Page:Life Among the Piutes.djvu/271

I handed the article or editorial of the “Council Fire” to the editor of the “Silver State,” and send you herein his reply. I also mail you a copy of the “Silver State.”

Your people have just closed a week’s “Fandango” at this place. Nearly all the captains were present, besides a number of Shoshones and Bannocks. There were present about four hundred in all. Hoping you may succeed in your war upon the corrupt Indian ring, I am yours, etc.,

M. S. Bonnifield.

The Indian Bureau Alarmed.—Sarah Winnemucca, the Piute princess, is lecturing in Boston on what she knows about Indian agents. She is throwing hot-shot into the camp of the “peace policy hypocrites,” who plunder the red man while professing to be his best, truest, and only friend. She knows by practical experience, acquired at several Indian agencies, that the Indians, with the exception of the head men, are cheated out of their annuities, and not infrequently driven to the war-path by the inhuman treatment of those who are paid by the government to care for their corporeal as well as spiritual wants. She is aware that the Indians at the Malheur Reservation, many of them members of her own tribe, joined the hostile Bannocks in 1878 because they could get nothing to eat at the agency, and were starving when the hostiles, loaded with spoils, invited them to join them. She also realizes the fact that the only time that the Piutes received what the government provided for them was when the military at Fort McDermitt were intrusted with its distribution. Now, because she states, before an audience in Boston, what the whites in Nevada and on the frontier generally know to be facts, the “Council Fire,” the Washington organ of the Indian Bureau, roundly abuses her, and styles her the “Amazonian champion of the army.” Without attempting