Life and property were absolutely safe—far safer than in any white community I know. None of them would ever have thought of molesting anyone. They were in those days happy, peaceful, harmless people. As to how the present state contrasts with that, you have been out there lately and know better than I. “As to your second question, whether there was less swindling than at the present time, I would say that then there was none at all. The Indians had no lands to sell; no property of any kind except their little patches of gardens, their little furs, wild rice, etc. There was nothing to tempt the cupidity of the white man. As to how that contrasts with the present, you have been out there and know better than I. “But I ought to qualify this by saying that for some years in the nineties there was a great deal of swindling from them unwittingly perpetrated by the Government, for an account of which I refer you to my inclosed printed statement made to Mohonk Conference in 1898, which you will find on Page 13 of the inclosed pamphlet. And that you may know that the statements made therein are true, I may inform you that the then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hon. William Jones, who went to the ground and personally investigated, endorsed upon that statement: ‘I find that the statements herein made by Mr. Gilfillan are in the main correct.’ This indorsement does not appear on the copy I send you, but is on other copies. To briefly specify the heads under which this swindling was done: it was; First, by billeting upon them three Chippewa commissioners at $39 a day for the three, making with their clerks, etc., $88 a day, the Indians said; said commissioners being mostly politicians out of a job, and their positions almost sinecures. Secondly, by repeated farcical ‘estimating’ of their pine; three several ‘estimations’ (pretended), covering a period of perhaps nine years; two of said estimations costing $360,000, and then done dishonestly in the interests of those who bought the pine, whereas the real worth of the work, done honestly, was only $6,000. Thirdly, by cutting green pine, but paying for it as ‘dead and down’ pine, so getting for it seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars a thousand. But most destructive of all was the swindling done by fire; the timber being fired to allow of its being cut as ‘dead and down’ and paid for at seventy-five cents a thousand instead of five dollars. It was a pitiful sight to see those magnificent pine forests, where I used to ride for seventy miles on a stretch through great pine woods, shapely and tall, the trees reaching up, it seemed, 100 feet, that, like the buffalo, could never be replaced, now all blackened and scarred, killed and dead. The glory of the State of Minnesota was gone when in the nineties her magnificent pine forests that covered so large an area of her northern part were fired to get the