Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1879.djvu/11

Rh River to the Sioux agencies recently established in Southern Dakota was intrusted to the Indians themselves. The department furnished wagons and harness and the Indians their ponies as draft animals. A shout of derision all along the Upper Missouri greeted the experiment. A disastrous failure was confidently predicted by those interested in the freighting business and many others. But not only did the Sioux succeed in keeping their agencies supplied during an uncommonly hard winter, taking their wagons over desolate plains without roads, a distance of 90 and 193 miles respectively from the river, but they have proved the most efficient, honest, and reliable freighters the Indian service ever had. Not a pound of freight was lost; although the Indian freighters, occasionally delayed by accidents or extraordinary difficulties on their weary way, were sometimes without provisions, not a cracker box nor a pork barrel was broken open. In the course of the year Indian freighting has been introduced at a large majority of the agencies this side of the Rocky Mountains which are at a distance from railroad depots and steamboat landings, and uniformly with the same success. There are now 1,356 wagons run by Indian teamsters in that occupation, and the overland freighting is done better, more faithfully, and far more economically by them than it ever was done for this department by white contractors. But for the difiiculties connected with the giving of bonds we should now be in a condition to have the Indians make bids for freighting contracts for other branches of the public service. The introduction of freighting among them has not only been a great success in itself, but has given a powerful impulse to the desire to work and to earn money among all the Indian tribes that have been so employed. It will be introduced at all the agencies where it is practicable.

The employment of Indians in the mills and workshops on the agencies has been tried with equal success. In some of our grist and sawmills Indians act as engineers. In the blacksmith shops, saddler shops and carpenter shops at the agencies 185 young Indians are instructed as apprentices and their number is being constantly increased. Some of the shops are successfully controlled by Indians as foremen and the employment of Indians as laborers in a variety of other ways has been generally introduced. On Indian reservations where suitable clay is at hand the establishment of brick yards to be worked by Indians is contemplated and will be begun next spring. On the Sioux reservations in Southern Dakota Indians are engaged in putting up telegraph lines. The building of houses for Indians by white contractors has been abandoned, and Indians are now constructing their houses themselves, window sash, shingles, and planks, the latter sawed in the mills on the reserves, being furnished to them. The old Indian prejudice that it is improper for men to do anything else than hunt and fight, and that squaws only should work, is being rapidly and very generally overcome. The progress made in this direction is indeed unequal on different reservations, but progress has been made almost everywhere and at many