Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1915 — UNCLE SAM'S STAR PACIFIER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

UNCLE SAM'S STAR PACIFIER

EN. HUGH L. SCOTT was just getting the chair of chief of staff of the army comfortably warmed when, the wk/KW other day, he was hurriedly dispatched to the Mexican border to persuade the turbulent Mexicans to take their civil war out of Arizona’s front yard. That’s always the way. Scott never gets well started on an army job anywhere but what he is yanked away to go somewhere and do some pacifying. He is Uncle Sam’s star pacifier. Dark-skinned people, whether they be Mexican or straight Indian, or Cuban or Filipino, take to him as children. take to a fond uncle. Sometfmes he has to lick them first. When he does, he licks them thoroughly. But that is only on rare occasions. As a rule he has them eating out of his hand within a week. Two years ago, with a lifetime of experience behind him, he went down to the Mexican border, as colonel of the Third United States cavalry. There he remained until last April, when he came to Washington to become assistant chief and a brigadier general. Only a few weeks ago he moved up to be chief of staff. Those two years on the border made him, obviously, the man to settle the. new trouble that has arisen. All through his army career he has made it a rule in all problems with which he has had to deal to "study the personal equation.” So he studied the personal equation of Pancho Villa, for one, and of Benjamin Hill, the Carrapza ' general, who has been making most of the recent fuss near Naco, Aria He came to know both men well, and they, in turn, conceived a profound respect for him and even a sincere affection. His hold over them is said to be remarkable. It is admitted that no man living knows the American Indian more thoroughly than does General Scott. He has fought the Indian and conquered him, but many times mote he has reasoned with him and conquered him even more completely. The pre-eminent master of Indian sign language, the author of standard scientific wbrks on American ethnology, General Scott is quite as well known in the field of. scholarship as in his profession. Lacking political influence or powerful friends, General Scott was thirty years in the army before the country kt large came to know his name at all. His work, remarkable as it was, was done out of the public eye. He did not have the faculty of pushing himself forward. But in recent years the reward has come. Promotion, so long delayed, while younger men leaped over his head, has been' rapid. And now he heads the army. _ Observe him at his desk in the war department, his bullet-torn bands, shy several fingers, busy with the multitude of papers presented to him, giving his orders tn gentle, conversational tones, his appearance, his manner, his attitude precisely the same as when he was a major of the line those few years ago, modest, democratic, kindly. The erect head, the keen, searching eyes, the strong jaw proclaim the man who is master of himself, fit for command. Curiously, the dependents of Uncle Sam know him even better than the civilized folk know him. With the Indians of the West and with the savage peoples of the Sulu archipelago the name oT Scott is held in reverence. Their faith in him is absolute, their devotion unswerving. Away back in 1881, when occurred through all the West the last serious Indian outbreak, when, in some mysterious manner the Indians from the Canadian line to the Mexican border suddenly fell victims to the Messiah craze, went to ghost dancing and left their reservations for the war path, the grim jest that was bandied about through the army posts ran: “The United States army is holding down the Indians jn the Northwest; Scott Is holding them down in the Southwest.” It was generally admitted that Scott did the better job of the two. Every since then, whenever the Indians anywhere get restless and trouble starts, both the interior department, which has jurisdiction over the Indians, and the war department set up the cry, “Send for Scott!” - - . Experlenwfe has shown that ft-ft. far better, ebsaper std sm efficient to put Scott on the

job of bringing peace to the troubled Indian souls than to send out a squadron of cavalry, as was done in ancient days. Back in 19 08, when Scott was serving as superintendent of the military academy at West Point, the Navajos in New Mexico and the Mexican Kickapoos In Arizona started trouble. Scott was yanked away from West Point, sent among the hostiles practically alone, and presently the trouble was alt over. Again in 1911

when the Hop! Indians in Arizona flew the track, Scott went down and brought them back. Only a year ago, when more of these sprradic disturbances started, this time in the Navajo country, Scott had to leave his cavalry command on the Mexican border and adjust matters. These are but a few instances. How does he do it? Because he knows the savage and the savage mind. He knows how the savage thinks. He has the ability to put himself in the place of the savage. “Brothers,” he begins, when he has to do with a band of Indians who are war -dancing, “tell me what troubles you.”' And straightway they tell him of this wrong they have suffered at the.hands of the officers appointed over them, of that indignity which in their opinion has been put upon them. “My heart bleeds for you," he tell them. "I grieve that this trouble has been made between you and the great father at Washington, whose soldiers are as the leaves of the trees. I do not want them to come among you and kill you. Is there not some manner in which we can adjust the differences; some way to restore the friendship between you and the great father who wishes you well?” And then.they get down to a settlement. One of General Scott’s ancestors was Benjamin Franklin —the general’s mother was a greatgranddaughter of the Immortal Ben. It would appear that some of the genius, the philosophy, the diplomacy and the conciliating powers of this, the first American diplomatist, has descended upon the new chief of staff. But, like old Ben, whose phrase on the signing of the Declaration of "We must all hang together, or we shall hang separately,” is immortal, General Scott knows when to abandon pacific measured and to fight. So it was when,'ln 1903, he became governor of the Sulu archipelago he determined that this was no time and no place to "brother” the belligerent natives. The Malay mind he mastered as he had mastered the Indian mind. A licking first and brothering afterward plainly was the course marked out for him. And such a licking he gave them! Then came the task of breaking up the slave trade in the Islands of the archipelago. Alternately “brothering” and punishing, Scott achieved Ms purpose. He wiped out Slavery absolutely. And when, in 19(MJ, he eame to leave, the people wept. Here was a man they could understand; a man whose word always was kept They asked, through their cMefs, that he remain to rule over them, but his tour of duty was ended., r: Back he came to the states to instill other lessons as superintendent of the military academy at West Point, for a period of four years. . Adaptability, that is one of his qualities. He is adaptable because he knows men, civilized men as well as savage men. Is it any wonder they made,Mm a doctor of the humanities? Seldom does it occur that a young officer just out of West Point—"a shavetail” as the army knows such an officer—gets his baptism of fire within alfew weeks of his graduation. Scott hr one of the few. . -

