An exhausted Indian sits slumped forward from the waist atop his horse, the animal itself so weak that its legs are buckling beneath the weight of its burden. Cast in bronze, this allegorical figure achieved international renown as The End of the Trail (1915), a sculpture by James Earle Fraser. Its meaning was obvious: The Indian, once noble, had become a dying breed who would soon disappear forever.
Fraiser’s warrior was only one of many popular images that predicted, and even celebrated, the demise of Indian peoples in the early 20th century. From the photographs of Edward Curtis to the novels of Zane Grey, Indians were said to be a “vanishing race.” As Grey wrote in The Vanishing American (1925), “[The Indian’s] deeds are done. His glory and dream are gone. His sun has set.” For most Americans, an even more constant reminder of the Indian’s eminent death was the Indian-head nickel, issued in 1913. Designed by Fraiser, it depicted an Indian man’s profile on one side and a buffalo on the other—a none-too-subtle suggestion that the Indian, like the buffalo, was doomed to become a casualty of the United States’s expansion westward.
As the prevalence of this imagery implies, the notion of the vanishing Indian was embraced by many non-Indians. It not only confirmed that the bloody and costly Indian Wars of the 19 th century had in fact been won, but it promised that the victors need not worry over what to do about their defeated enemy. Centuries of bloodshed, disease, and forced assimilation had at last solved what policy makers had once called the Indian Problem.
The ultimate death of the Indian indeed seemed so certain that non-Indians could now afford to romanticize the peoples and cultures that they had long worked to destroy. Not surprisingly, the myth of the vanishing Indian blossomed simultaneously with the birth of the western film, the Boy Scouts’ Indian merit badge, and a tourist industry that touted the remaining Indians in the West as an attraction for eastern vacationers.
There was, however, one obvious problem with the idea of the vanishing Indians: Indians were still very much alive. They had not become extinct; they had merely become easy to ignore. Owing largely to the federal Indian policies of the 19 th century, by 1890 the Indian population of the United States had dropped to less than 250,000, an all-time low. Most lived in dire poverty, and many were landless. The immediate culprit of their misery was the policy of allotting tribally owned lands as individual plots to be held as private property. Lauded by some reformers as the only means by which Indians could hold onto their remaining territory, the Allotment policy proved to have the opposite effect. Between 1887 and 1934, its implementation would lead Indians to lose some 90 million acres of land.
Although the poverty of most Indians rendered them invisible to the majority of Americans, some Indians gained prominence during the early years of the century. Those with the highest profiles were athletes, such as baseball player Louis Sockalexis, marathon runner Tom Longboat, and Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. A gold-medal winner in the 1912 decathlon and pentathlon, Thorpe would go on to play professional baseball and football in one of the most spectacular athletic careers in American history. Less well known today but significant in their time were Indian authors such as Charles A. Eastman, Mourning Dove, and John Joseph Mathews. Using non-Indian literary forms, these writers brought attention to the plight of Indians to generations of white readers.
Also influential were the many Indians who came together to resist government policies that were destroying Indian peoples and cultures. Traditional-ists—such as the anti-Allotment Creek of the Crazy Snake movement—launched a number of resistance movements that openly rejected white customs and demanded a return to Indian ways. Others united to create such organizations as the Mission Indian Foundation and the All-Pueblo Council. While modeled after non-Indian political institutions, these and similar organizations provided powerful tools in the fight to protect Indian rights.
The most important Indian political organization of the era was the Society of American Indians (SAI). Founded in 1911, the group brought together prominent Indian advocates, including Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin, Alfred C. Parker, and Laura Cornelius Kellogg. Many SAI members had been educated at boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Beginning in 1879 with the establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School, these institutions sought to eliminate tribalism by instructing Indian children in the ways of white society. But for many students, their school experience redefined, rather than destroyed, their “Indianness.” As the SAI bore witness, the schools produced a new generation of
Indian leaders, whose knowledge of English, white customs, and mainstream institutions allowed them to deal effectively with non-Indian leaders and bureaucrats.
Although the agendas of individual members varied, the SAI took as its primary goals securing citizenship for all Indians and abolishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the government agency that had developed the policies largely responsible for the dispossession and poverty of American Indians. The group succeeded only in the former. In part as a reward for the military service of some 16,000 Indians during World War I, native-born Indians were made U. S. citizens in 1924. Citizenship, however, did little to improve the daily lot of Indian people. The SAI’s more significant legacy was as a model for future political groups, such as the Indians of All Tribes and the American Indian Movement. Like the SAI, these were multitribal organizations whose members were willing to put aside tribal differences to work together to improve the lot of all Indians.
Spurred on by Indian activists and by an alarming series of Indian murders on the oil-rich Osage reservation, non-Indian progressives began to push for a reexamination of Indian policy. An early effort was the Committee of One Hundred, a group of Indians and non-Indians brought together by the Calvin Coolidge administration to discuss Indian affairs. The committee called for a wide variety of reforms—from improvements in Indian education to increased governmental tolerance for traditional Indian religion—but their recommendations were largely ignored. Far more significant to federal Indian policy was the Meriam Report, which was published in 1928. The document was the result of an extensive investigation of the living conditions of contemporary Indians. The findings were appalling: Indians were discovered to be the most impoverished American minority by every measure, including housing, health care, education, and diet.
By shining a light on Indian poverty, the Meriam Report revealed to all that Indians had never in fact vanished. They had merely been hidden from view. Its revelations would usher in a new era in which Indians and non-Indians alike would acknowledge the scope of problems facing modern Indians and the increasingly urgent need for a remedy.
World History
