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20 just grievance of the Indians, which in justice should be speedily redressed. I therefore earnestly recommend that the necessary appropriation be made.

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs gives in his report an elaborate account of the wanderings, removal, settlements, escapes, and marauding expeditions during several years of certain bands of Southern Apaches. Victoria, one of their chiefs, came, on the 30th of June last, with a small number of men, to the Mescalero Agency, in New Mexico, and after a conference with the agent promised to stay there quietly, whereupon arrangements were made to bring to them their wives and children, from whom they had been long separated, then living on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona; but the consequences of their former reckless life and misdeeds suddenly turning up, upset all these arrangements and good intentions. In July last, three indictments had been found against them in Grant County, New Mexico, for horse stealing and murder; and believing themselves pursued by the officers of the law, they effected their escape from a military guard watching them, and took with them other Southern Apaches from that reservation. Then their old marauding life began again, and they committed a number of murders and robberies in Southern New Mexico. The vigorous pursuit by a military force under Major Morrow succeeded, after rapid and difficult movements, to drive them across the Mexican border, and they are now on foreign soil. These small bands, living in a country now and then infested by gangs of white desperadoes, who make marauding a profession, are vagabonds by lifelong habit, and in view of the atrocities committed by them, should be dealt with in the severest manner should they ever appear on our territory again.

The troubles and tribulations to which Chief Moses and the bands of Indians that recognize him as their chief have been exposed for some time past, are fully set forth in the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. I invite attention to his narrative as furnishing a fair illustration of the difficulties the Indian service has to contend with in its efforts to prevent collision between Indians and white settlers when the latter are determined, upon any pretext and by any means, to drive the Indians from the lands they occupy. The Commissioner states in detail how Moses, at that time not living on any reservation nor under the control of any agent, was charged with complicity in a murder; how he was waylaid, arrested, thrown into jail and threatened with death, and how at a critical moment this department interposed, ordering him to come to Washington, to have his case inquired into. After several conferences with him, in the course of which he produced the impression that