1014

INDIAN TRAGEDIES AND ROMANCES.

would an unavoidable death at the stake, and whatever he may think on the subject, makes no protest, but accepts any price offered or gives any asked, without murmur or question."

The military posts of the frontier are supplied with fuel and hay by contractors, who employ Indian labor. "A short time ago," writes an officer at one of these posts, " I was told by an Indian that he had cut twenty cords of wood for a contractor, for which he was to receive one dollar and twenty-five cents per cord. The wood was delivered, and he received an order on an Indian trader, some sixty miles away, for payment of the amount. In due time he presented the order and was paid one pint cup of brown sugar for each cord of wood cut.

" Paul's Valley in the Chickasaw Nation is one of the garden spots of earth. Thousands of bushels, of corn are raised by the Indians in and near this valley. They can sell only to the Indian trader. I have been informed that the average price paid the Indians is fifteen cents per bushel in goods (three to five cents in cash). This corn is really worth there over one dollar a bushel in cash."

Among the other misfortunes from which the Indians suffer, as a result of their treatment by the United States, is that of homesickness. No citizen of the United States suffers exile on account of crime, but the government has always claimed and exercised the right to remove and banish peoples with whom they have treated as if they were independent nations from their own country in perpetual exile. The Indians, banished from warm regions to cold reservations in the north, or from the bracing mountain air of Oregon and Montana to the sultry, sandy plains of Indian Territory, suffer in body and in spirit from the change. The older members of the tribe, heart-broken, grow weary of life, and become willing victims to every chance disease. The Indians understand the treatment of wounds perfectly ; but sickness is to them only the work of the Bad God. Consequently almost the only treatment is a religious pow-wow by the medicine men, who howl, sing, dance, and beat the torn-