The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (26 page)

Richard Henry Pratt (center), with students and teachers at the Carlisle Indian School, 1879. Helen Clarke delivered two of her nephews to Pratt’s institution in central Pennsylvania in 1890 and was a frequent visitor thereafter, delighting audiences with readings and dramatic performances. Citing her mixed ancestry, Pratt held her up as a model of achievement for his students. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

In the end, if indeed she had reservations about Pratt’s methods, they did not keep her away from Carlisle; she made frequent trips to central Pennsylvania from Washington and New York to check on her nephews, whom Pratt’s mouthpieces at the school unfailingly described as “bright little boys.” As reported in various school publications, a visit by Helen Clarke was an occasion to be savored, for it usually featured a performance of some sort by the former actress: a poem by Longfellow, a lesson in elocution, or a parable about moral uplift.
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Pratt was thrilled, seeing in his guest, who was “part Indian herself,” as the school newsletter proudly noted, a stunning role model for the boys and girls he hoped to refashion.
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Considering his close association with the leading architects of federal Indian policy, it is possible that Pratt encouraged Clarke to seek work in the Indian Service. More likely, however, she took her inspiration from Alice Fletcher, the first—and besides Clarke, the only—female allotment agent during the nineteenth century. As it happened, Fletcher and Pratt had become good friends through their mutual interest in native peoples, and the reformer promoted the school to lawmakers and potential students nationwide. Between 1889 and 1892, Fletcher’s companion Jane Gay sent dozens of letters to Pratt describing their work in allotting the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho Territory. Many of these dispatches were reprinted in the
Red Man,
the school’s newspaper, precisely when Clarke was a regular visitor to Carlisle.
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Although there is no evidence that the two ever met, Helen Clarke and Alice Fletcher had much in common: both were well-educated, unmarried women of middle age, who worked for personal satisfaction but also out of economic necessity. And yet their lives were hardly identical: while Fletcher was descended on her father’s side from an old New England family, Clarke was of mixed ancestry, a fact that played an indispensable role in her appointment in the fall of 1890. Earlier that year Congress had targeted several reservations in Indian Territory for division, including lands held by some of the tribes most opposed to the Dawes Act. In assessing this thorny situation, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan wrote to the secretary of the interior, “It has occurred to me that Miss Helen P. Clark[e] … would be a proper person to make those allotments. … Being identified with the Indian race, it is probable that she would be able to exert a greater influence with them than one who is not so identified.”
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President Benjamin Harrison signed her commission on 4 October 1890.
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I
N THE EARLY DECADES
of the twentieth century, north-central Oklahoma became not only famous but also rich thanks to its dark oceans of petroleum, reflected aboveground in stately mansions that dotted the grassy landscape. One of them, the Italianate “Palace on the Prairie” built by the oil baron E. W. Marland, boasted fifty-five rooms and 45,000 square feet—fitting for a man who at one time controlled a tenth of the world’s known oil reserves.
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No such luxury awaited the Otoe-Missouria Indians who moved to the area in 1881. Instead, they eked out a living on their small reservation, enduring malarial summers and icy winters, all the while pining for the homes they had left behind. Increased white migration after 1850 had crowded them off their traditional lands along the Kansas–Nebraska border, and so they had reluctantly agreed to head south.
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In 1890 they were faced with a fresh indignity: the breakup of their tribal land under the new Dawes Act.

Sharing their anger were the Poncas, their neighbors to the north, who had suffered even more grievously at the hands of the federal government. After all, unlike the Otoe-Missourias, the Poncas had never consented to their removal. Because of a stupefying bureaucratic mistake in 1868, their supposedly permanent homeland in northern Nebraska had been ceded by the federal government to their bitter enemies, the Sioux, in that year’s Treaty of Fort Laramie. For a time the Poncas clung to their ancestral land, even in the face of withering Sioux aggression, until a U.S. military detachment herded them to Indian Territory in 1877 in what became known as the Ponca Trail of Tears. One of their chiefs, Standing Bear, was so distraught by the move that he led a small group back to Nebraska in 1879 and fought a determined and ultimately victorious legal battle to remain there.
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By contrast, for the Southern Poncas who stayed behind, the proposed allotment of their lands marked Washington’s latest and most devastating betrayal.

