It was one thing, however, to take the brighter Indian children away from home and teach them the ways of white men, and quite another to persuade the main tribe to support itself by regular labor. The ration system was a pauperizing influence that removed the incentive to work. Trained mechanics, coming home from Carlisle, or Hampton, or Haskell, found no work ready for them, no customers for their trade, and no occupation but to sit around with their relatives and wait for rations. Too much can be made of the success of Indian education, but the progress was real, if not rapid or great. The Montana Crows, for instance, were, in 1904, encouraged into agricultural rivalry by a county fair. Their congenital love for gambling was converted into competition over pumpkins and live stock. In 1906 they had not been drawing rations for nearly two years. While their settling down was but a single incident in tribal education and not a general reform, it indicated at least a change in emphasis in Indian conditions since the warlike sixties. The brilliant green placard which announced their county fair for 1906 bears witness to this:-- "CROWS, WAKE UP! "Your Big Fair Will Take Place Early in October. "Begin Planting for it Now. "Plant a Good Garden. "Put in Wheat and Oats. Get Your Horses, Cattle, Pigs, and Chickens in Shape to Bring to the Fair. Cash Prizes and Badges will be awarded to Indians Making Best Exhibits. "Get Busy. Tell Your Neighbor to Go Home and Get Busy, too. "_Committee._" A great practical obstruction in the road of economic independence for the Indians was the absence of a legal system governing their relations, and more particularly securing to them individual ownership of land. Treated as independent nations by the United States, no attempt had been made to pass civil or even criminal laws for them, while the tribal organizations had been too primitive to do much of this on their own account. Individual attempts at progress were often checked by the fact that crime went unpunished in the Indian Country. An Indian police, embracing 815 officers and men, had existed in 1880, but the law respecting trespassers on Indian lands was inadequate, and Congress was slow in providing codes and courts for the reservations. The Secretary of the Interior erected agency courts on his own authority in 1883; Congress extended certain laws over the tribes in 1885; and a little later provided salaries for the officials of the agency courts.