Round the camp fire that night the battles of the day were fought over again, but the main talk was about Indians. For the last week or two all America had been ringing with the murder of General Canby and the Peace Commissioners by the Modoc Indians of the lava beds on the borders of California and Oregon; but the news, already stale even in Europe, had not yet reached the prairie, and we were the first to tell the story to the hunters. They were fiercely indignant, but far more so against the Government than against the Modocs. Even the wildest men, the men like Prairie Bill who held that “an Indian was never in his proper place till he was six feet underground,” were bound to admit that the Government treated them shamefully. The policy adopted at that time was, as the march of civilization advanced, to keep driving them back further and further on to reservations, as the parcels of land allotted to them were called. In return for the rich territory of which they were robbed the Government supplied them with blankets, arms, ammunition and other necessaries, which were distributed by the “Indian Agents.” There were few warmer berths in the gift of the ministry than that of an Indian Agent. There were practically no limits to his powers of robbery, and right good or bad use he made of his opportunities, charging for first-class double blankets and supplying the poor Indian starvelings with half blankets of the thinnest and meanest description; and so it was with all other stores. In a few years the agent was a rich man. The Indians knew they were being swindled, but there was no redress, and one fine day there would come a day of reckoning such as we were discussing. Then the soldiers must be called out to wreak vengeance which is not consummated until many valuable lives have been lost; for what chance have drill and discipline and regular troops against the cunning of savages fighting on the vantage ground of such a stronghold as the lava beds. “Why don’t they call out the hunters?” said Prairie Bill; “guess we’re used to trackin’ varmin!” Wherever there were gathered together ten men who live by honest labour, whether they were merchants in New York, miners in California, farmers or hunters on the prairie, one heard the same abuse of the Government, the same tale of bribery, extortion and corruption. These men, with whom we were talking, were rough and wild and uncouth, but they were not bad fellows, as Mr. Ruggles testified, and they earned their bread hardly and honestly by the sweat of their brows. Nay more! They had a fair right to complain, for they were the most likely men to suffer by the policy of a Government which provoked the savages by robbery, and then furnished them with arms to avenge their outrages. It was the scalp of the hunter and not that of the Minister at Washington that was in peril. The Indian agent was surely one of the most striking products of universal suffrage.