support of their own people. There should be inserted in every appropriation bill for the support of the army or of the Indians the provision that anything and everything called for under a contract for supplies, which the Indians on a reservation or in the vicinity of a military post can supply, for the use of the troops or for the consumption of the tribe, under treaty stipulations, shall be bought of the individual Indians raising it and at a cash price not less than the price at which the contract has been awarded. For example, because it is necessary to elucidate the simplest propositions in regard to the Indians, if the chief "A" has, by industry and thrift, gathered together a herd of one hundred cattle, all of the increase that he may wish to sell should be bought from him; he will at once comprehend that work has its own reward, and a very prompt and satisfactory one. He has his original numbers, and he has a snug sum of money too; he buys more cattle, he sees that he is becoming a person of increased importance, not only in the eyes of his own people but in that of the white men too; he encourages his sons and all his relatives to do the same as he has done, confident that their toil will not go unrewarded.
Our method has been somewhat different from that. Just as soon as a few of the more progressive people begin to accumulate a trifle of property, to raise sheep, to cultivate patches of soil and raise scanty crops, the agent sends in the usual glowing report of the occurrence, and to the mind of the average man and woman in the East it looks as if all the tribe were on the highway to prosperity, and the first thing that Congress does is to curtail the appropriations. Next, we hear of "disaffection," the tribe is reported as "surly and threatening," and we are told that the "Indians are killing their cattle." But, whether they go to war or quietly starve on the reservation effects no change in the system; all supplies are bought of a contractor as before, and the red man is no better off, or scarcely any better off, after twenty years of peace, than he was when he surrendered. The amount of beef contracted for during the present year—1891—for the Apaches at Camp Apache and San Carlos, according to the Southwestern Stockman (Wilcox, Arizona), was not quite two million pounds, divided as follows: eight hundred thousand pounds for the Indians at San Carlos, on the contract of John H. Norton, and an additional five hundred thousand pounds for the same people on
