deserving of reward for the rescue of white captives.” Certificates, petitions, and letters showing these facts were forwarded from Iowa to the Department, but the commissioner says, in his report for 1866, that “they have been mislaid in their passage through the various departments, and cannot be found!”
There was still another class of these Indians deserving of help from the Government—some two hundred and fifty friendly farmer Indians, who were living in 1862 quietly on their farms, “who have acted as scouts for the Government; who never committed any acts of hostility, nor fled with those who did commit them,” and have still remained friendly through these four years, “while compelled to a vagabond life by the indiscriminate confiscation of all their land and property.”
“The crops belonging to these farmer Indians were valued at $125,000, and they had large herds of stock of all kinds, fine farms, and improvements. The United States troops engaged in suppressing the massacre, also the prisoners taken by them—in all, some 3500 men—lived for fifty days on this property.”
Strong efforts were made by Bishop Whipple and others to obtain from the Government some aid for these friendly Indians, and the sum of $7500 was appropriated by Congress for that purpose. The letter of Bishop Whipple, who was requested to report on the division of this sum, is so eloquent a summing up of the case of these Indians, that it ought to be placed on permanent record in the history of our country. He writes:
“There is positive injustice in the appropriation of so miserable a pittance. * * * A much larger sum would not pay the amount which we honestly owe these men. The Government was the trustee of the Upper and Lower Sioux. It held several millions of dollars for their benefit—the joint property of the tribes. These friendly Sioux had abandoned their wild life,
