with their bargains, and
from that time the control of affairs passed from the chiefs--who,
it was believed, had been bribed--to the young men. They had now
nearly disposed of all their lands, and received scarcely anything
for them. They were six thousand two hundred in number, and their
annuities, when paid in full, were hardly fifteen dollars apiece.

'Their sufferings,' continues Mr. Heard, 'were often severe,
especially during the winter and spring previous to the massacres.'

Their crops failed them; a heavy fall of snow, late in the season, came
to increase their miseries, and delayed the spring hunts. The Sissetons,
of Lac Traverse, had to eat their horses and dogs--and at least fifteen
hundred of the old men, women, and children had to be supported by the
Government at an extra expense; and this was so inadequately done that
some died of starvation.

The history of these iniquities is no new thing in Indian affairs. It
is, from first to last, a record of the most shameless lying and fraud.
The Agency seems to have been established there as a sort of Jonathan
Wild's shop, for the purpose of carrying on the trade of thieving. What
did these storekeepers--who credited the Indians for tobacco and rum,
for bread and beef, for clothing, and such other luxuries as they had
come to regard as necessaries--care for the winter prospects of the
wretched Indians, after they had lined their pockets with that four
hundred thousand dollars? Not a dime! And when subsequently it was found
that only half the regular Government payment would be handed over to
the Indians during the next year, these storekeepers--on the 'Wild'
plan--not only refused to give them credit for articles indispensable to
life in the wilderness, but insulted them to boot; and this so
exasperated the proud, revengeful nature of the Indian, that he
remembered it afterward in many a bloody murder which he committed, and
the innocent suffered for the guilty!

Mr. Heard acquits the Agency, and all connected with it, of being in
any way the causes of this outbreak. But his own statements of their
dealing with the Indians hardly bear him out in his judgment. I do not
mean to say that the people of the Lower Agency were a whit worse in
such dealings than those of the Upper, or any other similar Agency. It
is an understood thing, and mercilessly practised, that the Indian shall
be fleeced whenever the white man has a chance to