- mas, Pimas, and Maricopas. The cost of living is very moderate,
and all supplies could be brought in on the branch railroad, while the absence of excitement incident to communities established at railroad centres or on through lines will be manifest upon a moment's reflection. It would require careful, intelligent, absolutely honest administration, to make it a success; it should be some such school as I have seen conducted by the Congregationalists and Presbyterians among the Santee Sioux, under the superintendence of Rev. Alfred Riggs, or by the Friends among the Cherokees in North Carolina, under Mr. Spray, where the children are instructed in the rudiments of Christian morality, made to understand that labor is most honorable, that the saddler, the carpenter, or blacksmith must be a gentleman and come to the supper-table with clean face and combed hair, and that the new life is in every respect the better life.
But if it is to be the fraud upon the confiding tax-payers that the schools at Fort Defiance (Navajo Agency), Zuni, San Carlos, and other places that I personally examined have been, money would be saved by not establishing it at all. The agent of the Navajos reported in 1880 that his "school" would accommodate eighty children. I should dislike to imprison eight dogs that I loved in the dingy hole that he called a "school"—but then the agent had a pull at Washington, being the brother-in-law of a "statesman," and I had better not say too much; and the school-master, although an epileptic idiot, had been sent out as the representative of the family influence of another "statesman," so I will not say more about him. The Indians to be instructed in the school whose establishment is proposed at Prescott, Arizona, should be trained in the line of their "atavism," if I may borrow a word from the medical dictionary—that is, they should be trained in the line of their inherited proclivities and tendencies. Their forefathers for generations—ever since the time of the work among them of the Franciscan missionaries—have been a pastoral people, raising great flocks of sheep, clipping, carding, and spinning the wool, weaving the most beautiful of rugs and blankets and sashes, and selling them at a profit to admiring American travellers. They have been saddle-makers, basket-makers, silver-smiths, and—as in the case of the Mojaves, Pimas, and Maricopas—potters and mat-makers. In such trades, preferentially, they should be instructed, and by
