Editor's Note:
Introduction by Tom Mc Davitt:
JAMES Mahlon HAWORTH was born in Clinton County, Ohio,
November 19, 1831. Is a member by birthright of the Society of Friends
(Quakers). He is decended from James Haworth of Bacup, England, through George
(the emigrant), James "Frederick", George H., Mahlon and George Dillion Haworth
(his father). Previous to the war, was engaged in farming and merchandising. Was
for many years connected with the Clinton County Agricultural Society, filling
the position of president in 1861. Was elected County Treasurer in 1856, and
re-elected in 1858, holding the office four years and three months, his term
closing in September, 1861, when he recruited a company of which he was elected
Captain, and going to Camp Chase was assigned to the Fortieth Ohio Infantry,
which regiment was ordered to Eastern Kentucky, and became a part of a brigade
under command of General James A. Garfield on whose staff he served as A.A.A.
General, until the General was ordered to another part of the country. He
resigned his captaincy on February 7, 1863 on account of increasing infirmities
and returned to his home for restoration. In 1865, he removed to Cincinnati and
engaged in the wholesale drygoods business, until 1870, when broken health,
requiring a change of climate, he removed to Olathe, Kas., from where, in the
fall of 1872, he was appointed United States Indian Agent and placed in charge
of the Kiowa and Comanche Indians, near Fort Sill, Indian Territory, remaining
there until April 1878. He was one of a commission for locating the Sioux, in
the summer of 1878, soon after which he was appointed a special Indian Agent at
large, and on February, 1879, was appointed United States Indian Inspector,
which position he held until July, 1882, when he was appointed Inspector of
Indian Schools, an office created by the session of Congress which had just
closed, the duties being of a supervising care of all the Indian schools in the
United States, excepting the five nations in the Indian Territory.
[NOTE:
J.M. Haworth was the first superintendent of All Indian Schools]
THE
GRAVE
JAMES M. HAWORTH.--Superintendent of Indian Schools, died suddenly in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 12th, 1885, in his 53rd year.
Funeral services
were held at the M. E. Church, Olathe, Kansas, March 16, at 1 o'clock P.M.,
under the direction of the I.O.O.F. and A.F. & A.M., and were largely attended.
The deceased was one of the most highly esteemed men in Johnson county, and his
sudden taking off is mourned by all.
J.M. Haworth, is my GG grandfather.
Editor's Note: We have never seen any documentation
to support the middle name of "Frederick" for James, the son of George.
Ron Haworth
JAMES M. HAWORTH,
QUAKER INDIAN AGENT *
By Burritt M. Hiatt**
On March 31, 1873, James M. Haworth was appointed agent to the Kiowa and Comanche Indian tribes. His appointment by the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs had been unsolicited and came as a surprise to him, since he had little experience with Indians and little information about agency affairs. But he remembered that in 1864 a band of unarmed Indians had been camped on a spot selected for them by the commandant of an army post nearby. In the night the whole camp of Indians was massacred. This incident had caused a war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of frontier people. James M. Haworth was resolved that such incidents should not be repeated if he could help it.
James M. Haworth and his wife Elizabeth Smith Haworth were living in the small town of Olathe in eastern Kansas in 1873. They planned to travel west as far as the railroad ran, and then take a stagecoach to Fort Sill in Indian Territory. Their train stopped at Caddo, the eastern terminus of the Fort Sill stage line. The trip from there took four days in a canvas-topped buckboard, in which they sat with their knees drawn up because the floor of the conveyance was piled high with sacks of mail. The road was full of chuck holes and there were many detours to avoid bogs. At night they stayed in wayside cabins built of logs chinked with mud. Supper was served under a smoking coal oil lamp and consisted of pale eggs, smoked ham, and corn bread.
On the fourth evening they reached the ford over Cache Creek, a few hundred yards east of the post. They heard the dull boom of the sunset gun and were soon on the plateau of Fort Sill and got out at the hotel. It was no better than the cabins they had been in on the journey, for it was infested with fleas and bedbugs.
