The Last Protest

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A Story of Montana
by Henry Oyen
The Century Co. 68 1904
New York
1904
WHEN the teachers at the government school had instructed Young Moon thoroughly in the various branches of knowledge prescribed in the course, they presented him with an engrossed diploma setting forth his qualifications as a scholar, and told him that the great wide world was before him -- his to conquer or serve as he saw fit.
The teachers were very well satisfied with Young Moon. They had seen him come to the school from the tepees up in the valley with the dark, unreasoning savagery of the ages in his heart. They had taken him just as he came to them, and had wrought with him; and now when he departed there was enlightenment where there had been darkness, and civilization where the savage had held sway. So the teachers were vain of him, -- for was he not all their handiwork? -- and had visions of him performing miracles in the work of elevating his own people. Which was all very pleasant and satisfying.
Young Moon took the diploma and went back to the tepees by the river. The great outside world which the teachers pictured so alluringly held no charms for him. He had been to the school of the white man, and he had seen, and he knew that the ways of the white brother were positively not as his ways. The fact was ridiculously evident to Young Moon. What possible good could there be in a community where one must of a necessity eat at regular intervals and wash himself with alarming frequency, where the beauties of a mysterious thing called duty were continually dinned into one's ears, and where the people lived, moved, and had their being under the rule of an insignificant whirring clock? What sense could there be in abiding in the tepees of a dubious thrall of work? Why live, if one must make of himself a slave? No, no; Young Moon's philosophy of life ran far from such lines.
So when the teachers at the school were through with him, he was very well satisfied to return to the loose, duty-free ways of his fathers, where soap and tooth-brushes were not, and where life was not a constant, strained pursuit of "golden moments."
It was good to be back in the tepees by the river. This was the place to live; it was life to feel the sense of full freedom of the wide, free prairie, to see the Big Hills beckoning familiarly from the blue, hazy distance, and to hear the river, which, with its double rows of green cottonwoods, always sang down the valley. Verily this was the place for an Indian; here was his home, here his abiding-place on earth. Here, all undisturbed by any false notions of work and duty, the old life moved along in the old, old way. Each day was sufficient unto itself, and the days came in never-failing supply, and there was peace and quiet.
But there was not the peace of his fathers for Young Moon. He had learned too much. He had imbibed the wisdom of the white man to a disturbing degree, and he had become possessed of ideas. This was bad, inasmuch as they were ideas scarcely compatible with the precepts of the teachers.
The white man was master in a land where he should scarcely be tolerated. It was this idea that disturbed Young Moon's peace of mind. The white man was master. All over, everywhere, in the valley, were the signs of his superiority in numbers and power. His houses lay scattered over the face of the land, his irrigation ditches scarred the earth for miles and miles, and his fences were binding the valley and the foot-hills in a bond of hostile barb-wire. In a few years there would be only white men in the valley.
Of course this idea was old and foolish. The old men laughed at Young Moon in the council-tepee.
"Yoh, yoh," they said; "what the young man says is true -- very true. But others have said the same many times before him." And they lighted their pipes indifferently.
Young Moon came away from the old men with a hard, dry lump in his throat. The humbled acquiescence of his people to the order of things that were had angered him. These things were all wrong, and the old men knew it. Yet they sat and smoked in indolent, dog-like content. The old men were surely squaws.
Young Moon lighted a thin, flat cigarette and gazed out over the valley. He was not in a frame of mind conducive to sweet, conventional thoughts. He had gone to the council-tepee with his mind full of great ideas for the peaceful reform of conditions, and the old men had laughed at him.