Red Iron replies in a speech full of pathos: RED IRON. 'We will receive our annuity, but we will sign no papers for anything else.' [You've swindled us enough, lied to us deep enough already, and we have no belief in your words or agreements.] 'The snow is on the ground, and we have been waiting a long time to get our money. We are poor; you have plenty. Your fires are warm; your _tepees_ (wigwams, tents) keep out the cold. We have nothing to eat. We have been waiting a long time for our moneys. Our hunting season is past. A great many of our people are sick for being hungry. We must die because you won't pay us. We may die! but if we do' [hold on, reader! no curses on the white men are coming next, as one might naturally expect, either from Christian or heathen orator, under the circumstances!]--'but if we do,' he continues, 'we will leave our bones on the ground, that our Great Father may see where his Dacotah children died!' [He has seen many such shambles, O thou eloquent Indian! eloquent to ears of flint and hearts of granite! and I never heard that the 'Great Father' ever shed a single tear over them.] He goes on: 'We are very poor. We have sold our hunting grounds, and with them the graves of our fathers. We have sold our own graves.' [Out of all those hundreds of thousands of acres, not six feet of earth, which they could call their own, left for any one of them!] 'We have no place to bury our dead, and you will not pay us the money for our lands.' I give this interview, and what transpired there, as a sample of the treatment which the Indians were in the habit of receiving at the hands both of the General Government and the State authorities. Not the wisest kind of treatment, one would think, this which Red Iron received, taking all the circumstances into account. The reader will be surprised, however, that Governor Ramsey, not content with 'breaking' the chief, as he called it--the greatest dishonor which he could inflict upon an Indian of rank--sent him, when the council broke up, to the guard house, under an escort of soldiers! This impolitic official ought to have remembered that the fire was even then ready for the kindling, which finally burst out in such fearful devastation over his devoted State; that it was enough to have cheated the Indians, without thus inflaming their already excited passions, by heaping so great an indignity upon the person of their chief. But he was regardless of everything except the display of his own power and authority. No doubt he thought he was acting for the best, and that the dirty redskins needed to be held with a high hand. But it was bad thinking and doing, nevertheless; a most shortsighted and foolish policy, which came wellnigh, as it was, to an Indian outbreak.