The Carlisle Arrow

THE PONCA INDIANS.

The fact that White Eagle, chief of the Poncas, has died at Ponca City, Oklahoma, after reaching the age of 111 years, may lead some people to infer that the climate of the new reservation against which he plead so eloquently in Washington long ago was not so unfavorable to health and longevity as he doubtless honestly believed it to be. He had reason enough for his belief that the new country in the Southwest to which his tribe had been removed was unhealthy.

Many of the tribe had died, among them his wife and four children, and he himself was so weakened by malaria when he came to Washington to plead with the government that the physicians did not expect him to live three months. Possibly homesickness and a sense of injustice had as much to do with the mortality attending the removal as the climate of Oklahoma, but it is none the less true that the peaceful Poncas had been most unfairly and even cruelly dealt with.

Readers of George Catlin's "Eight Years," if there are any such in these busy days, will recall the testimony of the first artist to make a study of the red man that he nowhere found a finer type of men or prettier women among the many tribes which he visited. They were cultivators as well as hunters, peaceable and industrious, with something, too, of the poetical in the make-up, as was shown in such names as "Pure Fountain" and "Bending Willow" which they gave their women. But such a people could not contend successfully against a more savage and warlike enemy, and they were forced to leave their homes in the Dakotas for a reservation near Omaha. Then the white man had his turn at coveting the lands of the poor Poncas, and they were removed by the government, much against their will, to Oklahoma. White Eagle went to Washington and made his protest in language which to the time aroused the sympathy of a large proportion of the American people of all who were not selfishly interested in cheating the Indians in trade and robbing them of their lands. He went back to his people, and had been wellnigh forgotten, but his appeal had an effect which has been felt to this day. Public sentiment had been aroused, and the government entered upon a new policy in its treatment of the Indian problem.