At last, by petition or recommendation—perhaps an urgent request from Representative Bowers to save an old friend—William A. was appointed by Pres. Grover Cleveland to be “a special government agent to make allotments of lands in severalty to Indians at the Round Valley Indian Reservation,” located in Covelo, California. This presidential appointment, announced in the Washington Post on January 30, 1894, was of course not a medical position; it was too late for that. But it is true that Winder is a man who is well acquainted with Native Americans. This is yet another new career for him, when he is infirm, broke, and toppling toward the age of seventy-two with no retirement in sight. Weary and perhaps wary, he must move forward. With what appeared to be a grim and short future, at least in Representative Bowers’s dramatic declaration that William A. had but a short time to live, the government, it seems, is taking care of him at last.1
Winder’s position was made possible by a controversial act of the Forty-Ninth Congress approved on February 8, 1887, and named for its sponsor, Sen. Henry Laurens Dawes, who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The General Allotment Act—also known as the Dawes Severalty Act—at its most positive addressed the idea that the federal government “believed that individual land ownership was the starting point for assimilation.” But the act allowed the president to break up reservation land that was held in common by members of the tribe and then to parcel it out to individuals. There were other purposes and mandates seemingly meant to enrich the lives and welfare of Native Americans. According to the mandates of the act, “The head of each family shall receive one hundred and sixty acres . . . single persons and orphans under the age of eighteen were granted eighty acres, natives under the age of eighteen would receive forty acres each.” Eligible natives had four years to choose their allotments, “or if this time passed, the selection would be initiated for them by the Secretary of the Interior.” It was the law of a white government—compulsory—but thought to be of economic benefit to the Indians by making Christian landowners of them. While the provisions of the act would ultimately efface the well-established tribal communities, the goal was assuring their safety from white settlers and assimilating them into “white culture.” However, many Native Americans were assigned to often unworkable, nonarable parcels not of their choosing. Keeping them on the reservation but making them farmers and “civilizing” them—seen as more acceptable than slaughtering them—was the declared intent. But to a man like William A., who from his earliest army days had never by word or deed intended harm to indigenous peoples, this was not only a much-needed job but an opportunity to help and perhaps build a path to citizenship for a people long devalued, long brutalized, long massacred. It was a formidable task for William A., who never believed any Native American was a true enemy.2
Winder will leave San Diego behind, as he has in his various past lives as a military man, a mining hopeful, a husband, a father, and a doctor. He must summon what little remaining strength he has and reinvent himself yet again. That will be a mighty task. He will take as devoted assistants two much younger men: Charles Reiter, the husband of Andrea Moro, a full-blooded Luiseño Indian who lived on the Warner Ranch in San Diego County until Reiter married her, and John Chew Minor, a former Confederate soldier whom William A. had met at María de Burton’s Rancho Jamul cement works, one of her last attempts at a money-making enterprise.
