“Deliveries of goods should be witnessed by some Federal officer who should certify _that he saw the delivery_.”--_Report of the Northwestern Treaty Commission to the Sioux of the Upper Missouri, 1866._ “The government appropriations are supposed to be liberal; but it so happens that by the time they reach their destination, they have, and not mysteriously either, dwindled down into a paltry present.”--_Henry A. Boller, in “Among the Indians.”_ “This system of issuing annuity goods is one grand humbug.”--_Report of Gen. Alfred Sully, August 18, 1864._ Evidence like the foregoing could be presented by the volume. [68] “I saw, while at Sioux City, Captain La Barge, who had just returned with his boat from the upper Missouri. Captain La Barge has been in the American Fur Company employment for twenty-five years, and says that never before this trip have the Indians been unusually hostile. He says that now the whole Sioux nation is bound for a war of extermination against the frontier, ... and that the British government, through the Hudson Bay Company, are in his opinion instigating all the Indians to attack the whites. He says British rum from Red River comes over to the Missouri, and British traders are among them [the Indians] continually. I have great confidence in his judgment and opinion.”--_H. C. Nutt, Lieutenant Colonel Iowa State Militia, to Hon. S. J. Kirkwood, Iowa City, dated Council Bluffs, September 15, 1862._ [69] See page 277 for an account of the massacre of a party of miners from Montana by these Indians. [70] It has been asserted that the _Far West_ bore the first news of the Custer massacre to the world; but this is not so. General Terry’s dispatch to General Sheridan, written in camp on the Little Big Horn June 27, was sent by courier to Fort Ellis, 240 miles distant, and there put on the wire. The following graphic account of the voyage of the _Far West_ is well worth preserving in spite of its many errors of fact. As a word picture of what was really a notable performance, it is a fine example of journalistic writing. It is from the pen of M. E. Terry, and was published in the _Pioneer Press_ of St. Paul in May, 1878: