Puck's Solution of the Indian Question

Frederick Opper's cartoon for Puck proposes a sardonic answer to U.S. Indian policy: if the Regular Army cannot subdue Native resisters, deploy the Salvation Army's "3d Regiment Salvation Shouters" instead. At center, a brass-drum-beating, tambourine-shaking religious corps marches forward beneath a pink banner; fleeing before them are Native figures rendered in the grotesque caricature standard to late-nineteenth-century illustrated humor—exaggerated features, comic postures, war-bonnets askew. The caption reads: If the Regular Army can't Handle the Hostiles, let us send a Detachment of the Salvation Army to Frighten them into Submission. The joke mocks both U.S. military incompetence and Salvation Army self-importance, but its visual language dehumanizes Indigenous people in ways that reflected, and reinforced, the era's casual contempt for Native sovereignty during the Ghost Dance crisis.