—Meanwhile, the Bannock Indians, numbering about 200 warriors, under the command of Buffalo Horn, the noted scout, are encamped in the lava beds, between Big Campus Prairie and Snake River, and have ordered the whites to leave the prairie on penalty of death. The Indians on the Upper Columbia are equally hostile, and the Sioux still threatening. —General Sherman says that, if the present indications of an Indian war are realized, and he fears they will be, the army, as it now stands, would be entirely insufficient to cope with the weight of Indian strategy and valor that would be thrown against it. —The Commissioner of Indian Affairs is about to try a new experiment with the Indians. He has given orders forbidding further gratuitous issue of coffee and sugar to them at their agencies. In order to secure application to duty on their part, he says that only as they work, and in payment for their labor, will they receive coffee and sugar rations in future. —The _Tribune_ says: “The Senate will certainly raise the army to 25,000 men, and concur in the transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department. The first will almost certainly be yielded by the House in Conference Committee, and the other has already received its approval.” The same paper contains this paragraph, also: “Before the Indian Bureau is transferred from the Interior to the War Department, however, Congress should strive to comprehend the fact that even the War Department can have very little success in managing Indian affairs unless we contrive to attain some settled Indian policy. We have been in the habit of putting the Indians by turns under the immediate care of missionaries and thieves, of Quakers and Catholics, of army officers and contractors. We have made solemn treaties, and broken them. We have moved them to reservations, and then crowded them off whenever they were found to be in the way. We have pauperized them by promising supplies, and starved them by breaking our promises. We have made a pretence of civilizing them, without furnishing them with any code of law, and of educating them, without furnishing them with any teachers. After supplying them with rifles to fight with, and worrying them into hostilities, we have made war upon them; and when they have proved so conspicuously cruel and treacherous as to deserve swift retribution, we have tried moral suasion. No one ever dreamed that the same tribe was to receive the same treatment for two successive years, and no two tribes ever received the same treatment at the same time. What is first needed is a definite and persistent policy of some kind, so that both Indians and white men will be able to form some clear idea of what will probably happen the day after to-morrow. A bad system is better than no system; any system is better than caprice.”