[63] Galpin’s mission to Washington was to secure reimbursement of a ransom which he had paid for the liberation of a white female prisoner, who had been captured the year before at the time of the Minnesota massacres. Galpin had been sent by La Barge from Fort La Framboise to rescue the prisoner, and had been compelled to pay fifteen hundred dollars. Captain La Barge took her down in his boat to Sioux City, whence she was sent home. He had Galpin go with him to Washington to assist in presenting the matter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The ransom money was reimbursed in full. [64] “What consideration will induce you to give up war and remain at peace?” is the hypothetical question of a certain Indian agent to a tribe of the Sioux in 1867. And the hypothetical answer, based upon his many talks with them, was this: “Stop the white man from traveling across our lands; give us the country which is ours by right of conquest and inheritance, to live in and enjoy unmolested by his encroachments, and we will be at peace with all the world.” [65] Gruff old General Harney had his own views upon this treaty business. When Commissioner Cummings came down the river from the council with the Blackfeet, and, having lost his mules at Fort Pierre, besought the General to give him some others to complete his journey with, the General replied: “Yes, Colonel, I have plenty of mules, but you can’t have one; and I only regret that when the Indians got your mules they didn’t get your scalp also. Here all summer I and my men have suffered and boiled to chastise these wretches, while you have been patching up another of your sham treaties to be broken to-morrow and give us more work.” “It is beyond question that such a system of treaty-making is, of all others, the most unpolitic, whether negotiated with savage or civilized peoples, and ... aside from its effect in encouraging and stimulating breaches of treaties of peace, is always attended with fraud upon the government and upon the Indian.”--_General John Pope, Report of August 3, 1864._ [66] “Send me one man who will tell the truth and I will talk with him,” was the laconic reply of a celebrated chief who had been asked to meet a government commission in council. [67] “Traders in former years have run the only boats to that region, and had connected with their stores the only safe places for deposit; hence a convenient mixture of government and traders’ goods has so amalgamated matters as to have converted government annuities into mercantile supplies. “Our further progress up to the more remote tribes has disclosed to us more mortifying evidence of negligence by former agents, and most probably stupendous frauds and outrages.... Immediate arrangements should be made to place the present agents independent of traders and also to enable them to build safe storehouses, where the goods can be properly protected and preserved....