Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/21

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 13 and Tin-tin-met-sah, another Cayuse headman, had 3,000 head of ponies. It is easy to see how these men, by sales of horses, could have started farming operations full handed, but there was more money in horses than in anything they could raise on the farm. While they could sell a pony for forty to one hun- dred dollars, there was no inducement to raise wheat, especi- ally as two days were required to make the trip to the Walla Walla mill. Even an Indian could see that. In spite of all discouragements a very few Indians had little fields of wheat, which they threshed with sticks and took to the mill aforesaid. Three of them had log houses, and a few of them had set out some apple trees. The two men who were most able to have good houses, barns, stack-yards, and the other accompaniments of permanent settlement, lived in wigwams or tents and par- took of the white man's delicacies, raised flour biscuits with store butter, coffee, tea, sugar, etc., while sitting upon the ground after the fashion of their ancestors. People forget, when they sarcastically smile at sight of an Indian garden patch, how recently he was a nomad depending for his sub- sistence upon hunting and fishing; and if they would only stop and think how many mature white men, with families depending upon them, had been enticed away from home by the fascinations of the chase and become incorrigibly lost to the pursuits in which they had been bred, the smile would take an entirely different expression. The sensible, humane men who negotiated the treaty were fully aware that those Indians could not in any way maintain themselves upon the Umatilla Reservation, ample as it was, and they, therefore, pledged the United States Government to subsist them the first year, while with Government help and under its supervision houses should be built and farms opened so that they might live in the main by agriculture. The Government, as usual had been dilatory and as usual, too, the means given to its agents had been squandered or appropri- ated. The treaty specified that a flouring mill and saw mill should be erected at suitable points on the reservation; and