• MATTHEWS, Washington. Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians.
  • MATTHEWS, Washington. Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians.

MATTHEWS, Washington. Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians.

$225.00

Department of the Interior. United States Geological and Geographical Survey. F.V. Hayden, U.S. Geologist-in-Charge. Miscellaneous Publications – No. 7. 

Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1877.

4to., brown cloth stamped in gilt.

First edition.

As a young lieutenant, Grant spent a good deal of time among the Native American of the west. He also saw the traders and missionaries that hovered around them like flies, and said to Julia—who worried about her husband losing his scalp at the hands of a red savage—that “those about here are the most harmless people you ever saw. It really is my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by whites.” In 1853 he noted bitterly how the “once powerful” Indians were “fast wasting away before those blessings of civilization ‘whisky and small pox.’”

Such views guided the formulation of Grant’s Peace Policy as president. It called for the end of the treaty system by which the U.S. dealt with each tribe as if it was a sovereign nation. Indians instead were to be contained on reservations where they were supposed to be educated into a peaceful, responsible sense of Christian American individualism. Grant’s wartime aide, Ely Parker, was just such an Indian, and Grant hoped his policies would produce many more like him. Things, of course, did not work out that way, but Grant’s effort represented a far more humane and enlightened alternative than that expressed by many of his fellow generals.

The ex-President remained interested in Indian affairs, however, as the Washington Matthews treatise attests. In the 1880s and ‘90s, he was among the first to study the Navajo, and published works on the tribe’s folkways and mythology, much of which was collected in Navajo Legends in 1897. By the time he died in 1905, Matthews had authored 53 studies of Native American culture. The presence of this book on Grant’s shelf speaks to his respect for, and interest in, the cultures of American Indians.