Rutherford B. Hayes

Partly-printed DS as president, signed “R. B. Hayes,” one page, 20.75 x 16, May 31, 1880. President Hayes appoints “W. H. Parkhurst of Providence, Rhode Island…to be Agent for the Indians of the Lower Brulé Agency in Dakota," for a term of four years.” Signed at the conclusion by Rutherford B. Hayes as president, and countersigned by the Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz. The lower left corner is embossed with the Department of the Interior seal.
In very good to fine condition, with intersecting folds, three file holes, edge toning, and a slice near the bottom edge, none of which affect the signature.

The Lower Brulé Agency on the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota administered one of the bands of the Lakota Sioux. The appointment falls at a charged moment: the Great Sioux War had ended in 1877 with the confinement of the Lakota to the Great Sioux Reservation following the Little Bighorn and Crazy Horse's surrender and death. The Grant-era Peace Policy — placing Indian agents under the supervision of religious denominations — was then being dismantled, and Hayes's administration was returning agents to presidential appointment.

Carl Schurz, the German-born reform politician who served as Hayes's Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881, was one of the more serious advocates for Indian welfare in the period, opposing the worst abuses of the reservation system while stopping well short of recognizing tribal sovereignty. Schurz's countersignature on a Dakota Territory Indian agency appointment is itself a document of the reformist wing of Gilded Age Indian policy. Within a decade, the Great Sioux Reservation would be broken up by the Dawes Act and the Sioux land cessions of 1889.