Another evidence of Hopi thrift and credit is to be found in the “reimbursable” records. About 1914 the Government instituted a plan of loaning money to Indians, through their Agents, for the purchase of livestock, implements, seed, building-materials, and so on. I was not impressed with this plan, and to-day the Washington Office would like to have some one advise how to collect its outstanding reimbursables. The worthy charity provided many Indians with money without interest, and with practically no security assuring repayment. As an instance of this, the Mohave Indians found themselves embarrassed by these gifts, and in 1922 owed more than $34,000, they having had about forty thousand crowded on to them by a former superintendent. They had been crushed by debt for years. At least eighty-five per cent of the Mohave reimbursable was outstanding and delinquent, and with the best of fortune at least twenty per cent of it a total loss. The always cautious Hopi approached this experiment gingerly. He is suspicious of Greeks bearing gifts. When he promises to pay, he expects to pay; and too, I did not rush forth, laden with money and generosity, to crowd them into debt. Between 1914 and 1915, my scruples having been argued away by a squad of non-visioning clerks who now wish that they had possessed a little less enthusiasm, I did advance $10,627 to the Hopi Indians. This money was placed in wagons, harness, and livestock. Within four years they had repaid seventy-five per cent of the advance, and of the remainder it was estimated that not more than $300 would be lost. So the frontier work went on. We were building schools, quarters, and a hospital; fighting dirt, disease, and superstition; improving livestock, and selling it, and washing wool; experimenting with trees and plants; hawking bonds, and lending money, and holding court; checking traders’ prices and guaranteeing Navajo blankets; policing Snake Dances, trapping bootleggers, and offending tourists; meantime struggling with the summer floods, and the mud and quicksands afterward, and the winter drifts. When the roads were destroyed, we somehow rebuilt them—and then prepared to rebuild them again. The Desert was a busy place. And when daylight failed, I reported it all to an unappreciative, often snarling Bureau, twenty-six hundred miles away, that understood little and corrected less, while it asked senseless questions that must be answered, made foolish decisions, and prepared for the field as many handicaps as distant ignorance and lack of sympathy could contrive.