Quotation from Mr. Swan.—His mistake.—General Gibbs’ mistake.—Kamaiyahkan.—Indian agent killed.—I. I. Stevens misjudged.

The gigantic fraud of slavery fell, in our own land, in the short space of four years; but that of this company—holding and destroying as many lives as the African slave trade—holds its own, and still lifts its head, under the patronage of a professed Christian nation; and claims to be an honorable company, while it robs and starves its unnumbered benighted Indians, and shuts up half of North America from civilization. At the same time it has obtained $650,000 for partially withdrawing its continued robberies of the American Indians within the United States, after implanting in the savage mind an implacable hatred against the American people.

While we have our own personal knowledge on this point, we will give a quotation from Mr. Swan’s work, written in 1852, page 381, showing his views of the subject, which are mostly correct; but, in speaking of the trade of the Americans and of the Hudson’s Bay Company, he says: “The Indians preferred to trade with the Americans, for they kept one article in great demand, which the Hudson’s Bay people did not sell, and that was whisky.”

In this Mr. Swan is entirely mistaken. The Hudson’s Bay people always had liquor, and let the Indians have all they could pay for, as proved by their own writer, Mr. Dunn. (See 12th chapter.) Mr. S. continues: “Reckless, worthless men, who are always to be found in new settlements, would give or sell whisky to the Indians, and then, when drunk, abuse them. If the injury was of a serious nature, the Indian was sure to have revenge; and should he kill a white man, would be certainly hanged, if caught; but, although the same law operated on the whites, I have never known an instance where a white man has been hanged for killing an Indian.” This has been my experience, Mr. Swan, for more than thirty years, with the Hudson’s Bay Company, or English. When a white man kills an Indian, the tribe, or his friends, are satisfied with a present, instead of the life of the murderer. It has been invariably the practice with the Hudson’s Bay Company to pay, when any of their people kill an Indian, and to kill the Indian murderer; not so when an American is killed. Says Mr. Swan: “The ill-feelings thus engendered against the Americans, by this, and other causes, was continually fanned and kept alive by these half-breeds and old servants of the company, whose feelings were irritated by what they considered an unwarrantable assumption on the part of these settlers, in coming across the mountains to squat upon lands they considered theirs by right of prior occupancy. The officers of the company also sympathized with their old servants in this respect, and a deadly feeling of hatred had existed between these officers and the American emigrant, for their course in taking possession of the lands claimed by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, and other places on the Sound and the Columbia River; and there is not a man among them who would not be glad to have had every American emigrant driven out of the country.” It is unnecessary to add examples of this kind to prove to any reasonable mind the continued hostility of that company, and all under its influence, to the American government and people.

Can their friendship be bought by paying them the entire sum they claim? We think not.

Whatever sum is given will go to enrich the shareholders, who will rejoice over their success, as an Indian would over the scalp of his enemy. The implacable hatred will remain, and nothing but extermination, or a complete absorption of the whole continent into the American republic, will close up the difficulty, and save a remnant of the Indian tribes. This, to some, may not be desirable; but humanity and right should, and will, eventually, prevail over crime, or any foreign policy.

The American people are taunted by the Roman Jesuits and English with having driven the Indian from his lands, and having occupied it themselves; but how is it with the English? While the American has attempted to gather the Indians into convenient communities, and spent millions of dollars to civilize and better their condition, the English nation, as such, has never given one dollar, but has chartered company after company of merchants, traders, and explorers, who have entered the Indian country under their exclusive charters, or license to trade, and shut it up from all others. They have, in the profitable prosecution of their trade, so managed as to exterminate all surplus and useless Indians, and reduce them to easy and profitable control. Should one of their half-breed servants, or a white man, attempt to expose their system, or speak of their iniquitous policy, a great hue and cry is raised against him, both in England and America, and he must fall, either by a misinformed public or by savage hands, while they triumphantly refer to the ease with which they exercise absolute control over the Indians in their jurisdiction, as a reason why they should be permitted to continue their exclusive occupation and government of the country. Thus, for being forced partially to leave that portion of Oregon south of the 49th parallel, they presumed to make a claim against our government three times larger than the whole capital stock of the two companies combined.

