Spanish-American War, 1898 -- Regimental histories; United States. Army. Volunteer Cavalry, 1st
Not all of the Indians were from the Indian Territory. One of the
gamest fighters and best soldiers in the regiment was Pollock, a
full-blooded Pawnee. He had been educated, like most of the other
Indians, at one of those admirable Indian schools which have added so
much to the total of the small credit account with which the White
race balances the very unpleasant debit account of its dealings with
the Red. Pollock was a silent, solitary fellow--an excellent penman,
much given to drawing pictures. When we got down to Santiago he
developed into the regimental clerk. I never suspected him of having a
sense of humor until one day, at the end of our stay in Cuba, as he
was sitting in the Adjutant's tent working over the returns, there
turned up a trooper of the First who had been acting as barber. Eyeing
him with immovable face Pollock asked, in a guttural voice: "Do you
cut hair?" The man answered "Yes"; and Pollock continued, "Then you'd
better cut mine," muttering, in an explanatory soliloquy: "Don't want
to wear my hair long like a wild Indian when I'm in civilized
warfare."
Another Indian came from Texas. He was a brakeman on the Southern
Pacific, and wrote telling me he was an American Indian, and that he
wanted to enlist. His name was Colbert, which at once attracted my
attention; for I was familiar with the history of the Cherokees and
Chickasaws during the eighteenth century, when they lived east of the
Mississippi. Early in that century various traders, chiefly Scotchmen,
settled among them, and the half-breed descendants of one named
Colbert became the most noted chiefs of the Chickasaws. I summoned the
applicant before me, and found that he was an excellent man, and, as I
had supposed, a descendant of the old Chickasaw chiefs.
He brought into the regiment, by the way, his "partner," a white man.
The two had been inseparable companions for some years, and continued
so in the regiment. Every man who has lived in the West knows that,
vindictive though the hatred between the white man and the Indian is
when they stand against one another in what may be called their tribal
relations, yet that men of Indian blood, when adopted into white
communities, are usually treated precisely like anyone else.
Colbert was not the only Indian whose name I recognized. There was a
Cherokee named Adair, who, upon inquiry, I found to be descended from
the man who, a century and a half ago, wrote a ponderous folio, to
this day of great interest, about the Cherokees, with whom he had
spent the best years of his life as a trader and agent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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