Still further to disquiet the Sioux, and to give countenance to the disgruntled warrior bands that resented the treaties already made, came the mismanagement of the Red Cloud agency. Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale College, was stopped by Red Cloud, while on a geological visit to the Black Hills, in November, 1874, and was refused admission to the Indian lands until he agreed to convey to Washington samples of decayed flour and inferior rations which the Indian agent was issuing to the Oglala Sioux. With some time at his disposal, Professor Marsh proceeded to study the new problem thus brought to his notice, and accumulated a mass of evidence which seemed to him to prove the existence of big plots to defraud the government, and mismanagement extending even to the Secretary of the Interior. He published his charges in pamphlet form, and wrote letters of protest to the President, in which he maintained that the Indian officials were trying harder to suppress his evidence than to correct the grievances of the Sioux. He managed to stir up so much interest in the East that the Board of Indian Commissioners finally appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Red Cloud agency. The report of the committee in October, 1875, whitewashed many of the individuals attacked by Professor Marsh, and exonerated others of guilt at the expense of their intelligence, but revealed abuses in the Indian Office which might fully justify uneasiness among the Sioux. To these tribes, already discontented because of their compression and sullen because of mismanagement, the entry of miners into the Black Hills country was the last straw. Probably a thousand miners were there prospecting in the summer of 1875, creating disturbances and exaggerating in the Indian mind the value of the reserve, so that an attempt by the Indian Bureau to negotiate a cession in the autumn came to nothing. The natural tendency of these forces was to drive the younger braves off the reserve, to seek comfort with the non-treaty bands that roamed at will and were scornful of those that lived in peace. Most important of the leaders of these bands was Sitting Bull. In December the Indian Commissioner, despite the Sioux privilege to pursue the chase, ordered all the Sioux to return to their reserves before February 1, 1876, under penalty of being considered hostile. As yet the mutterings had not broken out in war, and the evidence does not show that conflict was inevitable. The tribes could not have got back on time had they wanted to; but their failure to return led the Indian Office to turn the Sioux over to the War Department. The army began by destroying a friendly village on the 17th of March, a fact attested not by an enemy of the army, but by General H. H. Sibley, of Minnesota, who himself had fought the Sioux with marked success in 1862.