wondered if she was thinking of the days when she carried his weight on her back as she went about her cooking or foraging for wood, or swung him from a limb of a tree, and of the first leather leggings she made for him when he was able to walk, and of the necklace of elk teeth, and the arrows which he used to fire bravely at the prairie-dogs. He was a very different child now, and very far away from the doglike figure crouching by his side and gazing up patiently into his face, as if looking for something she had lost. It is quite too presumptuous to suggest any opinion on the Indian question when one has only lived with them for three weeks, but the experience of others who have lived with them for thirty years is worth repeating. You will find that the individual point of view regarding the Indian is much biassed by the individual interests. A man told me that in his eyes no one under heaven was better than a white man, and if the white man had to work for his living, he could not see why the Indian should not work for his. I asked him if he thought of taking up Indian land in the Territory when it was open in the spring, and he said that was his intention, “and why?” The officers are the only men who have absolutely nothing to gain, make, or lose by the Indians, and their point of view is accordingly the fairest, and they themselves say it would be a mistake to follow the plan now under consideration--of placing officers in charge of the agencies. This would at once strip them of their present neutral position, and, as well, open to them the temptation which the control of many thousands of dollars’ worth of property entails where the recipients of this property are as helpless and ignorant as children. They rather favor raising the salary of the Indian agent from two thousand to ten thousand dollars, and by so doing bring men of intelligence and probity into the service, and destroy at the same time the temptation to “make something” out of the office. It may have been merely an accident, but I did not meet with one officer in any of the army posts who did not side with the Indian in his battle for his rights with the Government. As for the agents, as the people say in the West, “they are not here for their health.” The Indian agents of the present day are, as every one knows, political appointments, and many of them--not all--are men who at home would keep their corner grocery or liquor store, and who would flatter and be civil to every woman in the neighboring tenement who came for a pound of sugar or a pitcher of beer. These men are suddenly placed in the control of hundreds of sensitive, dangerous, semi-civilized people, whom they are as capable of understanding as a Bowery boy would be of appreciating an Arab of the desert.