lands bought, owned and paid for—of soldiers that the Government had sent there, to be ready to make war upon them, in case the agent thought it best to do so! This is the plain English of it. This is the plain, naked truth of it.
And now the Secretary of the Interior has stopped the issue of rations to 1000 of these helpless creatures; rations, be it understood, which are not, and never were, a charity, but are the Utes’ rightful dues, on account of lands by them sold; dues which the Government promised to pay “annually forever.” Will the American people justify this? There is such a thing as the conscience of a nation—as a nation’s sense of justice. Can it not be roused to speak now? Shall we sit still, warm and well fed, in our homes, while five hundred women and little children are being slowly starved in the bleak, barren wildernesses of Colorado? Starved, not because storm, or blight, or drouth has visited their country and cut off their crops; not because pestilence has laid its hand on them and slain the hunters who brought them meat, but because it lies within the promise of one man, by one word, to deprive them of one-half their necessary food for as long a term of years as he may please; and “the Secretary of the Interior cannot consistently feed a tribe that has gone to war against the Government.”
We read in the statutes of the United States that certain things may be done by “executive order” of the President. Is it not time for a President to interfere when hundreds of women and children are being starved in his Republic by the order of one man? Colonel J. M. Chiyington’s method was less inhuman by far. To be shot dead is a mercy, and a grace for which we would all sue, if to be starved to death were our only other alternative.
New York, Jan. 31st, 1890.
This letter drew from the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver newspaper, the following reply:
LETTER II.
To the Editor of the Tribune:
Sir,—In your edition of yesterday appears an article, under the above caption, which arraigns the people of Colorado as a community of barbarous murderers, and finally elevates them above the present Secretary of the Interior, thereby placing the latter gentleman in a most unenviable light if the charges averred be true. The “Sand Creek Massacre” of 1864 is made the text and
