillicuddy 
 back into a place for which he was fitted by years of experi¬ 
 ence, and where he could have been of immeasurable service 
 to the Government; but such was not the case. Senator Petti¬ 
 grew of South Dakota had promised the Pine Ridge job to 
 
 % 
 
 Dr. D. F. Royer, who added to Gallagher’s ignorance the 
 most pitiful ineffectiveness that has perhaps ever been wit¬ 
 nessed in an agent in such an emergency. As soon as the 
 new agent was installed pandemonium broke loose at the 
 agency, and Royer, instead of discounting some of his other 
 shortcomings by a display of pluck, fled before the storm, 
 deserting his post when it was most necessary for the Govern¬ 
 ment to have a courageous and cool-headed representative on 
 the spot. 
 
 The manner of Royer’s appointment was quite as charac¬ 
 teristic as the manner of his leave-taking. Commissioner 
 Morgan, Secretary Noble and President Harrison were 
 prompt enough to wash their hands of responsibility for his 
 brief and ignoble career as agent, and thus the fact came out 
 that they had had no share in the business beyond a perfunc¬ 
 tory assent to an appointment already made, in effect, by 
 Senator Pettigrew. The Senator had claimed the place and 
 named the man to fill it; the executive branch of the Govern¬ 
 ment, designated by the Constitution as the appointing power, 
 simply registered the Senator’s will, and the deed was done. 
 It is humiliating to add the confession that the only way in 
 which the Administration could escape the imposition of 
 another possible Royer by the same Senatorial boss was to 
 detail an army officer to take charge as acting agent. There 
 
is no doubt—now that we can go back and study the Pine 
 Ridge incident in the cold light of history—that all the 
 upheaval, and riot, and bloodshed and suffering might have 
 been spared if the first blunder had not been made in the 
 removal of McGillicuddy—an act of political partisanship 
 utterly hostile to the principles of Civil Service Reform. 
 
 Such facts as I have here set forth are enough to make 
 every respectable American blush for his country and for the 
 boasted virtues of popular government. It is only with shame 
 that one can see changes made every few years in offices 
 which have no more to do with politics than with the price of 
 stocks or the eclipses of the moon. If the whole miserable 
 business were not so vicious in principle, it would sometimes 
 be positively comical. Take, for example, the case of a man 
 named Connell, who was appointed a harness-maker under 
 McGillicuddy, although personally a Democrat—the explana¬ 
 tion being, without doubt, that he was so good at his trade, 
 and so useful, that McGillicuddy ignored all secondary con¬ 
 siderations. It so happened that among the papers recom¬ 
 mending Connell’s appointment the only letter bearing a 
 well-known signature was one from a very prominent Repub¬ 
 lican, who was then in Congress and has since been given a 
 seat on the bench. When the Democratic Commissioner of 
 Indian Affairs took hold in 1885, Connell’s papers were scru¬ 
 tinized in the office at Washington, and he was promptly 
 removed. He could not understand why this was done, and 
 visited the Commissioner to inquire about it. He was 
 informed that there were no charges or complaints against 
 him, but that he was removed because he was a Republican. 
 It then turned out that the only reason the Commissioner 
 supposed him to belong to the obnoxious party was because of 
 the letter of recommendation from the conspicuous Republican 
 already mentioned. Connell at once proceeded to summon 
 witnesses from his old home, who testified to the Commis¬ 
 sioner’s satisfaction, not that their friend was a good harness- 
 maker, or that he had a faculty for training young Indians at 
 a trade, or that he was especially useful and efficient as a 
 helper about the agency, but that he was never guilty of the 
 
crime of voting a Republican ticket ! Upon the strength of 
 these assurances the Commissioner reinstated him. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length upon affairs at Pine Ridge be¬ 
 cause the history of that agency for the last ten years has 
 afforded a more striking series of object lessons illustrative of 
 the truths I am trying to impress than that of any other one 
 place in the Indian establishment. I have cited the case of 
 Mr. McGillicuddy as a typical instance of a successful agent 
 who owed his usefulness to his long experience as well as to 
 his character and practical acquirements. I cited the case of 
 Mr. Gallagher of Indiana to show the folly of turning out a 
 trained servant to put in a verdant one imported from a dis¬ 
 tance, no matter how respectable in a general way. I cited 
 the case of Dr. Royer of South Dakota to show the sort of 
 stuff which the ‘ ‘ home rule ’ ’ humbug foists upon the service 
 when satisfaction of the spoils greed is the only consideration 
 kept in view. I cited the case of Connell to show the total 
 disregard of questions of fitness, or the reverse, under a sys¬ 
 tem in which partisan politics dictate removals and appoint¬ 
 ments. Uet me invite your attention to one more typical 
 case at the same agency, by way of showing how, under the 
 spoils system, the places are twisted to fit the men, not the 
 men chosen to fit the places. 
 
