tion on the whole reservation; the people were huddled together in ravines and bottom-lands, and were dying of disease and exposure.
In 1876 the Winnebagoes are reported again as “fast emerging from a condition of dependence upon their annual appropriations. * * * Each head of a family has a patent for eighty acres of land. Many have fine farms, and are wholly supporting themselves and families by their own industry. * * * The issue of rations has been discontinued, except to the Wisconsin branch of the tribe and to the sick-list.”
Tn what does this report differ from the report which would be rendered from any small farming village in the United States? The large majority “wholly supporting themselves and their families by their own industry;” a small minority of worthless or disabled people being fed by charity—i. e., being fed on food bought, at least in part, by interest money due on capital made by sales of land in which they had a certain reckonable share of ownership, Every one of the United States has in nearly every county an almshouse, in which just such a class of worthless and disabled persons will be found; and so crowded are these almshouses, and so appreciable a burden is their support on the tax-payers of State and county, that there are perpetual disputes going on between the authorities of neighboring districts as to the ownership and responsibility of individual paupers: for the paupers in civilized almshouses are never persons who have had proceeds of land sales “invested” for their benefit, the interest to be paid to them “annually forever.” It is for nobody's interest to keep them paupers, or to take care of them as such.
We now find the Winnebagoes once more quietly established in comfortable homes—as they were, in their own primitive fashion, in 1822, when Dr. Morse visited them on the shores of their beautiful lake; as they were, after our civilized fashion, in 1862, on the healthful and fertile up-lands of Minne-
