TO THE PEOPLE,

OF BOTH RACES,

WHOM I MET ON THE RESERVATIONS,

THIS LITTLE BOOK IS INSCRIBED

WITH

SINCERE INTEREST AND GOOD-WILL.

THE

LATEST STUDIES

ON

LIBRARY

UNIVERSO
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR

INDIAN RESERVATIONS.

BY

J. B. HARRISON,

AUTHOR OF "Certain DanGEROUS TENDENCIES IN American Life," "NOTES ON INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS," ETC.

PHILADELPHIA:

INDIAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION,

No. 1316 FILBERT STREET.

1887.
Fe

PRESS OF Wм. F. FELL & Co., 1220-24 SANSOM STREET,

PHILADELPHIA,

DURING the month of May, 1886, as a representative of the Indian Rights Association, I visited and examined the schools for the training of Indian youth of both sexes, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and at Hampton, Virginia. At Washington I obtained letters from the Honorable Commissioner of Indian Affairs to all Indian Agents, and from the Honorable Secretary of War to commanders of forts and military posts in the Indian country, directing them to give me any assistance consistent with their official duties.

Thus prepared and equipped, I set out to examine, observe and report as fully as possible everything connected with the condition and character of the schools, farming, home-life, and missionary work, and the general and special relations of the Indians to civilization and their progress therein, on several of the principal Indian Reservations. I wished, also, to observe

and report regarding the character, methods and efficiency of the administration of affairs on the reservations, and especially to examine carefully the quality of Indian land everywhere, and its adaptation, in the case of each particular reservation, to sustain a considerable self-supporting Indian agricultural population.

Beginning about the first of June, I visited and examined the following reservations, in the order given: Rosebud and Pine Ridge, in Southern Dakota; Omaha, Winnebago and Santee, in Nebraska; Yankton, Lower Brulé, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock, in Dakota; the Crow Reservation, in Montana; Yakima, and Nisqually and Skokomish, in Washington Territory, and the Klamath Reservation, in Southern Oregon, closing my work in the latter region at the end of October. I was thus employed for six months, without pause or interruption, in the travels and observations here recorded.

Before leaving New England I had been engaged by the Boston Herald as a special correspondent, and I wrote many letters while travelling which were published in that journal. Much of the matter of those letters is reproduced here, by special permission of the editor of the Herald. As the range of my observations extended from Omaha in Nebraska, through Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington Territory and Oregon to the