Anadarko is a town of six stores, three or four frame houses, the Indian agent’s store and office, and the City Hotel. Seven houses in the West make a city. I said I thought this was the worst hotel in the Indian Territory, but the officers at Fort Sill, who have travelled more than I, think it is the worst in the United States. It is possible that they are right. There are bluffs and bunches of timber around Anadarko, but the prairie stretches towards the west, and on it is the pen from which the cattle are issued. The tepees and camp-fires sprang up overnight, and when we came out the next morning the prairie was crowded with them, and more Indians were driving in every minute, with the family in the wagon and the dogs under it, as the country people in the East flock into town for the circus. The men galloped off to the cattle-pen, and the women gathered in a long line in front of the agent’s store to wait their turn for the rations. It was a curious line, with very young girls in it, very proud of the little babies in beaded knapsacks on their backs--dirty, bright-eyed babies that looked like mummies suddenly come to life again at the period of their first childhood--and wrinkled, bent old squaws, even more like mummies, with coarse white hair, and hands worn almost out of shape with work. Each of these had a tag, such as those that the express companies use, on which was printed the number in each family, and the amount of grain, flour, baking-powder, and soap to which the family was entitled. They passed in at one door and in front of a long counter, and out at another. They crowded and pushed a great deal, almost as much as their fairer sisters do in front of the box-office at a Patti matinée, and the babies blinked stoically at the sun, and seemed to wish they could get their arms out of the wrappings and rub away the tears. A man in a sombrero would look at the tag and call out, “One of flour, two of sugar, one soap, and one baking-powder,” and his Indian assistants delved into the barrels behind the line of the counter, and emptied the rations into the squaw’s open apron. She sorted them when she reached the outside. By ten o’clock the distribution was over, and the women followed the men to the cattle-pen on the prairie. There were not over three hundred Indians there, although they represented several thousand others, who remained in the different camps scattered over the reservation, wherever water and timber, and bluffs to shield them best from the wind, were to be found in common. Each steer is calculated to supply twenty-five Indians with beef for two weeks, or from one and a half to two pounds of beef a day; this is on the supposition that the steers average from one thousand to one thousand and two hundred pounds. The steers that I saw issued weighed about five hundred pounds, and when they tried to run, stumbled with the weakness of starvation. They were nothing but hide and ribs and two horns. They were driven