back to the Indians for the purpose of obtaining their sanction to the modification, as was done in the case of the Sioux treaty negotiated by Commissioners Ramsey and Lea. It is hoped this oversight will be corrected as early as practicable next spring, otherwise the large amounts already expended will have been uselessly wasted, and the Indians far more dissatisfied than ever.”
To comment on the bad faith of this action on the part of Congress would be a waste of words; but its impolicy is so glaring that one’s astonishment cannot keep silent—its impolicy and also its incredible niggardliness. A dollar apiece a year, “in goods, animals,” etc., those Indians had been promised that they should have for fifty years. It must have been patent to the meanest intellect that this was little to pay each year to any one man from whom we were taking away, as the commissioner said, “his means of support.” But, unluckily for the Indians, there were fifty thousand of them. It entered into some thrifty Congressman’s head to multiply fifty by fifty, and the aggregate terrified everybody. This was much more likely to have been the cause of the amendment than the cause assigned by the superintendent, viz., the probable change of localities of all the “wandering hordes” in the next fifteen years. No doubt it would be troublesome to the last degree to distribute fifty thousand dollars, “in goods, animals,” etc., to fifty thousand Indians wandering over the entire Upper Missouri region; but no more troublesome, surely, in the sixteenth year than in the fifteenth. The sophistry is too transparent; it does not in the least gloss over the fact that, within the first year after the making of our first treaty of any moment with these tribes—while they to a man, the whole fifty thousand of them, kept their faith with us—we broke ours with them in the meanest of ways—robbing them of more than two-thirds of the money we had promised to pay.
All the tribes “promptly” assented to this amendment, how-
