ill God, because he alone is the
creator of life, and it is only foolish to try to stand upon his word
and keep it down. The Indian customs fall before the Word of God
wherever the Bible has gone. My friends, stop fighting against God,
believe on him and rejoice." This is Wakutemani (Walking Hunter) whom I
named Huntington Wolcott for Mr. Wolcott of Boston. Because he said he
wanted a long name and the name of a good man, I combined the two. He is
now ambitious to become a teacher. He will be ready for an out-station
whenever you are able to build one. He says they have already asked him
to come up on Oak Creek to teach them, and I gave him a Bible and hymn
books and primer, and he goes about reading and singing and praying for
Christ. May he be indeed the Walking Hunter, going about seeking souls.
God be with him to the end.

Nearly all of our Indians signed the bill to open the reservation. John
Grass took the lead. He is a very wise man, and a good one for an Indian
who represents the wild Indians. I attended all the sessions of the
Council except the last. I see by the papers that a Roman Catholic
priest on this Agency says he touched the pen first, and that caused all
the Indians to sign. Grass says he wants me to dispute that, that he
refused to sign last year because he did not like the bill. This year,
the Commissioners were men of brains and the bill was a better one, and
was so explained that the Indians understood it, and that they of their
own accord thought the best thing they could do was to sign it, that the
said priest had no power or influence over them whatever. He said, "Tell
our friends this for me, and tell them the Commissioners know that we
signed it of our own will because we believed it was for the good of our
people." I told him I would write it East.

* * * * *

The instability of the Indian.--It used to be a proverb among the
Indians that "The white man is very uncertain." The following brief
extract from the letter of a missionary among the Indians not only shows
that the Indian is unstable, but illustrates the difficulty of fixing
the Indians in a given locality and at steady work:

The Commissioner was at ---- the other day, and our Indians
had a chance to sign, and almost all of them did so, but
still to many of them the opening seems an evil. I am afraid
they are not going to maintain their places in the face of
settlement by th