Did the old timers know the Indians? Once I thought so and went out to get first-hand information from pioneers who had been among the red men since childhood. The first man answered,

“Do I know Indians? I’ll say I do. The dirty black beggars killed a calf of mine once and I made them give me three sacks of pine nuts for it.”

“What tribes have you known?”

“Dog-goned if I know. That don’t make any difference anyway. An Indian is an Indian and they are all alike.”

From the next man: “Yes, I have known every Indian that’s been in this country in the last sixty years. I ought to know Indians for I grew up with ’em.”

What was the name of the tribe that lived at Cedar City?

“We always called them Cedar Indians.”

What land did they own?

“The lazy devils didn’t have a foot of land but they claimed everything. One fall they turned their horses in our fields and we would have killed the whole tribe if Bishop Lunt had let us go.”

Thus the conversations turned wherever I went. Did the old timers know the Indians?

What would we do if a stronger people should come in upon us, look over our country, select the fertile valleys in which we have had our headquarters, settle down there and tell us to move on? Suppose that people, in justification, told us that we had no right to the country, because we were not making the best use of it that we were not developing it and; that we were obstructing progress. Suppose further that they explained that they were taking neither property nor rights from us for they were buying the ground from some unheard of being called “Government.” Would the explanation satisfy, or would it sound to us like the fable of the wolf upstream who accused and killed the lamb below for befouling his drinking water?

We took the land from the Indians—that much, I presume, is admitted—but from which particular Indians did we take our particular townsite, or fields, or ranch? That may be a strange question for not many white men have ever thought of it in just that way. We are like the old settler, “Indians are just Indians and they are all alike.” We have supposed that they ran wild like the jackrabbits.

Brigham Young had an Indian policy. It was soothing syrup. It was intended to be humane, and, as compared with the treatment accorded the Indians almost everywhere else, it was humane. But the basis of it was Safety First for the Mormons. His policy was, “Feed the Indians, for it is CHEAPER to feed them than to fight them.” As a policy it was good, but as a declaration of rights it had serious shortcomings. There was in it no recognition of Indian rights. The great pioneer sent colonies out to possess the lands peacefully if they could, or by force if they must.

It mattered not what became of the Indians who were thus forced to vacate their home lands. That contingency perhaps never entered the thoughts of the pioneers. The country was large and they thought there were plenty of places which the whites did not want, where Indians could live and they could go there. If the red men preferred to hang around the Mormon settlements, “Keep them at a safe distance and if they will behave themselves, give them five acres of ground and teach them to till the soil.” (Geo. A. Smith at Parowan.)

The tragic fact was that there were no other places except the middle of the deserts or the tops of the mountains where dispossessed bands of Indians could go without becoming trespassers themselves; and the deserts and mountains, even according to Indian standards of living, were scarcely habitable except for short periods of the years. Utah was as definitely divided on property lines among the Indians as it is today, and property rights were quite as much respected by the Indians as we now respect land titles. The only difference was that with us the individual holds the land while with them the clan held all rights in common.

It may be seen that when we uprooted a band of Indians we created serious inter-tribal problems for each clan had its own land and when one was driven out they became unwelcome trespassers on the domain of some other clan. There was much exchange of friendly visits between tribes but one never settled down permanently upon another. Moreover, the locations that we found desirable were the fertile valleys that were for the same reasons most desirable to the Indians. These were the watered areas in which the vegetation used for food by the natives was most abundant. Naturally, too, the game, because of the improved forage conditions, was most plentiful there.

If one made a map of the Indian tribal home lands one would find in most cases that their locations were almost identical with the places selected by the Mormon pioneers for settlement. The only reason that our encroachments did not precipitate intertribal strife was that we came so rapidly that the problem overwhelmed the natives.