Born in Kentucky in 1852, he was graduated from West Point In the class of 1876. That summer Custer had gone out with his regiment, the famous Seventh cavalry, as part of General Terry’s column, in the expedition against the Sioux. Custer and five companies of his command were cut off and wiped out to the last man on the Little Big Horn river in Montana. Scott and a number of other graduates of his class were hurried West to take the places In the regiment of those killed. He joined his regiment at Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the Missouri river, in Dakota territory, and he, with five other officers, slept their first night in the room formerly occupied by Custer. Then to the field. Through all the Northwest country the Indians were. In arms. The Seventh was sent down the Missouri to disarm and pacify the Indians. It was bitter, trying work, a mixture

of pacific and warlike measures; here a tribe to be won to peace by palaver; there to be whipped into docility. As his fellow-offi-cers tell it, Scott had not been in the field twenty-four hours when he became fascinated by a study of the Indian, and particularly of the Indian sign language. He was forever talking with the Indian prisoners, learning from them, gaining an insight into their mental processes. The next year—--187 the Nez Perces -uprising in Idaho and that wonderful retreat of Chief Joseph from Idaho 1,500 miles through Montana and almost to his goal, the Canadian line. Howard and Gibbon pursued from behind; Miles, from the east, attempted—and finally succeeded —to head off the wily Indian strategist before sanctuary could be found in Canada. The Seventh cavalry was in the front, but just before Joseph and his band were caught at Snake Creek, and just before that . two-day battle in which Joseph was forced to surrender, Lieutenant Scott was detached for special duty.

In 1878 Lieutenant Scott’s regiment was at Camp Robinson, Neb., and participated in the Cheyenne expedition. Then, until 1891, the young officer served continuously on the plains, fightIng and studying and learning. And presently he became the acknowledged Indian authority in the army. So when the ghost dancing craze of 1891 came along he was sent alone to do the work which ordinarily a column of cavalry would have been called upon to do-rand he did it You have heard of old Geronimo, the famous Apache warrior, who gave the government so much trouble in the days when the Apaches were on the war path in the Southwest? Well, General Scott and Geronimo for three years came near being “buddles.” You-see,-after Lawson and Wood and the rest of them had brought in Geronimo and his band of Chirlcahua Apaches, the problem of what to do with them was difficult Finally, they were held as prisoners at Fort Sill, and in. 1894 General Scott was sent to take charge of them. He remained on that duty three years, 1894-97. Here was a first-class ethnologist’s laboratory ready to hand, a bunch of the wildest Indians ever assembled on the continent herded together, unable to get away, offering a fruitful field for study and observation. The keeper and the kept became fast friends, and the Indians imparted all their plains lore to. the studious but extremely military person who had them in hand. Then, naturally, General Scott was ordered to Washington for duty in the division of military information, and assigned to the bureau of ethnology in the Smithsonian institution, whet’s he proceeded to write his fitaous report on Indian sign language. But then came the Spanish-American war. General Scott closed the door on that portion of his mind devoted to abstract science, and opened up the military section to its fullest Once more he was the fighting cavalry man. As Ludlow’s adjutant general he went to Cuba, and presently, after the fighting was over, he was adjutant general to General Wood, commanding the island. For three years, from 1898 to the evacuation May 20, 1902, he was General Wood’s right-hand man in doing in Cuba that historic work that has reflected so much credit on the nation. Higher in, rank now, he was just as eager and enthusiastic in his study of the Cuban people as he was in those shavetail days of 1876 away off on the Northwestern plains in studying Indians. And, as General Wood tells' it, very much of the success of American administration in the island was due to the thorough understanding of the people possessed by this hard working adjutant and to that adjutant general’s sympathetic attitude toward them. Then to the Philippines as major of the Third cavalry went Scott, there again to justify his reputation as “the greatest little pacifier in the army.” Equally apt in pacifying with a machine gun and with sympathetic acts and words, Scott once more demonstrated his many-sidedness. It Is given to few men to be able to shoot up a country and make the people like it Scott is one of the few. He did that very thing in the Philippines. .-. ' ' '