(Lo) The (Poor) Indian Bureau

Nast draws a wooden bureau—the furniture kind—smashed to splinters, drawers flung open and empty, a hatchet buried in its top. One fallen plank reads "(LO) THE (POOR) INDIAN BUREAU." The pun is structural: the Bureau of Indian Affairs rendered as literal broken furniture. The parenthetical "Lo" mocks the sentimental phrase "Lo, the Poor Indian" (from Pope's Essay on Man), a condescending formulation whites routinely applied to Native Americans—Nast invokes it to skewer the bureaucracy that exploited them. Interior Secretary Carl Schurz was then attempting to reform the notoriously corrupt agency. Nast argues the bureau is irredeemably rotten and should be demolished outright rather than patched. The hatchet makes the verdict final.