Daylight showed James M. Haworth and his wife a row of Indian tepees within a few yards of the hotel door. Squaws were wandering around wrapped in colorful blankets, their long braided locks wound with scarlet yarn and their ears hung with ornaments. The grounds swarmed with dogs.
Fort Sill had nothing of the conventional fortress about it. There was no moat, no parapet, no trench bristling with cannon, and no stockade. There were only some one-story barracks built of local stone, some cavalry stables and a hospital, a traders’ store, and the commandant’s residence. They soon met the personnel of the fort. The commandant was Lieutenant-Colonel John W. Davidson of the Tenth Cavalry, who had just been appointed to the office. They feared that they would not get along with him very well because they were to inaugurate a new policy for the Indian agencies. They also met the adjutant, who took charge of all administrative details, and the quartermaster, who had charge of the warehouse with its store of uniforms, groceries, and supplies. The post surgeon, they found, was worried about the sanitary conditions, because of the high frequency of malaria and dysentery; the water system of the post was suspected; the number of outdoor privies and the accumulations of horse-manure were obviously detrimental to the sanitation, and there was no icehouse. Another member of the personnel, a man of considerable charm, was the post trader, who acted as banker, postmaster, and merchant. (James Haworth did not know until later that post traderships had been sold to the highest bidders by Secretary of War Belknap.) The soldiers at Fort Sill were mainly colored troops from regiments organized during the Civil War.
James Haworth and his wife immediately felt the tension at the Fort and decided to make their home a few miles south of it, where the Indian commissary was located. This had been the residence of the previous Quaker agent, Lawrie Tatum, who had begun his work in 1869, but resigned on March 31, 1873 after having troubles with the Indian, the soldiers, and the camp followers. The commissary building was situated on Cache Creek. About a mile and a quarter farther down the creek were the schoolhouse, the bakery, and the blacksmith shop, and the doctor’s office. The agent’s residence was in the center of three groups of buildings. These buildings were held up by a complicated system of props, but in spite of that, one of them leaned more than a foot out of plumb. The roofs were leaky, and the sides were sawed from local cottonwood which had shrunk and warped so that the seasonal storms called northers could drive sleet and snow right into the buildings. But one of the greatest disadvantages was that the south and east of the residences were two swamps which were breeding-places for mosquitoes. The Indians, who were under orders to camp on Cache Creek below the fort, did not like the location because sickness was so much more prevalent when they stayed there.
This was the situation into which James M. Haworth came in 1873. A review of President Grant’s new Indian policy may help clarify his predicament.
The building of the Pacific Railroad in 1865 and the constant pressure of white men upon the Indian hunting grounds made it clear that the military policy against the Indians needed a change. It was estimated that the two wars against the Sioux tribes ending in 1866 and the two wars against the Cheyenne tribe ending in 1867 had cost upwards of a million dollars for every Indian killed. In the year 1867 even General W. T. Sherman had despaired of subduing the Indians by military force and had declared that fifty Indians could checkmate three thousand soldiers.
In 1867 some prominent officials connected with the government had expressed the wish that the Friends might take some care of the Indians, as they had had experience for some years in missions to the tribes. On September 4, 1867, the Weekly Chronicle of Washington, D. C. said: “We have often thought that if the Society of Friends who successfully colonized and civilized the Senecas in western New York and managed their affairs with such judgment and knowledge, could be induced to take charge of the colonizing in the Indian Territory and instruct the Indians, they might prepare them for the inevitable future.”
On January 25th, 1869, there was held the first conference on this subject between a committee of Friends and President Grant, who had been elected but had not yet taken office. The Friends were impressed by the cordial and sympathetic attitude with which the President-elect, although he was a military man, looked toward a more peaceful and humane policy in dealing with the Indians. The formal announcement of Grant’s peace policy came a month later on February 15, 1869. It took the form of a letter from General E. S. Parker, a military aide to General Grant, and it asked the Society of Friends to send him a list of names of person whom the Society could endorse as suitable for Indian agents. In the next year, 1870, President Grant extended an invitation to other Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church to submit names.
