Presbyterian church of one hundred and thirty-five members, and pay half the salary of the native preacher. On the occasion of an anniversary meeting of the Dakota missionaries there, these people raised one hundred dollars to pay for their entertainment. These three bands are far the most advanced, but all the others are making steady progress.
In 1876 the news from the Sioux on the agencies is that, owing to the failure of appropriations, the Indian Bureau had been unable to send the regular supplies, and the Indians, being in “almost a starving condition,” had been induced, by the “apparent purpose of the Government to abandon them to starvation,” to go north in large numbers, and join the hostile camps of Sitting Bull. This was in the spring; again in midsummer the same thing happened, and many of the Indians, growing still more anxious and suspicious, left their agencies to join in the war.
Congress would probably have paid little attention at this time to the reading of this extract from “Kent's Commentaries:” “Treaties of peace, when made by the competent power, are obligatory on the whole nation. If the treaty requires the payment of money to carry it into effect, and the money cannot be raised but by an act of the legislature, the treaty is morally obligatory upon the legislature to pass the law; and to repeal it would be a breach of the public faith.”
A disturbed and unsettled condition of things prevailed at all the Sioux agencies, consequent on this state of things. Companies of troops were stationed at all of them to guard against outbreaks. Owing to lack of funds, the Yanktons were obliged to give up their weaving and basket-making. At the Standing Rock Agency, after the Indians had planted eight hundred and seventy-two dollars’ worth of seeds—of corn, potatoes, and other vegetables—the grasshoppers came and devoured them. “Many of these Indians, with their whole families, stood all day in their fields fighting these enemies, and in
