The Indian Dispossessed
But the losers? One hundred and five thousand of them. This tells of only one:
"One old man stood near the edge of the platform, looking with anxious interest at the drawing. Clerk John McPhaul, who was in charge of the Bonesteel office, whose heart is as kind as a woman's, saw the old man and beckoned him to come to the stage and offered him a chair. But the old man was too interested to take a chair. All during the three days' drawing he hovered just over the chairs of the clerks who were taking the names of the lucky drawers. On the second day he was at his post when the drawing commenced, his old, weather-beaten face tense with anxiety. The third day found him still at his post, anxious, but still hopeful. That he was expecting to draw a claim became noised around, and every one was hopeful that the old man would be lucky. When the last number was drawn and his name had not appeared the old man looked about in a dazed sort of way and shuffled off the platform. His shoulders were bent and it was easy to see that he had suffered a deep disappointment. That old man was probably a type of thousands who were scattered throughout the country."
And the rake-off? One hundred thousand pilgrimages to the promised land, at an average of twenty dollars each—two million dollars of expense money left with the South Dakotans; this is more
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