old homes, from which they had been unjustly and inhumanly ejected.”
Mr. Tibbles succeeded in visiting the Poncas, although the Government agent interfered with him in many ways, and finally arrested him by authority of an order from Washington to arrest any member of the Omaha Committee who came upon the reservation. He was insulted by the agent, taken by force out of the reservation, and threatened with much more severe treatment if he ever returned.
This high-handed outrage on a free citizen of the United States aroused indignation throughout the country. The comments of the Press on the occurrence showed that people were at last waking up to a sense of the tyrannical injustice of the Indian Department. The New York Tribune said, editorially:
“The Indian Department may as well understand at once that the Ponca case has passed out of their control. It is a matter of simple justice which people are determined to see righted. * * * No petty Indian agent has the legal right to imprison, maltreat, and threaten the life of any citizen totally guiltless of offence beyond that of working to give these serfs of the Government the standing of human beings. * * * It is the Government of this great Republic, where all men are free and equal, that holds these Poncas prisoners on a tract where to remain is death. They are innocent of any crime except that they have been robbed of their land, and that they ask to bring suit, as a black man or convict could do, in the courts for its recovery.”
Mr. Tibbles reported the condition of the Poncas in Indian Territory as “deplorable in the extreme. They live in constant dread and fear, and are as much imprisoned as if they were in a penitentiary.” They seem “to have lost all hope, are broken-hearted and disconsolate. With one or two exceptions, they are making no effort to help themselves. Their so-called farms are miserable little patches, to which they pay very little attention. One of then said to me, ‘If the Government forces me to stay here, it can feed me. I had a good farm back at our old home, and if I was back there I would farm again: I have no heart to work here.’ The one hundred and fifteen who are back on the old reservation have a much larger amount of land under cultivation than the whole four hundred who are in Indian Territory. They have kept their crops in good condition, and are full of energy and hope.”
The Government Agency for the Poncas having been transfer-