 When Dr. Royer was appointed agent he was not the only 
 candidate in the field. A rival applicant was a man named 
 Gleason, who had some influential political backing in the 
 State, although Senator Pettigrew was already pledged to 
 Royer and the agency was recognized as “ Pettigrew’s place.” 
 Gleason’s friends were able to make a “deal” with Royer, 
 whereby, in consideration of their not giving him further 
 trouble, he should appoint Gleason his clerk. Royer lived 
 faithfully up to this bargain; and no sooner had he become 
 fairly warm in his seat as agent than he marked the Demo¬ 
 cratic clerk then in office for dismissal and named Gleason to 
 succeed him. Gleason’s qualifications for this position may 
 be judged from the fact that his former occupations were 
 stated as ‘ ‘ ranchman and railroad constructor. ” It is scarcely 
 wonderful that after a few weeks he was found so unfit for 
 the work that, in spite of compacts and understandings, he 
 
9 
 
 ( 9 ) 
 
 was put out again and the old clerk reinstated. Gleason 
 could not forgive Royer for what he denounced as a piece of 
 treachery and bad faith. He made no pretense of denying 
 his utter uselessness in the position of clerk; but the one 
 thought uppermost in his mind was that a bargain was a bar¬ 
 gain; that he had been promised a place which should bring 
 him $1200 salary, and that the money was not coming in. 
 As a sort of ‘ ‘ consolation prize ’ ’ he was tacked on to the 
 agency payroll under the title of “additional farmer,” and 
 from all accounts made about as poor a record at the agricult¬ 
 ural end of the concern as he had at the clerical end; but he 
 was, at any rate, wdiere he could do less harm with his ignor¬ 
 ance and general inefficiency. 
 
 I do not believe that I need go over any more ground to 
 the same purpose. Instances and illustrations might be mul¬ 
 tiplied by the hour touching every joint and sinew of the ser¬ 
 vice, and dotted all over the map. I know that the question 
 in everyone’s mind is: How can we change such a system? 
 The answer is not far to seek. Apply to the Indian Service 
 the same principles of Civil Service Reform which have been 
 applied with so much success in many other places in the 
 Government and you will get equally satisfactory results. 
 In the Indian Service are about eighteen hundred positions of 
 all classes; only about seven hundred of these have been 
 brought under the Civil Service Rules. If I could have my 
 way, I would bring in all the remaining eleven hundred. I 
 am aware that this would be considered in some quarters an 
 extreme view; but no candid observer will deny that several 
 hundred more ought to, and could, be brought in. At pres¬ 
 ent, physicians, school superintendents and assistant superin¬ 
 tendents, school teachers and matrons are included, and the 
 Secretary of the Interior announced his intention some time 
 ago to treat assistant teachers in like manner, though I believe 
 that the actual rule to that effect still hangs fire. The list 
 ought to be swelled by the clerks, disciplinarians, industrial 
 teachers, assistant matrons, and seamstresses and their assist¬ 
 ants, if no more. 
 
 You will doubtless ask what is the reason these classes of 
 functionaries have not already been brought under the Rules, 
 
if such a thing be practicable. There is no reason for their 
 continued exclusion—only an excuse . In the case of clerks, 
 it is contended that they have custody of some of the property 
 at the agency and that they stand in a somewhat confidential 
 relation to the superintendent, and therefore ought to be 
 selected by him from among the men whom he personally 
 knows and trusts. To this I answer that you can get as many 
 men who are honest and worthy of trust among those who 
 pass a Civil Service examination and come out at the top of 
 the list, as among those who have failed in every other busi¬ 
 ness and must therefore pick up a job under Government as 
 the only alternative of starving to death. That would stand 
 to reason, I think, even if we had not an abundance of ex¬ 
 perience in all parts of the Government service as corrobora¬ 
 tive proof. The plea that the clerk’s relations with the agent 
 are personal and confidential is quite as inapplicable as the 
 other. Take the case I have already instanced, of the man 
 Gleason at Pine Ridge: Gleason was not given his clerkship 
 because he was a personal friend or confidant of the agent, 
 but because the exigencies of politics necessitated his being 
 ‘ ‘ taken care of ’ ’ somewhere, and it seemed more convenient to 
 ‘ ‘ take care of ’ ’ him there than elsewhere. And this is what 
 is found to happen wherever the excuse of ‘ ‘ confidential 
 capacity ” is urged for keeping a particular office in the spoils 
 category. The end invariably is that the politicians who 
 created the chief create also the “confidential” subordinate, 
 and the excuse proves itself a hollow sham, as all such ex¬ 
 cuses must. 
 
