They came to Washington, hoping for additional allotments of funds with which to construct roads and bridges, to harness torrents, build mills and housing, equip and maintain schools, and, what is more important, establish hospitals. Their general talk was of cement and queer machinery, when it did not turn on gasoline and blasting-powder. They wanted things necessary to fix civilization on the last of the frontiers. Indian Agents! a much-maligned class of officials, although recognized as part of the National Government since 1796, clouded somewhat in their efforts by the memory—fact and fiction—of the “ration” days. They might have spoken proudly of the traditions of their Service, a Service that has had little recognition and possesses no chronicle other than a dry-as-dust Annual Report compiled by unknowing clerks. The reason for these officials’ existence has produced much sound and fury. The very title seems to have infuriated the ablest writers of the past, and still causes some of the present to see red. When sentimentalists—and God knows the ignorance of them is astounding—take pen in hand to picture the fabled glories and the believed miseries of the savage, they usually begin by attacking those very men I met and have in mind. They forget, if indeed they have ever known, that they are privileged to view the savage because of these men; that the miserable actualities of the “glorious past” would long since have engulfed the idealized protégé but for them. Indian Agents may not vie with painters and poets; but tubes of color, Strathmore board, dreams, and rhyming dictionaries produce small knowledge of tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, measles, syphilis—scourges of the Indian people, whose long train of evils reach grimly down through the generations of an ignorant and devitalized race. No one feels this so keenly as the official who daily faces the unromantic task, charged with the duty of alleviating the miseries of the present. Unlike the Spanish explorers, these men have no historian, and but for prejudice and libel would probably be unknown. Yet this one had succeeded to the task Custer left unfinished among the unrelenting, sullen Sioux; had checked a second rebellion; had faced and quelled and buried Sitting Bull, the last of the great savage charlatans. That one had built a city in the pines to shelter the children of murderer Geronimo; a third had tracked and mapped a region few civilized men had known. Now came one who had chained a river without an appropriation; now came another who had fought pestilence in winter, among a superstitious people, crippled by distances and lack of transport, without sufficient health-officers, to learn in the end that his mortality records were lower than those of enlightened civilization. Occasionally a fancied uprising brought one to unpleasant notice; occasionally, too, one was killed.