When the agent of the Upper Platte Agency tried to reason on this subject with one of the Sioux chiefs, the chief said: “When I was a young man, and I am not yet fifty, I travelled with my people through the country of the Sac and Fox tribe, to the great water Minne Toukah (Mississippi), where I saw corn growing, but no white people; continuing eastward, we came to the Rock River valley, and saw the Winnebagoes, but no white people. We then came to the Fox River valley, and thence to the Great Lake (Lake Michigan), where we found a few white people in the Pottawattomie country. Thence we returned to the Sioux country at the Great Falls of Irara (St. Anthony), and had a feast of green corn with our relations, who resided there. Afterward we visited the pipe-clay quarry in the country of the Yankton Sioux, and made a feast to the ‘Great Medicine,’ and danced the ‘sun dance,’ and then returned to our hunting-grounds on the prairie. And now our Father tells us the white man will never settle on our lands, and kill our game; but see! the whites cover all of those lands I have just deseribed, and also the lands of the Poncas, Omahas, and Pawnees. On the South Platte the white people are finding gold, and the Cheyennes and Arapahoes have no longer any hunting-grounds. Our country has become very small, and before our children are grown up we shall have no game.”
In the autumn of this year (1859) an agent was sent to hold a council with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, and tell them of the wish of the Government that they should “assume a fixed residence, and occupy themselves in agriculture. This they at once received with favor, and declared with great unanimity to be acceptable to them. They expected and asked that the Department shall supply them with what is necessary to establish themselves permanently. * * * Both these tribes had scrupulously maintained peaceful relations with the whites, and with other Indian tribes, notwithstanding the many causes of irritation growing out of the occupation of the gold region, and the