 An argument commonly used by the spoilsmen in opposing 
 the extension of the Civil Service Rules to cover certain in¬ 
 ferior grades of employment, like the assistant matrons, 
 seamstresses, etc., at the Indian schools, is that there is no 
 form of examination which will satisfactorily test the fitness 
 of applicants for such places. This has a specious force in the 
 minds of many good people who have not been in a position 
 to watch the progress of Civil Service Reform in the federal 
 Government at close range. But those of us who for years 
 have been on the ground at Washington, and in a position to 
 see what was going on behind the scenes, know that the argu- 
 
(II) 
 
 ment is wholly absurd and untenable. I care not what the 
 office is, so long as it is not political in its nature: an intel¬ 
 ligent and sincere Civil Service Commission, such as we have 
 now, cooperating with an equally intelligent and sincere head 
 of a department or bureau, can devise a test of fitness which 
 will be both practicable in its workings and satisfactory in its 
 results. The spoilsmen have tried, over and over again, to 
 defeat the plans of the Reformers by finding difficulties in the 
 way of proper examinations to cover particular cases, and they 
 have been themselves defeated every time. I remember very 
 well how long the Railway Mail Service was kept in the 
 hands of the patronage-mongers on the plea that there was no 
 way of examining an applicant which would adequately test 
 his capacity for quick and accurate work in sorting mail, or 
 his physical soundness and power of endurance, so necessary 
 in a service which involves constant and wearisome travel, 
 irregularity of hours, and work under all sorts of disadvan¬ 
 tageous conditions of light, ventilation, heating, motion and 
 space. But as soon as all parties concerned honestly put their 
 heads together, they worked out an experimental scheme; and 
 as experience has shown a weak spot here and there, they 
 have mended or strengthened it, till at last they have built up 
 a system which has not its equal in the world. What degree 
 of perfection it has reached, you may judge when I tell you 
 that under the old practice of picking out Railway Mail clerks 
 by political or personal favoritism, even under the very best 
 conditions as to stability of tenure which could prevail then, 
 the proportion of errors made in the work of the men never 
 fell below one error in every 5,575 pieces of mail matter 
 handled; whereas now, with the service for somewhat more 
 than five years under the honest operation of the Civil Service 
 Rules, the errors are only one in about 7,900, with a fair 
 prospect that, in the course of a few years more, the propor- 
 ition will be reduced to one in ten thousand. 
 
 A similar opposition manifested itself when it was proposed 
 to bring the corps of post office inspectors under the Civil 
 Service Rules. These officers are the detectives of the postal 
 service. Mr. Wanamaker expressed very happily the char¬ 
 acter of their duties and the mental capacity expected of them 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 ( 12 ) 
 
 when he said that they were the ‘ ‘ eyes and ears of the Post¬ 
 master-General.” He was at that time opposed to their being 
 subject to a Civil Service examination. My impression is 
 that he afterward admitted that this was a misjudgment. 
 However that may be, I can quote the statement made to me 
 personally by Postmaster-General Bissell, that when he 
 entered office he believed it a great mistake to require the 
 selection of inspectors from a Civil Service eligible list, but 
 that experience showed him he was wrong, and that this 
 method of selection gave him the best material he had in the 
 inspectors’ force. 
 
