Henry Laurens Dawes (
October
30 1816 –
February
5 1903) was a
Republican United States Senator and
United States Representative,
notable for the
Dawes Act.
Biography
Henry
Dawes was born in Cummington, Massachusetts
. After graduating from Yale University
in 1839, he taught at Greenfield,
Massachusetts
, and also edited The Greenfield
Gazette. In 1842, he was admitted to the bar and began
the practice of law at North Adams
, where for a time he edited The
Transcript. He served in the
Massachusetts House of
Representatives in 1848-1849 and in 1852, in the state Senate
in 1850, and in the
Massachusetts
Constitutional Convention of 1853.
From 1853 to 1857, he was United States district attorney for the
western district of Massachusetts; and from 1857 to 1875, he was a
Republican member of the
United States House of
Representatives. During this time, in 1868, he received 2,000
shares of stock in the
Crédit Mobilier of
America railroad construction company from Congressman
Oakes Ames, as part of the
Union Pacific railway's influence-buying
efforts.
In late
1871 and early 1872, Dawes became an ardent supporter of the
creation of Yellowstone National Park
. In March 1871, he supported federal
financing for
Ferdinand
Vandeveer Hayden's
fifth geological survey of the
territories which became a driving force in the creation of the
park. Dawes' son, Chester Dawes was a member of the survey team,
and
Annie, the first boat on Yellowstone Lake was
purportedly named after his daughter, Anna Dawes. When the
Act
of Dedication bill came before congress, Dawes was one of its
most active supporters.
In 1875, succeeded
Charles Sumner as
U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, serving until
1893.

Henry L.
During this long period of legislative activity, he served in the
House on the committees on elections, ways and means, and
appropriations, took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and
Reconstruction
measures during and after the
Civil
War, in tariff legislation, and in the establishment of a fish
commission and the inauguration of daily weather reports.
In the Senate, he was chairman of the committee on Indian affairs,
where he concentrated on the enactment of laws that he believed
were for the benefit of the Indians.
Dawes most prominent achievement in Congress was the passage in
1887 of the
General Allotment Act of 1887
(
Dawes Act), ch. 119, 24
Stat. 388,
et seq.), which authorized the
President of the United
States to survey Indian tribal land and divide the area into
allotments for the individual Indian. It was enacted
February 8,
1887, and named
for Dawes, its sponsor. The Act was amended in 1891 and again in
1906, by the
Burke Act.
The
Dawes Commission, set up under
an Indian Office appropriation bill in 1893, was created, not to
administer the Act, but to attempt to persuade the tribes excluded
under the Act to agree to the allotment plan. It was this
commission that registered the members of the
Five Civilized Tribes and many Indian
names appear on the
rolls. The
Curtis Act of 1898 abolished tribal
jurisdiction of these tribes' land.
On leaving the Senate, in 1893, he became chairman of the
Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes (the Dawes Commission) and
served in this capacity for ten years, negotiating with the tribes
for the extinction of the communal title to their land and for the
dissolution of the tribal governments, with the object of making
the tribes a constituent part of the United States. Native
Americans lost about 90 million acres (360,000 km²) of treaty
land, or about two-thirds of the 1887 land base over the life of
the
Dawes Act. About 90,000 Indians were
made landless. The Act forced Native people onto small tracts of
land distant from their kin relations. The allotment policy
depleted the land base, ending hunting as a means of subsistence. A
Calvin Coolidge Administration
study, completed in 1928, found that the
Dawes
Act had been used to illegally deprive Native Americans of
their land rights.
Henry
Dawes died in Pittsfield, Massachusetts
, in the year 1903.
References
External links