fifteen dollars a head per annum, and to all who will settle down to farming twenty-five dollars a head.
In the winter following these treaties all these Indians faithfully kept their promises, in spite of terrible sufferings from cold and from lack of food. Some of them were at the old Crow Creek Reservation in Dakota, where they were “kept from absolute starvation only by the issue to them of such scanty supplies as could be spared from the stores at Fort Sully, and from the agency.” It is much to the credit of these Indians that, in spite of their manifold sufferings, scarcely a ease of stealing occurred among them, they being determined to keep their faith to the Government.
“They will run like chickens to gather the offal from the slop buckets that are carried from the garrison kitchens; while they pass a pile of corn and hundreds of loose cattle without touching a thing, except when told they may gather up the grains of corn from the ground where the rats in their depredations have let it fall from the sacks,” says the report of one of the commissioners.
In the summer of 1865 still further treaties were concluded with the Indians of the plains, and all the Sioux, with the exception of those in the British possessions, were now pledged to peace. This summer also saw the first recognition on the part of the Government of its flagrant, injustice toward the friendly Minnesota Sioux who were moved to Crow Creek, Dakota, at the time of the massacre. There were nearly one thousand of these—mostly old men, women, and children—many of them the widows and children of those who had been hung or were in prison at Davenport. For three years they had been “quiet and patient in their sufferings.”
The two hundred prisoners in Davenport had also shown “an excellent disposition and entire submission,” although many of them were known and proved to have been “absolutely guiltless of any acts of hostility; and not only this, but