 Some time ago a Collector at one of the custom houses on 
 the Mexican frontier complained that the Civil Service exami¬ 
 nations were not calculated to furnish the sort of subordinates 
 he needed in his semi-civilized district, where the only way to 
 break up smuggling often is to ride the smugglers down, 
 lasso their horses and exchange pistol-shots with the marks¬ 
 men of the gang. What he needed in his men was not a col¬ 
 lege education, he said, but .strength, bravery, quickness, and 
 a knowledge of how to shoot and ride. I suppose the Collec¬ 
 tor thought that when he made this complaint he wrote the 
 death warrant of Civil Service Reform in his district, at any 
 rate. But he did not know with whom he had to deal. Mr. 
 Procter, the president of the Civil Service Commission, to 
 whom his communication was referred, is a veteran Con¬ 
 federate trooper, who feels more at home on a horse’s back, if 
 possible, than in an arm-chair; his senior colleague, Mr. 
 Lyman, was a Yankee volunteer soldier from Connecticut 
 during the Civil War, and is familiar with the smell of powder 
 and the whistle of bullets; and the third member of the Com¬ 
 mission, before whom all of our faith uncover as to the prince 
 of Civil Service Reformers—the peerless Theodore Roosevelt— 
 is a trained frontiersman, with the marksmanship of a bear- 
 hunter, the agility of an Indian, the toughness of a cowboy 
 and the courage of an American gentleman. This trio said 
 at once: “ You want an examination especially suited to your 
 peculiar needs ? Very well, you shall have one. You shall 
 have tests for horsemanship, sharpshooting, strength, nerve, 
 quickness of motion, readiness of resource—anything and 
 
( 13 ) 
 
 everything you desire. And you need not disturb your mind 
 about the difficulty of getting judges to pass upon the relative 
 merits of candidates. We are not exactly a parcel of tender- 
 feet up this way. We know a little something about horses 
 and firearms ourselves.” 
 
 So you see, if the only thing that stands in the way of 
 bringing any peculiar line of Government employment under 
 the Civil Service Rules is the difficulty of devising an ade¬ 
 quate merit-test, we have in Washington now a Commission 
 able to cope with every subject—from sewing on buttons to 
 performing in a Wild West show. 
 
 Thus far I have considered only the narrowest phase of the 
 subject—the direct application of Civil Service Reform princi¬ 
 ples to the Indian Service itself. The execution of an 
 enlightened Indian policy demands, however, the application 
 of the same principles to other branches of the public service. 
 Indeed, in a general way it may be said that the various parts 
 of the great organism which we call our national Government, 
 are so intertwined and corelated that there are very few 
 important principles applicable to one which are not appli¬ 
 cable in equal measure to all the rest—the only points of 
 essential difference being matters of detail. 
 
 I do not know how I can better illustrate my proposition 
 than by citing an actual case which has recently come under 
 the notice of some of those present here this evening, and 
 which has impressed me, more than anything else I have 
 encountered in a long time, with the importance to the Indian 
 Service, and to a progressive Indian administration, of extend¬ 
 ing the merit system to the Civil Service generally. 
 
 In the spring of 1893, a squaw-man named Fielder, living 
 near the Cheyenne River agency in South Dakota, and known 
 to be a drunkard and of violent temper, beat his Indian wife 
 into a state of insensibility. Her only offence was a refusal 
 to give him some money which she owned in her own right, 
 but which he wanted to buy drink or pay his debts. . She 
 dragged herself, bleeding and miserable, to the agency, and 
 the agent, Mr. Lillibridge, sent some of his Indian police with 
 a message to Fielder, and tried to induce him to come in 
 peaceably and submit to be locked in the guardhouse till he 
 
could be turned over to the judicial authorities on a charge 
 of assault. Fielder at first seemed disposed to surrender him¬ 
 self, but changed his mind; and when at last it was obvious 
 that he intended to keep out of the agent’s way altogether 
 the latter sent a small squad of the police, picking out the 
 most obedient and trustworthy men in the force, with instruc¬ 
 tions to arrest the culprit and bring him in. Fielder not only 
 shut himself in his cabin and refused to let the police in, but, 
 when they attempted to force an entrance, ran out at them 
 with an axe, and would have killed one or more of them if 
 they had not used their pistols in self defence. Fielder was 
 killed in the struggle, though there was nothing to indicate 
 that unnecessary violence had been used. When the agent 
 reported the facts to the Indian Bureau in Washington the 
 Bureau referred his communication to the Department of 
 Justice, under whose instructions the District-Attorney for 
 South Dakota had the Indians arrested and brought before 
 a grand jury at Pierre. The grand jury sifted the case 
 thoroughly, having the advantage of sitting near the spot 
 where the homicide occurred, which enabled them to sum¬ 
 mon witnesses promptly and at little expense. After a 
 careful investigation they reported that there was no ground 
 for indicting the Indians, and the latter were set at liberty. 
 Nothing more was heard or thought of the matter for nearly 
 two years. Meanwhile, the agent at Cheyenne River had 
 been changed and a new District-Attorney appointed. Sud¬ 
 denly the new District-Attorney, a local politician, dis¬ 
 covered that it was his duty to reopen the Fielder homicide 
 case; and with a half-breed witness of bad or doubtful char¬ 
 acter he went before a grand jury sitting at Dead wood—the 
 most distant point in the State where a United States court is 
 held—and procured an indictment of seven of the Indian 
 policemen; he then had them arrested and dragged all the 
 way across the State, of course to the profit of the deputy- 
 marshals who handled the job, and who will have fat bills for 
 mileage, living expenses, and per diem compensation to turn 
 in to the Government. A sensational trial of a batch of In¬ 
 dians was a godsend, moreover, to the jaded appetites of those 
 Deadwood hoodlums who were ready to accept as a foregone 
 
