bill has been drawn “providing for the removal and consolidation of certain Indians in the States of Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and the Territories of Washington and Dakota. * * * A reduction of twenty-five reservations and eleven agencies will thus be effected. * * * There will be restored to the public domain 17,642,455 acres of land.” He says that “further consolidations of like character are not only possible, but expedient and advisable. * * * There is a vast area of land in the Indian Territory not yet occupied.”
With the same ludicrous, complacent logic as before, he proceeds to give as the reason for uprooting all these Indians from the homes where they are beginning to thrive and take root, and moving them again—for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh time, as it may be—the fact that, “among the most radical defects of the policy formerly pursued with the Indians, has been the frequent changes in their location which have been made. * * * Permanent homes, sufficient aid to enable them to build houses, cultivate the soil, and to subsist them until they have harvested their first crops, will wean them entirely from their old methods of life, and in the course of a few years enable them to become entirely self-supporting. * * * Among the more forcible arguments which can be presented in connection with this subject is the fact that the expenses attending the removal and consolidation of the Indians, as herein proposed, will be more than met from the sale of lands vacated. * * * Much of the land now owned by these Indians is valuable only for its timber, and may be sold at an appraised value for an amount far in excess of the price fixed by law, and yet leave a large margin of profit to the purchaser into whose hands the lands will fall. * * * I can see no reason why the Government should not avail itself of these facts, and in effecting the consolidation of the Indians, and the opening of the lands for settlement, sell the same for an amount sufficient
