Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/20

 12 T. W. DAVENPORT. of these wards of the Government or the measure of success. The records, if any, were at Washington, and too far away to be compared with the facts and things to which they relate. So I was compelled to depend upon personal inspection and the memory of employees, most of whom were new to the place or discretely reticent as to the past management. One patent fact, observable by every one coming to the agency, was the scarcity of Indians. But very few of the three tribes were there, and no one could give any account of the others. They were away without leave. In fact, the reserva- tion was not their abiding place. And when conditions on the reservation were thoroughly understood, no good reason pre- sented itself why they should be there. There was no em- ployment for them, either as hunters or farmers. It was no fit place for civilized or uncivilized men in the condition of poverty common to the Indians. Every one knows how a poor white agriculturist does when he takes up a quarter sec- tion of prairie land in the West. He goes to work for some- body who has something, and from his wages buys a team and with the earnings of himself and team procures little by little the tools and implements necessary for successful hus- bandry. But if there were no one near him with more capital than himself, he would be compelled to emigrate to a com- munity where he could work and earn such things as were essential to start with in the unsettled country. The con- federated tribes on the Umatilla were all alike incompetent, as respects tilling the soil. If they had been white men, educated to agricultural pursuits and inured to toil, they could not have succeeded without levying upon the wealth around them. He would have been indeed a very shifty white man who could have gone onto the reservation and sustained himself from the soil through means obtained from the resources of the Indians. Nearly every Indian family had two or three horses and a few were amply supplied, but this was about all their wealth, and they were ponies, hardy and fleet no doubt, but too small for the plow. Howlish Wampo had 800, some of them bred to fair size by crossing with American stock,