( i5 ) 
 
 conclusion that to try an Indian for his life meant to hang 
 him. Undoubtedly the whole operation is good for a big 
 double-handful of votes whenever this enterprising District- 
 Attorney becomes a candidate for any elective office. 
 
 The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Judge Browning, was 
 naturally very much exercised over this turn of affairs. He 
 wrote to the new agent at Cheyenne River, Mr. Couchman, 
 for a detailed report of the case in its later phases. This he 
 referred, through the Secretary of the Interior, in a most re¬ 
 spectful and courteous manner, to the Attorney-General, ask¬ 
 ing that instructions might be sent to the District-Attorney to 
 enter a nolle prosequi. He took pains to represent, not only 
 the inherent injustice of the proposed prosecution, but the in¬ 
 expediency of giving the Indian police and the Indians gen¬ 
 erally an impression that, when they were acting under orders 
 of an agent and it became necessary to use force with a white 
 man, they were liable to be put in jeopardy of their lives as a 
 reward for doing their duty. 
 
 The Attorney-General, instead of accepting this in the 
 spirit in which it was offered, as a suggestion which might 
 save him from making a serious mistake, resented it as an in¬ 
 terference with his prerogative. All he was willing to do was 
 to write to the District-Attorney and ask for his side of the 
 case. The District-Attorney responded with a report which 
 showed that he either did not know anything about the facts 
 or was willing to distort them, and on the strength of this the 
 Attorney-General telegraphed him to “go ahead.” 
 
 The sequel may be briefly told. There was a tedious and 
 expensive trial, which cost the prisoners every penny they 
 had in the world, and in which the counsel fees for their de¬ 
 fence had to be guaranteed by the Indian Rights Association 
 as the only apparent means of preventing the poor fellows - 
 from being convicted by default, for the Indian Bureau was 
 powerless under the law to contribute anything. Five of the 
 prisoners were acquitted outright. The remaining two were 
 found guilty of ‘ ‘ assault with intent to do great bodily harm, ’ ’ 
 an offence for which there seems to be no definition in the 
 laws of South Dakota and for which it will therefore be 
 impracticable to hold them. 
 
C 16 ) I 
 
 This may seem a long way around to the very direct point 
 which I w T ish to make; but you will see the application when I 
 call your attention to a few condensed propositions: 
 
 First. The trial proved that there was no ground whatever 
 for prosecuting the Indians. 
 
 Second. If this unrighteous prosecution had gone against 
 the prisoners, through lack of a proper defence, discipline on 
 the Indian reservations in the Northwest would not have been 
 worth a rush from that day forward, and the fruits of a quarter- 
 century of humane effort would have been scattered to the 
 winds. 
 
 Third. The reopening of the case would never have oc¬ 
 curred if the District-Attorney who first investigated it had 
 remained in office. 
 
 Fourth. That District-Attorney was retired to private life, 
 not because he was an unsatisfactory officer, but because he 
 was a Republican; and another man, who did not know his 
 business, or was willing to subordinate his duty to considera¬ 
 tions of personal advantage, was put into his place, merely 
 because he was a Democrat. 
 
 To sum up: An obviously useless prosecution was pressed, 
 which involved a large expense to the Government; which 
 impoverished seven worthy and deserving Indians; which 
 might have ended in taking several human lives; and which, 
 in that event, would undoubtedly have been followed by 
 another bloody Indian war and given a backset of twenty 
 years to frontier civilization. And all this is traceable directly 
 to the fact that District-Attorney ships, like Indian agencies, 
 are still treated as spoils. 
 
 Can there be any doubt that all hope of the future for the 
 reform of our Indian administration is bound up with the 
 prospects of Civil Service Reform, not only in the Indian 
 service, but in every one of the corelated and interdependent 
 branches of our Governmental organization ?