The Mission Indians
are very much attached to their homes. One Indian that I know has maintained a home in the Potrero, and for many years worked most of the time twenty miles away. He is as little willing to give up his Potrero house and field as any of his neighbors who live there constantly. But now his home is threatened by a land-grabber who wants it for nothing. This second class of Indians are the ones now most especially needing the energetic care of the Government. The land-grabbers are after them, and an agent with seven-leagued boots could scarcely travel from village to village as fast as those Americans who are seeking a few acres of ground with a spring upon it, or moist lands where wheat and potatoes grow without irrigation, that may be pre-empted or taken up under the desert-land act. That such lands have been held by Indians and cultivated by Indians counts for nothing more than if they had been only homes for grasshoppers and coyotes. This seems to me a great and unpardonable vice in the law, that it treats as unoccupied, and subject to pre-emption, lands which have been in fact occupied and cultivated precisely as white men occupy and cultivate, and that, too, for more than one generation of living men. But for that vice of the law the Mission Indians would now be secure in their old possessions, and where their improvements and water-rights were wanted they would be bought and paid for instead of taken
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