sota. In their present home they seem to have reason, at last, to feel secure, to anticipate permanence, safety, and success. Their lands have been allotted to them in sevéralty: each head of a family has his patent for eighty acres. They are, in the main, self-supporting.
How does the United States Government welcome this success, this heroic triumph of a patient people over disheartening obstacles and sufferings?
In the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1876 the Secretary says: “As a matter of economy, the greatest saving could be made by uniting all the Indians upon a few reservations; the fewer, the better.” He says that there is land enough in the Indian Territory to give every Indian—man, woman, and child—in the country seventy-five acres apiece. He says, “The arguments are all in favor of the consolidation.” He then goes on to enumerate those arguments: “Expensive agencies would be abolished; the Indians themselves can be more easi!y watched over and controlled; evil-designing men be the better kept away from them, and illicit trade and barter in arms and ammunition and whiskey prevented. Goods could be supplied at a greater saving; the military service relieved; the Indians better tanght, and friendly rivalry established among them—those most civilized hastening the progress of those below them; and most of the land now occupied as reserves reverting to the General Government, would be open to entry and sale.”
Here are nine reasons given for removing all Indians to Indian Territory. Five of these reasons ostensibly point to benefits likely to accrue from this removal to the Indians. The other four point to benefits likely to accrue to the Government; the first three of these last are, simply, “saving;” the fourth is the significant one, “gain”—“most of the land reverting to the General Government would be open to entry and sale.”