Enoch Hoag, an Iowa Friend who had been a pioneer in Indian concerns, was appointed by President Grant as Superintendent of the Central Superintendency, which included Kansas and Indian Territory. One of the first and most important services of the Friends who became Indian agents was to quiet some of the tribes which had recently been on the warpath. The Friends held conferences with the more restless tribes in order to ask them to restrain their lawless members, especially the young men, who seemed bent on continuing a career of raiding. The more routine duties of the Friends as agents were to distribute rations, to instruct the Indians in agriculture and to oversee the establishment of schools. When the Friends took charge of the Central Superintendency there were only four schools in operation among the Indian tribes of that region. From 1869 to 1879 the enrollment of Indian children in schools increased from 150 to 1000. The new agents were also to try to establish some kind of justice before the law so that disputes could be settled by less arbitrary methods than had been used formerly.
Both President Grant and the Secretary of the Interior hoped that Congress would establish a United States court in the Indian Territory so that civil law could be properly administered there and enforced by an adequate police force. In the punishment of lawless white men within the boundaries of the Indian agencies there was an unavoidable complication with the military. After the Civil War many men drifted to the West, and, in the case of the agency around Fort Sill, the nearest Federal court was in Fort Smith, Arkansas. To present a case of injustice to that court would require many days of travel from the Indian reservation. No law existed to punish a crime committed by and Indian agent against an Indian.
In asking the Quakers to supply agents, President Grant said that “he as familiar with the past management of Indian affairs, and sensible of the injustice that had been done them and desired to remedy the abuses of the Indian System.” The only way, in the past, in which the Indian agents could enforce civil law, was to call upon the military arm of the government, not the judicial. But under President Grant’s “peace policy” the force of arms was to be used only when civil enforcement of the law could not keep order. It is evident that the military officers did not grasp the breadth of the instructions given to the non-military Indian agents: “to keep constantly before the minds of the Indians the pacific intentions of the Government and to obtain their confidence by acts of kindness and honesty and just dealings with them, thereby securing that peace which it is the wish of all good citizens to establish and maintain.”
Agent Haworth found the army post as much a provocation as it was a protection. Fort Sill maintained an awkward co-operation, but the establishment, as an influence, was far from satisfactory. The Agent requested the commander at the fort not to sell whiskey to white transients and loafers who would become intoxicated and go out looking for trouble among the Indians. “Among the many difficulties of the country on the frontier,” wrote Agent Haworth on August 30, 1873, “the peddling of whiskey by unprincipled men is one of the greatest. By special police I have arrested some whiskey parties and dumped on the ground some barrels of very poor Texas whiskey.” The profits of selling whiskey were so high that it was difficult to deter resourceful and dangerous men from coming into the Indian reservation with liquor. A favorite entrance of the bootleggers was Wrattan Creek, which became known as Whiskey Creek. A few nights before payday, the bootleggers would camp in the wooded bottoms of Whiskey Creek. They usually had with them a wagonload of prostitutes. On payday they drove a line of stakes with a bit of white cloth tied to each one, and their customers could follow this to the place of business.
Six months after James M. Haworth took over the Indian Agency, he wrote his first annual report. “When I took charge,” he wrote, “I told the Indians in council that I had come among them as their friend and desired us to live together as friends. As a proof of my confidence in them I had soldiers whom I found on duty, removed, and relied upon the Indians to conduct themselves in a peaceable and friendly manner. I told them that with their help we could make this a peaceable country to live in. I desired them to abstain from raiding and stealing. The chiefs promised me assistance. The said that if their young men would not listen to them, but ran off and stole horses, the chiefs would bring in to me all the horses brought back and restore them to their owners.”
