The material for this book has been drawn almost entirely from documentary sources and, in a very large measure, from unpublished documentary sources; namely, the manuscript records of the United States Indian Office. Those records to-day are in a very disorganized state, largely due to change of system and to the many removals to which they have been subjected within the last few years. At the time when they were examined for the purposes of the present work, such of them as were not included in _Registers_, _Letter Books_, and _Report Books_ were classified as _Land Files_, _General Files_, _Special Files_, _Emigration Files_, _Miscellaneous Files_, _Star Files_, and the like, the basis of classification being, convenience in the current and routine work of the office. The individual files were arranged according to tribe, agency, or superintendency and every incoming letter had its own file mark. It had a letter to designate the transmitter, that letter being the initial of the transmitter's surname or of the office he represented, and it had a number to indicate its rank in a series, all the papers of which bore the same initial letter and had been received in the same given year. Finally, it was rated as belonging to a particular tribe, agency, or superintendency and to a particular file. In the autumn of 1911, an attempt was made to consolidate the old _Land_ and _General Files_ with the result that now they are no longer distinct from each other; but it has seemed best not to change the reference in the citations. The year, the letter, and the number are permanent indices and, with them at hand, there ought to be no difficulty in the locating of a paper, except for the fact that nearly everything in the United States Indian Office seems, just now, rather transitory and chaotic. Had the inaugural ball for 1913 not been dispensed with, the plan was, to use the records as the base for the band-stand, a decidedly interesting reflection, one must admit, upon the popular notion of the value of the national archives.