man, and then all the others look on him with admiration; he is strong-hearted and brave; he does not mind giving away the only horse he has. It is wonderful how the excitement of the dance works on them to give away all they have. I have known a government employee to go and strip the bed clothing from his wife's bed, and give it away in the dance. That is one reason why they keep up the dance, to get presents. The little children from the schools, if there are any schools, are there, imitating their elders; they have jumped out the school windows to get to the dance, and are taking off their school clothes, given them by the United States government or by charitable persons, and are giving them away.

Off to one side of the dance is a group of perhaps thirty men, who do not seem to care for it, but are engaged in something more substantial. They are gambling. Every dance appears to require a gambling annex. Outside the circle of the actual dancers are large numbers of spectators, both men and women, who sometimes join in, but some are merely spectators.

When night has drawn a veil, then commences a sad scene of debauchery between the sexes. That is one of the principal reasons for having the dance; and that, as well as the gambling annex and other things, is considered to be proper and a legitimate part of the carousal. The dance and the drum are the religion of the heathen Indians. Ask a man what religion he is of, and he will reply that he belongs in the dance.

The next day one will see the household goods violently cast out of a cabin, and will hear sounds of violent quarreling within. The husband and wife were at the dance last night; one was unfaithful, and this is the breaking up of the family. All the young girls get ruined in the excitement of the dance as they grow up. When a Christian man begins to dance, or a farmer, he loses manhood, industry, every manly quality, and speedily goes back to the blanket and the wigwam again.

The fascination of the dance carries them long distances, perhaps a hundred miles, on foot, men and women, to the next Indian village to dance. I have seen the women go from Pine Point to Leech Lake, sixty-five miles, to dance, in the

dead of winter, wading through snow up to their knees, over an unbroken trail that I could not go through with my ponies till they broke the road; yet they carried their children on their backs, and dragged some of them through the snow, packing their blankets and provisions, pots and kettles, and camping out every night. And when they arrived at Leech Lake, they were as proud of jumping higher, or of showing off some new touch in which they thought they excelled, as any belle among us.

The authorities, as in Canada, should long ago have prohibited the heathen dance, as the very antipodes of all civilization and of all progress; instead of that, most of the Indian agents, caring nothing for the Indians, notwithstanding the entreaties of the missionaries, have given it full swing or encouraged it. The winter before the Wounded Knee outbreak, a party of fifty of the worst Sioux came to White Earth Agency, and taught the Ojibways the new "Sioux dance," which caught among them like wildfire. In spite of the remonstrances of the missionaries that they should be sent home, they were furnished with passes to go to every village of the Ojibways, and were fed with government provisions. Yet the Goths and Vandals did not play any more havoc with the civilization of the Roman Empire than those fellows did with everything that the government should do, and that the missionaries were trying to do for them. By the new dances they introduced, the practice of which lived for years and until the present time, they did more harm to the Ojibways than all the money the government expended on them did them good. Later the government ordered all Sioux excluded; but the agents allowed them there just the same, and sometimes encouraged them.

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AGENTS AND SCHOOLS.

In 1872 there was a most admirable Indian agent over the Ojibways, under whom they made progress that was most wonderful, the Rev. E. P. Smith. He surrounded himself with employees who were like himself, and under them the Indians progressed like something growing. But he was promoted to be United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and for a time

the progress stopped. Soon another equally admirable agent came, Hon. Lewis Stowe. He and his excellent wife were like a father and mother to the Indians, and did everything for them that love and devotion and ability could do. They were the Indians' dear and loving friends. He was a practical farmer, a practical carpenter; and one could see him out in the field all the time with the Indians, showing them how to plow, how to do all kinds of work. A better agent never went among the Indians, nor one who knew better how to raise them than Major Stowe; and if he could have had his own way and been sustained, he could have brought them to anything. But he was worried, hounded, and abused by interested parties; and at the end of his term he had to leave. There has since been one admirable agent, Col. T. J. Sheehan, the hero of Fort Ridgely, and he had exactly the same experience as the other two agents, Smith and Stowe. Col. Sheehan's heart was fully set in him to do the Indians good, and he knew exactly how to set about it. He had a natural faculty of being an admirable Indian agent. He was very energetic, was kind and just to all, and kept a sort of mother's hand over everything. But the same influence that had spoiled the salvation of the Indians under agents Smith and Stowe were opposed to him, and he had to leave.