“A short time after,” he continued, “I told them that I had heard of some of their young men who had been in Texas and brought back a number of horses. Within two weeks from the time I spoke to them, fifty-two head of horses and mules were delivered to me as having been stolen from Texas since I came in charge as agent. I did not make any threat of stopping rations or anything of that kind. I simply reminded them of their promises and appealed to their better natures.”
White men from Texas often came up to steal horses from the Indians. Fort Sill was so near the Texas border that the thieves could quickly get beyond the agent’s jurisdiction. It was difficult to get witnesses to go to Fort Smith, Arkansas, because the expense of the journey was much greater than the fees. “Consequently,” Haworth reported, “many people who have information about these thefts do not say anything about it in fear of having to go to Fort Smith as witnesses.”
Thomas C. Battey, teacher at the Kiowa camp, wrote a description of the scene at the agency, after the soldiers were sent away: “Agent Haworth removed the guard from about the agency buildings soon after his arrival. There are several hundred Indians here now to get their rations. They are more quiet than I have ever seen them on a day for issuing rations. Only the chiefs are in the commissary and there are no Indians wandering and peeking through the house, climbing fences into the yard, and trying this door and that to get in. As I look out on this quiet and orderly scene I see and old Indian riding slowly round and round the buildings. He is keeping an eye on the young men to hold them in check. This instead of having a guard of soldiers here. The Indians have established a guard of their own to keep order.”
Agent Haworth’s decision to dismiss the military guard was not the result of an impractical sentiment. He believed that the small guard would not be of much value if the Indian host wanted to do violence. As a consequence, the Indians felt responsible for the stores of rations. A delegation of the Kiowas and Apaches of the reservation called upon Agent Haworth to make a request. They had heard a rumor that Arapahoe and Cheyenne raiding parties might come to rob the commissary, and they were uneasy about the store of rations there. They asked that watchmen be posted about the building at night. This confidential co-operation of the local Indians in the protection of their supplies was much more effective than the soldiers could give. Agent Haworth consented to the Indians’ request for a night guard around the commissary, but he had in mind protection from the skulking white men, who were the more dangerous thieves.
James Haworth inherited some troubles not of his making. A delegation of Kiowa Indians had gone to Washington to ask that their chiefs, Satanta and Big Tree, who were in prison in Texas, condemned for murder, be released to them. The Government agreed to liberate the two chiefs, and also some Indian women and children who were prisoners, if the Kiowas would restore some stolen stock before the following March. The Kiowas kept their part of the bargain, but the Government failed to do so. The reason was that Texas had in the meantime become incensed over the murder of General Canby by some Modoc Indians. The Kiowas were not responsible for this murder, but Governor Davis of Texas refused to comply with the conditions that the United States Government had made. The Government in Washington decided that in the circumstances it was impossible to release the Kiowa chiefs, as had been promised. As summer came on and Indians began to gather at Fort Sill, anxiously awaiting the release of their chiefs, the question under discussion among them was whether or not the tribes should go to war if Satanta and Big Tree were not released. A messenger, Thomas Battey, was sent with a message to the tribes and they held him as a hostage for three weeks. The mental and nervous strain of this experience made him and invalid. The new commander of Fort Sill took this occasion to conduct a practice march over the terrain.
On September 4, 1873, the Indian chiefs, Satanta and Big Tree, were brought quietly froma prison in Texas to the guardhouse at Fort Sill.
The importance of the conference which followed can be judged by the fact that Governor davis of Texas arrived at Fort Sill on October 3rd, the United States Commissoner of Indian Affairs, E. D. Smith, came from Washington, D. C., and Enoch Hoag, Superintendent of the Plains tribes also came. The Indians objected to having the council meeting on the grounds of Fort Sill; Governor Davis was reluctant to confer with the Indians away from the shelter of the fort. Finally, the council was held on the adjoining parade grounds. In the stables the horses of the troops were saddled, and the colored cavalrymen were ready for any disturbance.