Helen P. Clarke in Indian Territory, ca. 1890s. Despite her rustic surroundings in the field, she nevertheless managed to cultivate an air of refinement during her stay in present-day Oklahoma, with impeccable table settings and, in her own quarters, a writing desk stacked with books. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

When she arrived in July 1891 to break up the communal lands of both peoples, Helen Clarke was well aware of the natives’ recalcitrance, but she had reason for cautious optimism, buoyed by her recent success in allotting the sixty-eight members of the Tonkawa tribe, whose postage-stamp reservation bordered the Poncas’ tract. Clarke had completed her efforts there in less than two months, with little resistance from the Indians. Of course, this was not to say that the work itself was easy; she sweated for her eight-dollar per diem, from “early morn to dewy eve,” as she put it, and often without taking a single day of rest for weeks at a time.
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Moreover, she and her three- or four-man crew (surveyor, interpreter, and one or two chainmen) moved about constantly, hauling heavy stones to be used as monuments and fretting about the attendant strain upon their horses.

A handful of rare photographs from her time in the field speak at once to the poverty of Clarke’s surroundings and to her gritty resourcefulness. Though living for weeks on end in canvas tents pitched directly onto the bare ground, Clarke still preserved at least a dash of her characteristic refinement. One picture shows her at mealtime, joined by two others at a table covered with a crisp white cloth and arrayed with a complete place setting or two. Another image reveals the intimate details of her sleeping quarters, which boasted a heavy, wicker-backed rolling chair, a writing desk, several photographs, and, as always, a collection of books. As any of her friends could attest, Helen Clarke was a woman equally at home on the frontier, in the schoolroom, or on the Broadway stage.

I
F THE
T
ONKAWAS
had given no trouble, and according to their agent “seem to be satisfied with the new order of things,” the same could not be said for the Otoe-Missourias, who vigorously contested Clarke’s efforts from the moment she arrived.
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One of their spokesmen, Mitchell Deroin, explained that the Indians believed, not incorrectly, that if allotted they would lose much of their reservation. “We would rather be naked and go hungry,” Deroin said, “than to take allotments and to have that land go out of our hand at some future time. … [I]f we take allotments we will not have a home.”
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Haunted by the possibility of such an outcome, the natives threatened to kill the first member of their tribe who accepted a homestead, and then set about ripping up the stones carefully laid by Clarke and her team to mark out individual plots.
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Yet it was not merely the prospect of allotment that agitated the natives: as Indian Inspector Arthur Tinker explained, they “complained of the Great Father, for sending a woman … they say they are men, and want a man to transact business with them, not a woman.”
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To Clarke’s chagrin, the Indians were not the only ones guilty of chauvinism: Clarke believed that federal officials had hinted to tribal leaders that she was not qualified for the work, which the Indians took to mean that her allotments had no legal standing.
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Her concerns were hardly the stuff of fantasy: years later, in reference to her case, an official conceded the “disadvantages under which even the most talented woman labors while engaging in allotment work.”
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Most women employed by the Indian Service (and by the early twentieth century there were many) served as teachers or field matrons, traditionally “female” positions less likely to antagonize skeptics; Alice Fletcher and Helen Clarke, on the other hand, belonged to a tiny and thus beleaguered vanguard.
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While her sex proved a liability as an allotting agent, Clarke’s race conferred no benefit, as Commissioner Morgan had hoped when he first made her appointment. By the end of November 1891, after almost five months among the Otoe-Missourias, Clarke had completed only 122 allotments, representing less than half the tribe. Nevertheless, if it was no help in persuading Indians to accept their individual tracts, her background did incline her to sympathy for the natives. As she explained to her superiors, “The question of allotment is a stupendous one—he [the Indian] has not been able to grasp it fully. … The Indian’s future depends upon this choice and this privilege I trust may not be denied him even if he be not as prompt to act as the Department and I would wish.”
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Admirable as it was, Clarke’s patience with the Indians reflected the paternalism of most white reformers. She considered the natives prone to superstition and found them—“like children, as they are”—moody and unreliable.
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This dim but largely benign assessment took on a darker hue in the winter of 1891–92, when her work among the Otoe-Missourias stalled completely and she moved on to allot the Poncas, who proved even less tractable. Clarke confessed in a plaintive note to her patron, Wilbur Fisk Sanders, “I feel utterly alone in their Territory—and I long for a home face and for encouragement.” In a cryptic aside, she added that her “tents were burned,” suggesting, perhaps, that the Poncas had taken matters into their own hands in order to check her progress.
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Nevertheless, she set to work, alternating between the Ponca Reservation and the Otoe-Missouria Reservation for the next two years.