American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age

Alexandra Harmon

Sen. Henry L. Dawes objected to the communal ownership of American Indian land because it discouraged "selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization." Without titles to private tracts, Indians lacked incentive to work for their own gain, as civilized people did. So said Dawes in 1885, during the annual conference on Indian policy reform at Lake Mohonk, New York. Nine years later, however, Dawes gave the reformers at Lake Mohonk a contrary reason to seek the privatization of tribal land. His target then was land belonging to the so-called Civilized Tribes. The membership of those five tribes—the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—included many "keen, able, enterprising business men," Dawes observed, a few of whom had "appropriated everything for their own benefit," especially tribal acreage. Dividing the land equally among members would correct this inequity. Apparently, communal ownership had encouraged selfishness after all, and Henry Dawes had lost enthusiasm for selfish Indians.1	1
Dawes was not the only American of his time who said contradictory things about acquisitive Indians and the effect of communal landownership on Indian ambition. People at Lake Mohonk heard other speeches stressing the need to stimulate Indians' appetite for separate land but disparaging those Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles who had already taken big personal helpings of tribal land. Articles in major periodicals made the same points. In 1893 a contributor to Harper's New Monthly Magazine alleged that "intelligent and enterprising elements" in those five tribes were assuming possession of the tribal domain for their private benefit. Allowing the acquisitions to continue "would be a blot upon civilization," the writer warned, yet he pleaded for allotment of the land to individual Indians on the ground that it would create "a desire to accumulate property."2	2
The campaign to privatize the lands of the Civilized Tribes is a notorious episode in a staple story of Indians' relations with the United States. Early U.S. leaders conceived of individual landownership as a way to "civilize" Indians and minimize their territorial claims. After the government had tried the strategy on a case-by-case basis for several decades, Congress made it a blanket policy in the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act. Vigorous lobbying won the Civilized Tribes exemption from that legislation, but their reprieve was short-lived. In 1893 Congress instructed a commission headed by Dawes to wrest from those tribes a consent to allot their land. After five more years, during which some tribal officials appeared to think they could withhold consent, the Curtis Act "authorized the commission to proceed with the allotment ... as soon as" it had compiled membership rolls for the Civilized Tribes.3	3
When explaining this late-nineteenth-century American crusade for allotment of Indian lands, historians have paid minimal attention to expressions of concern that "enterprising elements" were monopolizing tribal domain. Most histories highlight two other motivations. Eastern humanitarians hoped to bring Indians into U.S. society as yeoman farmers, thereby saving them from annihilation as civilization advanced and affirming the vitality of agrarian ideals in an age of industrialization and urbanization. Western politicians favored allotment because lots would be a specific, modest size and surplus tribal land would go to whites. Antipathy toward individual Indians who hogged tribal land has seemed a comparatively inconsequential motivation, aroused only by circumstances in the Civilized Tribes and inconsistent with reformers' aim of teaching Indians to be more selfish.4 In a larger context, however, the invective against Indian land monopolists assumes greater significance. That invective was part of a broad bilateral and intercultural discourse about economic culture, political economy, and race—a discourse that becomes apparent when we break the habit of segregating American intellectual history from American Indians' history.	. . .