Governor Davis enumerated harsh conditions which must be fulfilled before he would release the prisoners. James Haworth hastened to disclaim any responsibility for the hard terms of the governor. Then the Indians of different tribes spoke. Governor Davis listened attentively, but did not recede from the terms he had announced.
The council adjourned, and Agent Haworth spent the following day trying to persuade Governor Davis to change his conditions. The Indians brooded in their camp. Even Chief Kicking Bird was discouraged. The tribes held a secret meeting at night, and plotted to release the imprisoned chiefs by force. Everything was set for a violent denouement, but at the beginning of the next council Governor Davis in a short speech surprised everyone – except possibly Agent Haworth – by turning the chiefs over to their people.
The difficulties of dealing with the Indian and the military were not the only serious problems of the agent. There was always the shortage of supplies to maintain the Indians’ rations. The distance from the railroads was great and the teamsters were shiftless. There was no tradition of punctuality or fidelity in deliveries. Sometimes James Haworth had nothing to issue to the Indians, which was a great disappointment to him. One must remember that he had an area of 3,550,000 acres under his jurisdiction. He had to wield authority like a patriarch over the tribes, sit in judgment on disputes, bring offenders to trial, and keep everything under control. His authority was weakened by the uncertainty over the supply of provisions.
On the issue days, which were usually semi-monthly, the Indians came in multitudes for their rations. The squaws, who came in force, carried their babies in little cradles which they leaned up against the walls of the buildings. When the supplies failed, owing to Government delinquency, the Indians were left very hungry and sometimes walked into the cook’s apartment to look for food.
Elizabeth Haworth support her husband in entering into fellowship with the tribesmen. One dangerous Indian named White Horse once planned to kidnap James Haworth in his office. Mrs. Haworth met him trustfully and took him into the yard to show him the shrubbery and explain the growth of the flowers; she gave him a bouquet which he took away with every sign of respect and kindness.
One of the minor irritations was that a party of white surveyors was sent by the Government to measure the reservation. These men with quadrants and chains naturally gave the Indians the impression that their land was being laid out in sections for sale to the white men.
Perhaps the main accomplishment of James Haworth as agent was to gain the complete confidence of the Kiowa chief Kicking Bird. In 1873, it had been Kicking Bird who had kept the tribe from going to war when the Texas Governor refused to release the two Kiowa chiefs, in accordance with the Federal Government’s promise. When a major conspiracy among the Southern Plains Indians was formed in 1874, he found himself in a difficult position. The Indians of his own Kiowa tribe were suffering from white aggression and ruthless theft of their horses and cattle. They were pushing Kicking Bird into war, and he was cut to the quick by their distrust of his motives. Also he had begun to doubt the good faith of the white Government. In this crisis he set himself to winning the different bands of the Kiowas to a policy of peace. He was so successful that two-thirds of the Kiowa tribe refused to follow their chief, Lone Wolf, to war.
When the teacher, Thomas Battey, came to the reservation, Kicking Bird and his wife brought their only remaining child, a daughter, to him. They asked him to teach her and to be a father to her. Since other Indian children were hesitating to come to the school, and since Kicking Bird was reluctant to leave his daughter alone, he invited Thomas Battey to his camp and offered him hospitality and protection. This was the beginning of the confidence of the Indians in the teacher, and it laid the foundation for the acceptance of education among the Kiowas.
There was a Kiowa chief named Big Bow, an intractable savage, who had not been present when the tribe signed an agreement at Medicine Lodge to go on the reservation. He led a band of Indians who went on the Texas raid in which seven teamsters had been murdered, and he had been involved in other atrocities. It was the plan of Kicking Bird to induce Big Bow to come in and dicker for the surrender of his band. The reason for this was that Big Bow knew where all the hostile Indians were; he knew all the trails and water holes and where to find the scattered bands. The commander at the fort promised Big Bow that he would be exempt from punishment if he brought his band to the fort. The plan of Kicking Bird worked to perfection, except that it caused a temporary strain on the strong attachment between him and Agent Haworth. The Agent had taken Big Bow by the hand and given him prominence during the negotiations and public council. Haworth felt that this would have a reformatory influence on the defiant fragments of the tribe, but Kicking Bird felt that the Agent had rejected him. He was downcast by the idea that he was under suspicion. But when he finally grasped the Agent’s motive, and realized that he had not lost his confidence, he was delighted and gave his hand again to the white man with a firmer and happier grasp than before. There is not a doubt that Kicking Bird prevented the slaughter of many innocent persons and saved the government many thousands of dollars.
