Try to picture Miss Fletcher surrounded by her Indian friends, explaining to them carefully all about the strange machine before which she wants them to sing. For the graphophone was a field worker with her--for a time her chief assistant in catching the elusive Indian songs. Perhaps there could have been no greater proof of their entire confidence in her than their willingness to sing for her again and again, and even to give into the keeping of her queer little black cylinders the strains that voiced their deepest and most sacred feelings. For Indian music is, for the most part, an expression of the bond between the human spirit and the unseen powers of Nature. It must have been that they felt from the first that here was some one who understood them because she, too, loved the Nature they knew and loved. While Miss Fletcher was thus happily at work she became aware, however, that there was keen distress among these friends to whom she had become warmly attached. Some of their neighbors, the Ponca Indians, had been removed from their lands to the dreaded "hot country"--Indian Territory--and the Omaha people feared that the same thing might happen to them, for it was very easy for unprincipled white men to take advantage of the Indians who held their lands as a tribe, not as individuals. Always on the frontier of settlement there were bold adventurers who coveted any promising tracts of land that the Indians possessed. They said to themselves, "We could use this country to much better advantage than these savages, therefore it should be ours." They then would encroach more and more on the holdings of the Indians, defying them by every act which said plainly, "A Redskin has no rights!" Sometimes when endurance could go no further the Indians would rise up in active revolt. Then what more easy than to cry out, "An Indian uprising! There will be a massacre! Send troops to protect us from the mad fury of the savages!" The Government would then send a detachment of cavalry to quell the outbreak, after which it would seem wiser to move the Indians a little farther away from contact with the white men, who now had just what they had been working toward from the first--the possession of the good land. Miss Fletcher realized that the only remedy for this condition was for each Indian to secure from the Government a legal title to a portion of the tribal grant which he might hold as an individual. She left her happy work with the music and went to Washington to explain to the President and to Congress the situation as she knew it. The cause was, at this time, greatly furthered by the appearance of a book by Helen Hunt Jackson, called "A Century of Dishonor," an eloquent presentation of the Indians' wrongs and a burning plea for justice.