Their property has also been safe. Agent Eells affirms that clothes are left out day and night, tools are left in open sheds, doors are never locked, and yet they have never had an article stolen. He adds that they have had no occasion to use force, or show weapons, except in the arrest or retention of criminals. For this police service he commonly appoints Indian constables. What is true on these counts of the S’Kokomish Indians, is true of other bands or tribes placed on reservations in this region. Those who live near them, or who have observed them in all conditions, both off and on the reservations, for the last fifteen, and even for thirty years, can bear witness that they are usually quiet, peaceable hunters, fishermen, or workers on farms, or in mills, or lumber camps, or in kitchens and laundries for the whites, exciting no fear among families, and causing no danger to lone travellers on the prairies or in the forests. The Nez Percé reservation has been traversed for thirty years by whites in safety. Prospectors have ranged alone among their mountains, and through the gulches in all directions, in search of gold and silver for twenty years, in entire safety. Miners have followed and pitched their camps in every sort of lonely spot, exposed to the attacks of these savages. Long caravans of goods, in mule or wagon trains, in the care of a few teamsters, have passed back and forth among these Indians, and most of the other tribes, transporting merchandise of all kinds during the last twenty years, unmolested by the Indians. Express-men have had no fear to go to any mining camp of the upper country in charge of millions of gold. The mail carriers, on horses, have crossed and recrossed the whole Indian country unharmed. Stages, loaded down with mails and passengers, have rolled along over many of the same routes, having no more fear of Indians than of the white settlers, for whose convenience the post routes were established by government. Flocks and herds, in care of a few scattered men, have multiplied in all those regions. The robberies and murders, as the records of the courts testify, have been committed by white men. Sheriffs trace nearly every crime and outrage to the white, not to the Indian race. The charges of a thieving, savage, murderous spirit made against the Indian in the public press, on the street, in the halls of debate and legislation, are not borne out by the facts. It is like charging a whole community with the vices and outrages of a small number of its members. It is like putting the stigma upon the whole South for the atrocities of Libby prison and Andersonville. It is the charge of fraud upon the U. S. A. for the defalcations and embarrassments of a few of her citizens.