Besides these three admirable agents, there have been six others, nine in all; and what sort of men they were and what sort of administrations they gave may be sufficiently understood by its being stated that they were politicians, appointed by politicians, as a reward for political services. Under them everything that had been done under Smith, Stowe, and Sheehan, went down. The Indians largely gave up farming and civilization; fields were abandoned; and they went back to old heathen dances and heathen ways. Those of the missionaries who tried could not make head against the maladministration of the agents and their employees. One of those agents was fair; the rest were the poorest that could be imagined, and their influence upon the Indians was disastrous. Some of them openly encouraged the Indians to go back to the old heathen dances and ways. The employees of those agents naturally took their tone from them, so all government in

fluence was on the side of demoralization.

There were such

agents and such influences reigning for about sixteen out of the last twenty-five years. There were three good agents, one fair, and five of the kind spoken of. Politics has been the curse of the Indian service, and giving the Indians into the charge of such men and such employees has blighted them. The good agents were most bitterly fought, and the government relieved two of them; the evil agents were left in peace and quiet, and the government usually allowed them to complete their terms.

At Red Lake a typical event occurred. In 1872 and 1873, an admirable son of Vermont was agent, a one-armed soldier of his country, Major Pratt. Like Smith, Stowe, and Sheehan, his devotion to the Indians and his success were remarkable. While everything was in the full swing of progress, there walked in one day a creature, and presented a paper to Pratt, superseding him. He was almost broken-hearted, went to the President and showed him his sleeve emptied at Bull Run, proved to him the progress made, and that there had been no single complaint; but all was in vain. He went back to milking cows in Vermont, squeezing two teats in his remaining hand, and the Red Lake Indians have never had a good agent since. The man who superseded him soon gave a sample of what he was by trying all ways to marry an Indian woman of bad character, though he had a wife still living in the East. Reviewing this quarter of a century, we must pronounce the United States treatment of the Indians as bad, owing to their being handed over to be the prey of politicians.

The good thing that the government has done in the last twenty-five years is in educating many Indian children, but mostly those of mixed blood, in schools. Here again for political purposes a great mistake was made in having these schools mostly away from the reservations, so that the congressmen's constituents could get the money used in the erection and carrying on of the schools, instead of having them right among the Indians where they live. Communities of many hundreds of Indians were thus left without schools, every child being allowed to grow up in idleness, ignorance, and vice, starving and freezing; while somewhere at hundreds

of miles distance, and where not an Indian lived within miles and miles, a costly building was put up at an expense of perhaps $50,000, which money alone, if used where it ought to have been used, would have supplied every Indian settlement with a modest school, costing $5,000, sufficient for their needs. The consequence of this policy, which was oftentimes really a policy to benefit some congressman's constituents under the guise of educating Indians, is that the mixed-bloods, mostly French, got all the benefit, for they sent their children away to those schools; but the full-blood Indians, who loved their children too dearly to let them go far away from them, got very little benefit.

TREATIES WITH THE OJIBWAYS.

Bishop Whipple, Judge Wright, and Mr. Larrabee, along in the 80's, negotiated a most excellent treaty with the Indians for their pine and lands. It was the best that could have been framed, both for the Indians and for the whites. Interested parties, who did not see their way to getting what they wanted under that treaty, found means to break it up, and thereby inflicted a crushing blow upon the Indians. Then the same parties clamored for ex-Senator Rice to make the proper kind of a treaty for them. He, with Bishop Martin Marty, did so, and, with the best intentions on their part, they made a treaty that has worked very disastrously to the Indians. To instance one provision of it, the promising them an annuity for fifty years was done to please the Indian traders, who wanted the money. The practical effect of it upon the Indians was, as every one who knew them foresaw would be the case, to make them almost entirely give up farming or even doing anything for a livelihood; because every Indian said to himself, and many said openly, "I have an annuity, to come every year for fifty years, so has my wife, so has each of my children; no need for me to do anything." If their worst enemy had tried to devise the best scheme for keeping them worthless blanket Indians always, he could have thought of nothing more effective than the annuity for fifty years. The general feeling of the heathen Indians, and of many Christians, when the provision was put in the treaty, was, "The