This picture of Quakers and Indians is a sketch by James Doyle Penrose which portrays an event at Easton Township in New York's Washington County. In it an Indian chief arrives at a Quaker Meeting where Friends sit in silence. There are no guns with them, nothing they could use for protection. The Indians have noted the quiet, and a little boy turns to gaze at the proud chief with feathered headgear. The account upon which the sketch was based indicates that the Indians were as taken by surprise as the Quakers. But soon the Indians recognize what is going on: in silence the settlers have approached the Great Spirit. According to the story, afterwards the Indians joined the Friends for a meal and when they departed, they placed a white feather on the meeting house: a symbol that these people were their friends. - David Sox, John Woman: Quintessential Quaker For a fuller account of this incident, click here.
The Quakers and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
The Indians had gradually been driven beyond the Mississippi, then came the movement to the Oregon country, the mad rush of the "forty-niners" to the gold fields of California, and the building of the first transcontinental railway The Indian saw the buffalo and other game everywhere recklessly slain... At last, thousands of the tribesmen of the plains arose in a desperate and final attempt to stay the advance of the white men. The war-whoop resounded along the entire frontier. At once, there came a demand for the complete extermination of the Indian race by the military arm of the government. It was at this juncture that the Friends, with their program of peace, stepped in....
The bill then pending before congress "to restore the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Department of War" was most vigorously attacked by [Friends]... The President-elect, Ulysses S. Grant, was called upon in person...[and] the great warrior received his Quaker guests with marked respect and cordiality. He listened attentively to all they had to say, as they pleaded he might use his influence for the appointment of religious men... for the Indian agencies; and then in his characteristic manner he replied:
"Gentlemen, your advice is good. I accept it. Now give me the names of same Friends for Indian agents and I will appoint them. If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out of them. Let us have peace."
Of all the departments of the government service the one most honeycombed with corruption for years had been the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Grant eagerly seized upon the plan suggested by the Quakers, and.. .turned over to them [tribes numbering more than 23,000 Indians] their care.
Enoch Hoag was chosen for the Central Superintendency for the Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Osages... [and he] was ordered by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to go to the Osage Agency and straighten out, if possible, certain difficulties arising out of a treaty made with the tribe a year before. In opening his address on this occasion, for which "nearly the whole nation assembled", Hoag said:
My brothers! I am happy to meet you. I have long desired this opportunity to talk with you, but my duty to other tribes has prevented my being with you till this day. I call you brothers because we have all one common father. The Great Creator of all made the white man, the red man and the black man equal. He gave to the white man no more natural rights than He gave the to red man; and I claim from you no rights and privileges but such as I extend to you, and you should claim from me no more than you extend to me. I have long waited to have a plain talk with you, and am glad to see so many here today.
—Enoch Hoag, 1869.
After nine years of most successful labor in this great cause, owning to the unremitting opposition of those who disliked the Quakers’ peaceful policy, together with the personal hostility and interruptions of the part of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs under President Hayes, the Friends...felt it incumbent upon them in 1878 to withdraw from the responsibility. —Louis T. Jones, 1914.
