A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1881

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 1, Chapters 8-10

Part 2

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Key Figures

Helen Hunt Jackson (The Author)

Helen Hunt Jackson is both the book’s author and one of its key actors. A poet and literary figure of some note, Jackson wrote A Century of Dishonor after learning about Standing Bear and the plight of the tiny Ponca tribe.

The public records of the War Department and the Department of the Interior made A Century of Dishonor possible, revealing a history of lying, cheating, and stealing on the part of the US government. The documents were freely available, but only Jackson took the trouble to research and organize them in a way that would tell the story of individual tribes.

Jackson also became an advocate for Indigenous Americans, which brought her national attention: Her exchange of letters with William Byers about the Sand Creek Massacre appeared in the New York Tribune, while her correspondence with Carl Schurz over the Ponca case appeared in other newspapers.

Chief Standing Bear

In the 1870s, US government officials fraudulently cheated the Poncas out of their lands, and then force-marched them to Indian Territory, where many died. Standing Bear and others escaped the reservation and fled northward. After they were overtaken and imprisoned, concerned citizens in Nebraska helped the Poncas bring their case to federal court, where Judge Elmer Dundy ruled that the Poncas had the same habeas corpus protection as US citizens.

Freed from federal custody, Standing Bear, a chief of the Ponca tribe, traveled east to tell his story, which inspired Jackson to write A Century of Dishonor. Standing Bear plays a key role not only in the book’s origins but in the book itself, for he tells his tribe’s story in his own words.

Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph led a band of Nez Perces who resisted removal to a reservation in Idaho—a removal forced on the tribe despite the Nez Perces’ history of good relations with European-Americans and their refusal to join other tribes in a war on white settlers in the early 1850s. Rather than relocate, Chief Joseph and his breakaway band of Nez Perces fled northward until they were overtaken by US troops and imprisoned, first at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then in Indian Territory. Chief Joseph once told a US commissioner that he and his band did not want schools or churches because they would teach the Nez Perces to argue about God as the Catholics and Protestants did. Chief Joseph also never made a treaty with the US government.

Carl Schurz

Carl Schurz served as Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes (in office 1877-1881). Schurz is not mentioned in Part 1, but his correspondence with Jackson appears in Section 2 of the Appendix. In response to Jackson’s questions regarding the Ponca tribe’s right to land it once occupied in Dakota Territory, Schurz waxed philosophic about a connection between citizenship and individual ownership of land—a policy specifically aimed at dissolving tribal community and loyalty. He also insisted that tribes could not sue in federal court, insisting that raising money for their legal cause was a waste of time. Although he appears only in one section of the book’s appendix, Schurz represents the complacency and disingenuousness that Jackson notes is common among US government officials.