The New Indian War: Now, No Sarcastic Innuendoes, But Let Us Have a Square Fight

Three figures anchor this wood engraving: a civilian bureaucrat on the left stands before a door marked Interior Department; a military officer occupies the right before the War Department; between them, elevated on a small chest of drawers, stands a Native American man wearing a placard reading "This Is the Noble Red Man." A fourth figure lurks in shadow behind the War Department door. The caption challenges both departments to stop sniping at each other and settle openly who controls Indian policy—a live bureaucratic war in 1878 between Carl Schurz's Interior Department and the Army over jurisdiction on reservations. Nast's Native figure is rendered as a stock stoic caricature, feathered and weaponed, the era's shorthand that flattened Indigenous people into a political prop rather than participants in the dispute that directly governed their lives.