did Marmon and Pratt sway the Indians at Laguna, when the
Pueblos there were persuaded to send their children to Carlisle; and
Miss Drexel's Mission has never yet issued peremptory orders for
children to come to school; but the martinet mandate went forth. Now,
the Indian treaty, that provides the child shall be sent to school, also
stipulates that the school shall be placed within reach of the child;
and the Navajo knew that he was within his right in refusing to let the
child leave home when the Government had failed to place the school
within such distance of his _hogan_. He was then warned by the agent
that unless the child were sent within a certain time, troops would be
summoned from Ft. Wingate and Ft. Defiance. The Indians met, pow-wowed
with one another, and decided they were still within their right in
refusing. There can be no doubt but that if Captain Willard, himself,
had been in direct command of the detachment, the cowardly murder would
not have occurred; but the Navajos were only Indians; and the troops
arrived on the scene in charge of a hopelessly incompetent subordinate,
who proved himself not only a bully but a most arrant coward. According
to the traders and the missionaries and the Indians themselves, the
Navajos were not even armed. Fourteen of them were in one of the mud
_hogans_. They offered no resistance. They say they were not even
summoned to surrender. Traders, who have talked with the Navajos
present, say the troopers surrounded the _hogan_ in the dark, a
soldier's gun went off by mistake and the command was given in
hysterical fright to "fire." The Indians were so terrified that they
dashed out to hide in the sagebrush. "Bravery! Indian bravery--pah," one
officer of the detachment was afterwards heard to exclaim. Two Navajos
were killed, one wounded, eleven captured in as cold-blooded a murder as
was ever perpetrated by thugs in a city street. Without lawyers, without
any defense whatsoever, without the hearing of witnesses, without any
fair trial whatsoever, the captives were sentenced to the penitentiary.
It needed only a finishing touch to make this piece of Dreyfusism
complete; and that came when a little missionary voiced the general
sense of outrage by writing a letter to a Denver paper. President
Roosevelt at once dispatched someone from Washington to investigate; and
it was an easy matter to scare the wits out of the little preacher and
declare the investigation closed. In fact, it