Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/282

 brought these adventurers from all parts of the country. It was the wild chance to come in for a share of their Government's spoils that aroused them to a gambling pitch.

Deluded fools! They furnished a boom for the new country, and left millions of their good dollars in the land of the Vociferous Few who had engineered the whole scheme. Easy victims!

A grotesque method, this, for settling the public domain. But the opening of the Cherokee Strip was an object-lesson in governmental rectitude compared with the latest developed scheme for dividing the spoils in the Indian country. Not until the year 1904 did the Vociferous Few demonstrate to what length a half-dozen men can safely go, with the aid of a willing Congress, in the gentle art of buncoing the Indian and hoodwinking the public.