The agents are not the only people who make mistakes. Some friend mailed me a book the other day on Indian reservations, in order that I might avoid writing what has already been written. I read only one page of the book, in which the author described his manner of visiting the Indian encampments. He would drive to one of these in his ambulance, and upon being informed that the chiefs were waiting to receive him in their tents, would bid them meet him at the next camp, to which he would drive rapidly, and there make the same proposition. He would then stop his wagon three miles away on the prairie, and wait for the chiefs to follow him to that point. What his object was in this exhibition, with which he seemed very well satisfied, he only knows. Whether it was to teach the chiefs they were not masters in their own camps, or that he was a most superior person, I could not make out; but he might just as effectively have visited Washington, and sent the President word he could not visit him at the White House, but that he would grant him an interview at his hotel. I wonder just how near this superior young man got to the Indians, and just how wide they opened their hearts to him. There was an Indian agent once--it was not long ago, but there is no need to give dates or names, for the man is dead--who when the Indians asked him to paint the wagons (with which the Government furnished them through him in return for their land) red instead of green, answered that he would not pander to their absurdly barbaric tastes. Only he did not say absurdly. He was a man who had his own ideas about things, and who was not to be fooled, and he was also a superior person, who preferred to trample on rather than to understand the peculiarities of his wards. So one morning this agent and his wife and children were found hacked to pieces by these wards with barbaric tastes, and the soldiers were called out, and shot many of the Indians; and many white women back of the barracks, and on the line itself, are now wearing mourning, and several officers got their first bar. It would seem from this very recent incident, as well as from many others of which one hears, that it would be cheaper in the end to place agents over the Indians with sufficient intelligence to know just when to be firm, and when to compromise in a matter; for instance, that of painting a wagon red. VII A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST VII A CIVILIAN AT AN ARMY POST