“But into this fair garden of temperance Satan drew his shining trail and toward the last years of my residence there sadly marred it. It was found that much money could be made out of Indians drinking, and it soon grew up into a most profitable industry. It came about in this way: Congress, as everybody knows, passed a law that liquor should not be sold or given to Indians. A set of men arose who saw the money there was in that; they arrested Indians who had taken a drink, or as witnesses, took them to St. Paul or Duluth, fiddled with them a little, and then presented a bill of $400, I believe, to the Government for each Indian, which money was paid, and they divided it up among them. The Indians had all the whisky they wanted while under the care of these deputy marshals, as they were called; they kept drunk while with them, and they brought plenty of liquor home with them to the reservations when they returned. They did not want to stop the Indians drinking; they encouraged it; the more drinking the more cases and the more money for them. This was found so profitable that it grew to a monstrous height. Once they had, it was said, every adult male Indian on the White Earth Reservation in St. Paul in whisky cases, a distance of, say 240 miles, and for every one of these men they got perhaps $400. The most of the deputy marshals who made the arrests were French-Canadian mixed-bloods of the lowest character, nearly all of whom openly and frankly drank themselves, though in the eyes of the law Indians like the Indians they arrested; and a high official of the United States Government told the writer that one of those half-breeds made $5,000 a year out of it, as much, perhaps, as the salaries of the members of the Cabinet of the United States Government. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars or how many millions they got out of the Government by this swindle under the form of law it would be interesting to know. Some of those mixed-bloods worked that gold mine for eighteen years. The loss of so much money to the Government was pitiful, but not half so pitiful as the terrible demoralization of the Indians by the operations of those men. Here again the good intentions of the Government in passing that law, that liquor must not be given or sold to Indians, was turned into death and destruction to them, and became most bitter gall in its carrying out by the agents of the Government to enrich themselves.