INDIAN WARS AND THE AMERICAN ARMY.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1611, 19 April 1879, Page 4

INDIAN WARS AND THE AMERICAN ARMY.

[“ Alta California. ”J Each year we have Indian outbreaks, and chiefly because of our wretched system of Indian management. This has been so long apparent to all disinterested persons outside of the army, as well as the members of that arm of the Government, that it seems almost time thrown away to denounce the Indian Bureau and the cruel villainy transacted under its rule. The consequences of the thefts, peculations and violated promises made to the Indians, is, has been, and promises to be hereafter, a succession of outbreaks of the half-starved and deceived Indians, and a continual repetition of the calls made upon our troops to correct, by force of arms and loss of life, the errors and crimes of the Indian agencies and superintendencies. These outbreaks threaten more and more because, as the country the Indians claim as theirs is being fast occupied by the whites, the game the Indians formerly lived upon disappears, the buffalo becomes scarcer yearly, their haunts circumscribed, and their millions dwindling, the Indians must be fed somehow, or they will make war, and combine to make their wars more formidable and dangerous. To subdue these fierce people, our present army force must be concentrated from all parts of the country, at great expense, and even then it is too feeble to make its presence and power felt sufficiently. This was shown a year or two ago, when, from Eastport, Maine, to Pensacola, Florida, and from Montana to Arizona, our camps had to be broken up in order to gather enough skeleton armaments to subdue a tribe of Indians. When the immediate work has been done, when so many of our poor soldiers shall have been killed and the ranks of the Indians decimated, or, as in the case of the Cheyennes, annihilated, our political humbugs in Congress turn again to the little army and endeavour to so manipulate and reduce it as to make it a subject of ridicule, When occasion avisos for military service, instead of having a force ready to do the work required, this great country is forced to employ or enlist volunteers at a cost much greater than what regular soldiers would be paid. So, recently the enemies of the army moved to reduce it to fifteen thousand, seventeen thousand and twenty thousand, successively. But there remains in the House enough common sense to defeat these motions by a very handsome vote.