After the outbreak of 1874, which Kicking Bird had tried hard to prevent, he had the responsibility, as chief, of bringing in the remaining bands of hostile Indians and selecting the prisoners to be banished to Florida. On the morning when the prisoners, in chains, were loaded in wagons, for their departure, Kicking Bird said to them: “Brothers, the time has come to say goodbye. I am sorry for you. But because of your stubbornness I have failed to keep you out of trouble. You have to be punished by the government. Take your medicine. It will not be for long. I love you and will work for your release. I have done my best to keep you in the right road and I hope the time will come soon when you will return to us happy, at peace, and of a different mind.”
When he had finished, one of the prisoners said: “Kicking Bird, you remain free, a big man with the whites. But you will not live long. I will see to that!” Kicking Bird made no reply. The next morning at breakfast, shortly after a Mexican servant had served him coffee, the chief was stricken with a sudden and mysterious illness. Agent Haworth was summoned. A call went out for the agency doctor. It was no use. Kicking Bird seemed to realize that his time had come. He gave him fine gray horse to James M. Haworth. He said to him: “I have taken the white man’s road and I am not sorry for it. Tell my people to keep in the good path. I am dying holding the white man’s hand.”
“His body was given in my charge by his family, and I gave it the rite of the Christian burial, he being the first Kiowa chief ever to be buried that way by the request of his friends.”
The record of the post surveyor says: “Kicking Bird, one of the principal chiefs of the Kiowas, died suddenly May 4, supposed to have been poisoned through jealousy or anger of some of his tribe. Kicking Bird was far above any of his nation or of the Comanches even, in general intelligence, of fine physique, and had a prepossessing countenance.” He was forty year old, in the prime of life.
James M. Haworth says this about him in his annual report to the Government: “Though a wild and untutored savage, as he was regarded in civilized life, he was a man of fine native sense, and thoroughly educated in the learning and history of his own people. A number of years ago he abandoned the raiding habits of his people, and determined to make a reputation for himself, not in bad acts, but in elevating his people and leading them from the bad road to a knowledge of the white man’s way. Though yet a young man, he had succeeded in attaining the position as head chief of his nation and when the question of joining with the other tribes on the warpath or coming into the agency was up before the council of his nation, his influence was exerted on the side of peace and almost nine hundred of the eleven hundred Kiowas sided with him. Many others were anxious to join him soon afterward. He counseled his people to remain at peace with everybody and not throw away what their friends were trying to do for them.
The report of James M. Haworth for the year 1876 shows that he had made progress in the educational, industrial, and agricultural fields during the three years that he had been agent. There was a boarding school of seventy pupils, none of whom had ever been in school before, except three half-breeds. All could now read, some moderately well. All had industrial training. There were 550 acres of farm land under cultivation, and some of the Indians were raising sheep and cattle.
Although there was no Federal law in existence for the punishment of any crime committed by an Indian agent against an Indian, yet the tribes began to establish law. One of their young men killed his wife. The Indians arrested the murderer. On the advice of Agent Haworth, instead of killing him, as at first proposed, they put him in the guardhouse. His friends paid a number of ponies to the friends of the dead wife, and the man was released. On another occasion, the Indians arrested two of their young men for stealing from the whites and turned them over for imprisonment.