With these younger men perhaps imbuing him with a stronger spirit, they headed north to the Round Valley Reservation, a grueling distance of six hundred miles, over a mountain range and along perilous and twisted roads, to a remote sweep of “hunting grounds and fishing camps” in California’s Sacramento Valley. Winder finds great natural beauty—wildflowers and sweet grass in the hot summer and a dry, chilly, but bearable climate in winter—colliding with a heartbreaking history. The elders have passed on to their descendants tragic stories of massacres, rapes, and lost lands focusing on 1856, when bullwhip-wielding men rounded up thousands of disparate tribal peoples—“the Concows, the Pit Rivers, the Nomlackis, the Nisenans, the Wailackis, and the Pomos”—and forced them onto what was called the Nome Cult Indian Farm.3
If these dislocated tribes survived the death marches to the reservations—many did not, and they continued for years—they came to the ancestral homeland of the Yuki, whose traditions, ceremonies, language, and culture were foreign, and forbidding, to them. But coexistence was unavoidable, as there was no other choice. In 1870 Nome Cult officially became the Round Valley Indian Reservation at the order of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant. But according to Albion Monitor reporter Jeff Elliot, “Angry whites protested by tearing down the reservation fences so that their cattle and pigs would destroy Indian crops. Although Congress expanded the reservation to more than 100,000 acres, the Indians saw little benefit. Restricted to 5,000 acres in the undesirable northern end of the valley, most of their land was illegally occupied by white ranchers.”4
Twenty-four years after the Round Valley Reservation’s establishment, William A. must now make the Dawes Act allotments and “confirm the land choices of Round Valley Indians.” It was a difficult, often grueling procedure. “First, the General Land Office conducted a detailed survey paid for with money transferred from the Indian Office appropriations.” An agent like Winder would “prepare a roll of all Indians entitled to allotments, and direct the process.”5
He would learn that some reservation residents did not want the allotments, while others, especially those working outside the reservation—by choice or for pay—lobbied hard to receive the gift of land, especially if it was near good, clear water and would bring economic security. Winder worried that “in some cases . . . these so-called streams are in winter mountain torrents and in summer dry rocky beds, absolutely worthless.”6
In order to try to be fair—fairness to Native Americans in the face of injustices was always his concern—he at first gave allotment priority to “Indians who had made engagements to shear sheep [and] would lose the work by which they earn a little money.”7
Others wanted to “avoid the federal government” and despised the idea of taking orders from any white man, especially when, as the need for more allotments grew, Daniel Browning, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, ordered Winder to mandate that married women who’d already received ten acres must now give back five acres, as he believed that a woman’s work was unimportant and that “only men farmed and contributed to the household’s economy.”8
Winder waited until after the Fourth of July, which the reservation Indians—likely mandated to do so—celebrated as a feast day replete with fireworks, to deliver the edict. “Before informing them . . . I called their attentions to the many and great benefits the Government had conferred on them, and their desire to give them a good start in their new life,” he wrote. When the Indians didn’t happily respond to this new start in life, “some avoided me and could not be found,” William A. wrote.9
William A. and the local agent, Lt. Thomas Connelly, “in whom [Round Valley Indians] have great confidence,” were able to calm a potentially dangerous situation with the help of “Yuki Captain John Brown . . . who accepted his allotments.” Perhaps, as author William J. Bauer Jr. posited, Brown had done so to be a “good example for other reservation Indians.” For whatever reason, major conflict was avoided.10
The job William A. so desperately needed involved not only parceling out allotments but also taking away some of the land the Indians loved and needed. Winder’s time at Round Valley had ended by 1895, when “601 allotments with an average size of eight and a half acres” had been made.11
The job was done; the lands were allotted, for better or worse. William A. had managed to fulfill his obligations. By that time also he has most likely received news of the passing of yet another family member, his third cousin Richard Bayley Winder, on July 18, 1894. After his release from Richmond in 1866, R. B. Winder—indicted for war crimes, jailed, and finally paroled—began a new life. He “took up the study of dentistry and twenty years later became the dean of the Baltimore Dental College.” This Winder had survived and thrived; he was a success.12
What was next for William A., frail and silver-bearded, hunched and weary? On February 5, 1895, before he can shamble back to San Diego, banish the old ghosts, and begin again, there is this: “Special Agent George C. Crager”—an Indian fighter-turned linguist and interpreter living among the Lakota Sioux—was directed to “turn over his work to Special Agent William A. Winder who has been appointed to succeed him.” The assignment is familiar. The language is familiar. William A. has again been appointed a “special agent to make allotments of land in severalty to Indians,” this time at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.13
Again the government has come to William A.’s rescue. And he will again try to do what will be required of him in the year 1895, and in winter on the Great Plains. As he is elderly with severe rheumatism, it will be a winter harsher than any he has ever endured. Minor and Reiter will accompany him on this long journey to sacred lands that once belonged to warriors both princely and ferocious.