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In line with his policy of providing for all classes of Indians, Taliaferro urged the erection of an orphan asylum where "all poor blind, and helpless women" would also be accommodated. If time had been given doubtless a new form of Indian life would have arisen about the fort; but the coming of the land-seekers destroyed the plan. The failure was to result in a great massacre in 1862.
As I had learned on that flying trip to Pierre, the operation of the plan was very simple. Land-seekers were to register at the Land Office in Pierre, making an affidavit showing their qualifications to enter, at which time each would receive a number.
The men now coming are the land-seekers of the blood and type that settled England and New England and Virginia of the blood and type, in a word, that make nations. Hard on the heels of the land-seekers have come yet another type the type that binds country to country in bonds tighter than any international treaty the investors of surplus capital.
So they came, the farmer, the clerk, the bank boy, the teacher, the student, the professional man, the writer, the crossing-sweeper, the cab-man, high and low, rich and poor, old and young, they flocked to the offices, like the land-seekers in the West who form queues in front of the Homestead offices, to enter their land.
Urged by the cries of hungry land-seekers the cession of land by the natives gradually became the most important phase of all treaties; and in order that the new settlements might be protected from vengeful Indians the title to the land rested on legal cession rather than on conquest.
If the Indians had been left in peace by covetous land-seekers, their civilization might in time have been accomplished. There was practically no hostility manifested against the garrison by the surrounding Indians.
Rivers and the others soon came in, and after supper there was a great deal of energetic talk. The young land-seekers were garrulous with delight over their claims, which they proudly exalted above the stumps and stones of the farms "back home." "Why, it took three generations of my folks to clear off forty acres of land," said one of them. "They just wore themselves out on it.
We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless beetles stragglers from the main skirmish line. Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway.
The score or more of land-seekers aboard were awake and preparing early for the great day upon which they should behold their promised land. Up with the earliest of them, rosy, clean shaved, soberly and richly dressed and ministerial in dignity, was Granger, the agent, the expert leader of this confiding flock.
Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks, and yet it was perfectly right that they should pay.
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