In Congress all the interests involved in the Indian problem found spokesmen. The War and Interior departments had ample representation; the Western members commonly voiced the extreme opinion of the frontier; Eastern men often spoke for the humanitarian sentiment that saw much good in the Indian and much evil in his treatment. But withal, when it came to special action upon any situation, Congress felt its lack of information. The departments best informed were partisan and antagonistic. Even to-day it is a matter of high critical scholarship to determine, with the passions cooled off, truth and responsibility in such affairs as the Minnesota outbreak, and the Chivington or the Fetterman massacre. To lighten in part its feeling of helplessness in the midst of interested parties Congress raised a committee of seven, three of the Senate and four of the House, in March, 1865, to investigate and report on the condition of the Indian tribes. The joint committee was resolved upon during a bitter and ill-informed debate on Chivington; while it sat, the Cheyenne war ended and the Sioux broke out; the committee reported in January, 1867. To facilitate its investigation it divided itself into three groups to visit the Pacific Slope, the southern plains, and the northern plains. Its report, with the accompanying testimony, fills over five hundred pages. In all the storm centres of the Indian West the committee sat, listened, and questioned. The _Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes_ gave a doleful view of the future from the Indians' standpoint. General Pope was quoted to the effect that the savages were rapidly dying off from wars, cruel treatment, unwise policy, and dishonest administration, "and by steady and resistless encroachments of the white emigration towards the west, which is every day confining the Indians to narrower limits, and driving off or killing the game, their only means of subsistence." To this catalogue of causes General Carleton, who must have believed his war of Apache and Navaho extermination a potent handmaid of providence, added: "The causes which the Almighty originates, when in their appointed time He wills that one race of man--as in races of lower animals--shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race, and so on, in the great cycle traced out by Himself, which may be seen, but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed away; the red man of America is passing away!"