The great majority of the men now heads of families on this reservation, engaged in farming a little, and sufficiently instructed in methods of labor to add considerably to their resources by working during a part of the year for the outside farmers, who are very ready to employ them, do not, I consider, either wish or require to be treated any longer as children or wards of the United States Government. In my judgment, the time has come to apply a far different rule. Many to whom I have talked, and others whose opinions I have gathered from trustworthy sources, desire earnestly to be relieved from the restrictions and to abandon the privileges of their present condition. If the lands they now farm, the houses they now dwell in, could become their private property, I believe that they would support themselves and their families in respectability. It may be desirable, it probably is, to prevent their having now the power of free sale and disposal of such lands, so as to guard them at the outset from designing purchasers; but I believe the larger part by far would prize earnestly their separate estate. Why should not an independent officer have power to establish such families on homesteads of their own, on sufficient evidence of character and capacity--such men ceasing thenceforth to have claims for support on the agency as a whole, but still entitled to all the common benefits of the school, the church, and the store? The open land of the reservation would be diminished, of course, but how could it be put to better purpose? I am persuaded that the sight of their neighbors established on homes of their own would operate as a strong stimulus to those growing up and entering on life, to decent and orderly behavior. And as one district of a reservation became thus settled up, I think the boundaries of the open land devoted to general Indian purposes might be proportionately removed and contracted. Naturally, this plan would be of slow operation, but I think it would be sure. I am aware of the powers given to Indians by the homestead act to obtain land, but the plan differs in important respects from that set out above. The Indians on the Siletz reservation, of which alone I know anything from personal observation, are not all of the desirable class to whom I have referred. Some mistiness on the moral law yet remains. For instance, a murder was committed by three of them a month or two ago. It took place on the northern and remote part of the reserve, far away from the agency itself. Here lived one who, being a quack-doctor, claimed the character of a mighty medicine-man, having power to prescribe for both the bodies and souls of his patients. To him resorted many of his neighbors, whose faith in his charms and spells was boundless.