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184 and if you don’t give this order, and everything here is not on wheels inside of ten days, I'll order my young men to tear down and burn everything in this part of the country! I don’t want to hear anything more from you, and I've got nothing more to say to you:” and he turned his back on the commissioner and walked away. Such language as this would not have been borne from unarmed and helpless Indians; but when it came from a chief with four thousand armed warriors at his back, it was another affair altogether. The order was written. In less than ten days everything was “on wheels,” and the whole body of these Sioux on the move to the country they had indicated; and the Secretary of the Interior says, naïvely, in his Report for 1868, “The Indians were found to be quite determined to move westward, and the promise of the Government in that respect was faithfully kept.”

The reports from all the bands of Sioux for the past two years have been full of indications of their rapid and encouraging improvement. “The most decided advance in civilization has been made by the Ogallalla and Brulé Sioux,” says the Report of the Indian Bureau for 1879. “Their progress during the last year and a half has been simply marvellous.”

And yet this one band of Ogallalla Sioux has been moved, since 1863, eight times. Is it not a wonder that they have any heart to work, any hope of anything in the future?

“It is no longer a question,” says this same report, “whether Indians will work. They are steadily asking for opportunities to do so, and the Indians who to-day are willing and anxious to engage in civilized labor are largely in the majority; * * * there is an almost universal call for lands in severalty; * * * there is a growing desire to live in houses; the demand for agricultural implements and appliances, and for wagons and harness for farming and freighting purposes, is constantly increasing.”

That all this should be true of these wild, warlike Sioux,