on the Sioux for raiding off their horses and stock, because they hope “that the Government will keep its faith with them,” and that suitable remuneration for these losses will be made them, according to the treaty stipulations.
For the next two years they worked industriously and well; three schools were established; a chapel was built by the Episcopal mission; the village began to assume the appearance of permanence and thrift; but misfortune had not yet parted company with the Poncas. In the summer of 1873 the Missouri River suddenly overflowed, washed away its banks hundreds of yards back, and entirely ruined the Ponca village. By working night and day for two weeks the Indians saved most of the buildings, carrying them half a mile inland to be sure of safety. The site of their village became the bed of the main channel of the river; their cornfields were ruined, and the lands for miles in every direction washed and torn up by the floods.
“For nearly two weeks,” the agent writes, “the work of salvage from the ever-threatening destruction occupied our whole available force night and day. We succeeded in carrying from the river bank to near half a mile inland the whole of the agency buildings, mechanics' houses, stabling, and sheds—more than twenty houses—nearly every panel of fencing. The Poncas worked well and long, often through the night; and the fact that the disaster did not cost us ten dollars of actual loss is to be attributed to their labor, continuous and persevering—working sometimes over the swiftly-flowing waters, terrible and turbid, on the edge of the newly-formed current but a few inches below them, and into which a fall would have been certain death, even for an Indian.”
In one year after this disaster they had recovered themselves marvellously; built twenty new houses; owned over a hundred head of cattle and fifty wagons, and put three hundred acres of land under cultivation (about three acres to each male in the