With the end of President Grant’s administration, the military pressure against the Quaker administration of the Indian agencies began to be effective, and a number of Quaker agents were dismissed without notice. One of the agents, Levi Woodward, of the Sac and Fox reservation, declined to accept a man sent to him as an employee because he believed his employment would be injurious to the agency. Another agent, H. W. Jones, of the Quapan reservation, dismissed an employee for gross and notorious immorality, and lost his agency. There had been written agreement with the President about the control of employees by the agent, but this was disregarded. On the 20th of May, 1879, the Quakers resigned the charge committed to them over the Indian agencies.
From the beginning of his term as agent on July 1, 1873, James Haworth had struggled with a situation which had been on the verge of war. There had also been the additional strain of his relations with the military authorities. The great majority of the white people at the Fort, were, of course, opposed to his policy, and they promoted discord by telling the Indians that the agent was secretly their enemy. All this time James Haworth had been under the care of a physician. Somehow, amid all his perils and perplexities, his invalidism seemed to increase his influence over the Indians, many of whom became convinced that his intentions were peaceful.
In addition to his illness the inner life of James Haworth was troubled by other circumstances. For Christmas and New Year of the the year 1873, after he had been at the agency six months, he and his wife were to visit their son near Kansas City. They had received no mail or telegrams from him for a long time, because the weather had been too severe for the mail to get through. The telegraph wires ended at Wichita, Kansas, two hundred miles away. Therefore the first package that was delivered was a large one; on top was a telegram from their daughter, saying that their son was ill with spinal meningitis. James and his wife immediately set out in the face of a severe north wind and endured the exposure until they reached the railroad at Wichita. In the station there they met an acquaintance, who expressed sympathy but gave them no information, and the anxious couple was afraid to ask about the situation. When they got to Kansas City, they learned that their son, James Entricon Haworth, had died on the last day of 1873, after a brief illness. He was nineteen years of age and an only son, who had been an intimate companion of his father.
Back again on the reservation, James Haworth and his wife continued their efforts to control the intractable elements in the tribes. The wife of an Indian named Dangerous Eagle had died in their absence. The Indian custom was for the husband to be stoical and for nothing to be said about his departed wife. But Haworth disregarded this custom. He told Dangerous Eagle that he know the impropriety that might appear in his talk, but that the white man’s way was to say something about his grief. He told him briefly about the death of his son and expressed sympathy to Dangerous Eagle in his bereavement. This was a breach of Indian etiquette, but the man afterward became a supporter of the school for the children of his people and was of great value in the education of the tribe.
For the remainder of the year there were many administrative difficulties and complications. The agent’s over-taxed strength began to ebb. His fingers lost their natural touch. His tongue began to thicken and he had difficulty in swallowing food. In November 1876, he desired to vote in the Presidential election and was taken in a wagon to Wichita—a twenty-four hour journey. He caught a train for Kansas City and was borne to the polls. He desired to resign under the conviction that he would never be able to resume the work. But the Government preferred to grant him a leave of absence, which was extended repeatedly. His resignation as agent was finally accepted but he was continued in a supervisory capacity over many phases of the Indian work until his death on March 12, 1885, at the age of fifty-three.
*
This article was published in
The BULLETIN of
Friends Historical Association, Volume 47, No. 2, Autumn Number – 1958, pages
80-93.
Burritt Mills Hiatt was born 23 May 1887, to Edwin J. and Harriet Charity Mills Hiatt. Formerly a member of the faculty of Wilmington College, he lived in Wilmington, Ohio. His account of the experiences of James M. Haworth as an Indian agent is based largely on unpublished letters in private hands. It provides a corrective to certain misrepresentations of Agent Haworth found in Wilbur S. Nye’s Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill (Norman, Oklahoma, 1937). Further references to James M. Haworth’s work among the Indians will be found in Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (Philadelphia, 1899) and in Thomas C. Battey, The Life and Adventures of a Quaker among the Indians (Boston, 1875).
Burritt Mills Hiatt died 11 Nov 1971, in Fayette, Ohio.