Show LAST OF THE INDIAN SOLDIERS The last of the Indian companies mustered Into the service of the United States has been disbanded It was in Oklahoma at the time of the disbandment disband-ment Speaking of the event the Kansas Kan-sas City Star says The last of the Indian companies In the United States army has been disbanded dis-banded the men will be employed hereafter here-after only as scouts and this ends the experiment of making or attempting attempt-ing to make a regular soldier of the American Indian Many Indians have served first and last the government of the United States but what has been given up Is the attempt to use them as regularly drilled and disciplined soldiers diers The Indian as judged by the standards stand-ards of civilized men is a wild man There is a story that the chief Tecumseh Tecum-seh at an interview with General Har rison was asked to seat himself in a chair and answered The earth is my mother on her bosom will I repose re-pose and flung himself upon the ground This story whether true or only one of many poetic fictions invented vented about Indians finally illustrates the nature of the Indian He has no use for what the civilized man considers consid-ers common comforts and necessities < 9 = ruG He rises when he wakes up sleeps whenever and wherever he is sleeky eats at any and at all times and as much as he can knows nothing of rule or regulation takesno note of the passing hours has knowledge of the arts and sciences and left to himself will never acquire any He Is a creature crea-ture of passion and caprice who does not even know continuously his own untutored mind To suppose in the first instance that such a being would accept the life of a regular infantry soldier with its routine and regulation so strict and irksome that even white men the heirs of civilization take perilous chances to desert it was to believe in an impossibility I To expect that an Indian would getup i get-up at reveille and 20 to sleep at taps that he would answer roll call and sick call and the countless other calls I to which the United States bugle attunes at-tunes itself in twentyfour hours that I he would become a thinking creature I knowing today what he was going to do tomorrow was a wild flight on the part of somebodys fancy The cop I percolored child of nature concluded at first that regular soldiering was heap no good and he has continued to express 1 ex-press and emphasize that opinion till he has been let out The disbandment of this last company com-pany of Indian soldiers sounds like a death knell to the Indians They have never shown much capacity for civilization civili-zation and less inclination It is doubtful doubt-ful if there ever dwelt in the frame 01 a human being a wilder freer nature than that of the Indian Unquestionably Unquestion-ably Cooper and Parkman have thrown a glamour around him yet there was always that in the Indian nature that justified the glamour The only way in which the Indian could ever have been employed successfully in military service was as the French employed him in the days of Frontenac He might have been utilized by the gov ernmert in its border wars but as a soldier in all the term implies the Indian = In-dian was destined to prove a failure |