Such, in the main, had been the attitude of the government toward the Sioux as the last of the Indian races inhabiting the Iowa country. It had not been an altogether enlightened policy; nor had it been one that was calculated to secure their good will. Instead, it had stirred the Indians to wreak vengeance at every convenient opportunity. However mistaken this policy toward the Indians had been, the attitude toward the frontier and its white inhabitants had been no wiser and at times scarcely as wise. Much Indian trouble and no few massacres resulted from the loose administration of frontier affairs--more specifically from the lack of control exercised over various commercial interests whose chief justification for existence seemed to have been that they might prey upon the near-by red inhabitants. The government failed to appreciate the need for an adequate defense of the frontier. Venders of whiskey and other intoxicants frequented the frontiers and Indian villages--unmolested, oftentimes, in pushing their sales.[23] It is true that laws had been enacted by Congress with a view to putting an end to the liquor nuisance among the Indians; but the effective enforcement of these measures had scarcely been attempted. If a more than usually zealous Indian agent forbade dealers to carry on their nefarious business within reserved grounds, they would erect their cabins upon the ceded lands immediately adjoining the reserves--places to which the Indians were at all times free to go. To make matters yet worse the agent was in some cases powerless to act even though he desired to do so. The Chippewa agent, for example, complained that the treaty of 1855 deprived him of assistants or force through which to punish or apprehend violators of departmental rules and regulations.[24] Thus was produced that state of affairs where the Indian was being robbed and debauched, while innocent settlers were threatened by Indian violence during the periods of his drunken orgies. Not infrequently the massacre of isolated settlers completed the tale of an Indian visitation to a near-by liquor dealer’s establishment. Fortunate it was that the Sioux, “the Iroquois of the West”, were slow to take up and make their own the vices of their white neighbors.[25]