This hue and cry, and the public sentiment they have continued to raise and control, has its double object. The one is to continue their exclusive possession of, and trade in the country, the other is to obtain all the money they can from the American government for the little part of it they have professedly given up.

It will be remembered that in the investigation of their claims, and the depositions given, it was stated that Forts Okanagon, Colville, Kootanie, and Flathead, were still in their possession in 1866; that Wallawalla, Fort Hall, and Boise were given up because they were prohibited by the government from trading ammunition and guns to the Indians. This means simply that the last-named posts were too far from their own territory to enable them to trade in these prohibited articles, and escape detection by the American authorities. The northern posts, or those contiguous to the 49th parallel, are still occupied by them. From these posts they supply the Indians, and send their emissaries into the American territory, and keep up the “deadly hatred,” of which Mr. Swan speaks, and about which General Gibbs, in his letter explaining the causes of the Indian war, is so much mistaken.

There is one fact stated by General Gibbs, showing the continued combination of the Roman priests with the Hudson’s Bay Company, which we will give in this connection. He says: “The Yankamas have always been opposed to the intrusion of the Americans.” This is also a mistake of Mr. Gibbs, as we visited that tribe in the fall of 1839, and found them friendly, and anxious to have an American missionary among them. At that time there had been no priest among them, and no combined effort of the company to get rid of the American missionary settlements. Kamaiyahkan, the very chief mentioned by General Gibbs as being at the head of the combination against the Americans, accompanied us to Dr. Whitman’s station, to urge the establishment of an American mission among his people.

General Gibbs says, that, “as early as 1853, Kamaiyahkan had projected a war of extermination. Father Pandosa, the priest at Atahnam (Yankama) mission, in the spring of that year, wrote to Father Mesplie, the one at the Dalls, desiring him to inform Major Alvord, in command at that post, of the fact. Major Alvord reported it to General Hitchcock, then in command on this coast, Hitchcock censured him as an alarmist, and Pandosa was censured by his superiors, who forthwith placed a priest of higher rank over him.”

The next year, Indian agent Bolon was killed, and the war commenced. How did General Hitchcock learn that Pandosa, a simple-hearted priest, and Major Alvord were alarmists? The fact of the censure, and placing a priest of higher rank over Pandosa at the Yankama station (the very place we selected in 1839 for an American station), is conclusive evidence on this point.

“The war of extermination,” that General Gibbs, in his mistaken ideas of Hudson’s Bay policy and Indian character, attributes to the policy of Governor I. I. Stevens, was commenced in 1845. At that time, it was supposed by James Douglas, Mr. Ogden, and the ruling spirits of that company, that all they had to do was to withhold munitions of war from the Americans, and the Indians would do the balance for them.

The Indian wars that followed, and that are kept up and encouraged along our borders, and all over this coast, are the legitimate fruits of the “DEADLY HATRED” implanted in the mind and soul of the Indian by the Hudson’s Bay Company and their allies, the priests. There is an object in this: while they teach the Indians to believe that the Americans are robbing them of their lands and country, they at the same time pretend that they do not want it.

Like Bishop Blanchet with the Cayuses, they “only want a small piece of land to raise a little provisions from,” and they are continually bringing such goods as the Indians want; and whenever they are ready to join their forces and send their war-parties into American territory, this company of honorable English fur traders are always ready to supply them with arms and ammunition, and to purchase from them the goods or cattle (including scalps, in case of war between the two nations) they may capture on such expeditions.

The more our government pays to that company, or their fictitious agent, the more means they will have to carry on their opposition to American commerce and enterprise on this coast. Should they obtain but one-third of their outrageous claim, it is contemplated to invest it, with their original stock, in a new company, under the same name, Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company, and to extend their operations so as to embrace not only the fur, but gold and grain trade, over this whole western coast.

Will it be for the interests of this country to encourage them? Let their conduct and proceeding while they had the absolute control of it answer, and prove a timely warning to the country before such vampires are allowed to fasten themselves upon it.