Popular and historical concentration on the dramatic horsemen of the plains has clouded the significance of agriculture in Indian history. When Indian agriculture received attention, most dismissed it as a form of gardening or horticulture and thus unworthy of further consideration. Ironically, even after feasting, on maize, squashes, pumpkins, and a variety of beans, most contemporaries and later commentators described all Indians as a hunting culture bound to the trail of the deer and buffalo. In some cases, the observation was correct, although before the horse revolutionized the Indian societies of the Great Plains, few Indians lived, exclusively by the hunt. In fact, agriculture pervaded die history of Indian-white contact.

From the earliest meetings between Europeans and Indians north of the Rio Grande agriculture played a fundamental role linking Indian and white destinies on this continent. Indian agriculture fed the first colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth and largely accounted for their survival. Indian crops and farming techniques sustained the early settlements and provided the United States and a good portion of the world with its most prolific feed grain. Agriculture was a vital ingredient in the fur trade, More often than not, frontiersmen (a euphemism for farmers), carried Indian agriculture into the woodlands farms of the Ohio and beyond. Agriculture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served as an official vehicle to assimilate the Indians. Throughout American history, in sometimes benign and sometimes tragic circumstances, agriculture forged a bond between Indians and whites in North America.

Time and familiarity has reduced to quaint memory the crucial nature of Indian agriculture for white settlers on the Atlantic coast early in the seventeenth century. Every American school child can recite the story of Squanto and his service to the Pilgrims at Plymouth. It is a charming incident in our historical texts culminating in a grand feast of thanksgiving. The harsh reality of the time, as William Bradford well knew and recorded, inscribed a bleaker circumstance. Without the seed corn and beans Bradford's fellow adventurers unearthed in November 1620, survival of the colony was doubtful. Without Squanto to teach them the arts of New World agriculture the Pilgrims' future was likely to be short indeed. The settlers' failure to master Squanto's teaching forced the colony to rely on food supplies purchased from successful Indian farmers. Not until the second year did the Pilgrims' own fields produce in sufficient abundance to assure survival.¹

To the south, in Virginia, the Jamestown settlement had already benefited from Indian agriculture. On at least two occasions the imperial chieftain, Powhatan, provided Jamestown with sufficient food to stave off disaster. The Jamestown settlers and later commentators seldom understood Powhatan's motivation and apparent inconstancy toward the settlement. A broader view of the chief's effort to establish an empire in the Chesapeake area might shed some light on the seeming enigma, but for the Englishmen at Jamestown the fact that lie came and with food was enough.²

To the good fortune of Plymouth and Jamestown the coastal Indians produced food in quantity. The coastal tribes' ability to feed themselves and the white settlements belied the popular conception of Indian agriculture in that region as bare subsistence. Indeed, where investigators have explored the question a different picture emerged. In southern New England at least, Indian agriculture accounted for over 65 percent of the native population's diet and surplus production for trade and storage was common. In any event, it did not take the Plymouth colony long to discover that their gift from the Indians had a value beyond feeding the settlement.³

Within four years after their arrival at Plymouth settlers profited from Indian agriculture and entered into relationships that dominated Indian-white contacts for the next two hundred years and more. In the fall of 1625 Governor William Bradford sent a boatload of corn up the Kennebec River to trade with the interior tribes for furs. His men returned with a store of beaver and other furs that financed the colony's needs for the next year. In later years Massachusetts further developed its fur trade, raised its own corn for export, and purchased corn from the Indians for resale.⁴

As in Bradford's first effort, agriculture was a key element in the fur trade and the recognition of its role may throw light on some darker recesses of intertribal warfare. In the seventeenth century, French and Dutch traders dominated the fur trade in New York and the Great Lakes region. A steady stream of furs passed through trading stations at Montreal and Fort Orange. By 1630 the major trading system in the northeast came under the domination of the Huron Indians based in Canada. The Huron trading empire extended for hundreds of miles into the interior. The route of the Huron traders passed through the eastern Great Lakes, turned north to James Bay, and back to Montreal. Much has been made of the Indians' dependence and desire for European trade goods, but agricultural products lubricated the system.⁵ The Huron trading empire rested on securing the surplus production of two dependent agricultural nations situated on the first leg of the trade route. Located above Lake Erie, the Petun and Neutral Nations furnished the Hurons with a major item in, their trading scheme. Huron canoes transported stocks of maize and tobacco into the interior to trade for furs with the hunting tribes. The Hurons found the fur trade so profitable and Petun and Neutral agriculture so reliable that they abandoned their own agricultural labors. The Hurons jealously guarded the Petun and Neutral Nations from contact with French traders in Montreal. Recognizing the importance of their agricultural source to the success of the trading system, they were determined to retard potential competition from the French or other Indians. The Indians of the interior coveted European trade guns, kettles, and knives, but Huron furnished food was no less demanded.⁶

Agriculture also sustained the Hurons' great rival to the south, the Iroquois Confederation. Although many theories exist to explain the great confederation that fascinated early observers and later writers alike, probably the Iroquois commitment to an agricultural life offered the most reasonable answer. Not only did their agriculture demand relative peace with close neighbors in the Confederation to ensure the safety of their crops, but successful harvests encouraged the Iroquois to range far beyond their New York domain.⁷

Certainly the Iroquois envied the wealth the Huron trading empire accumulated. Rivalry in the fur trade undoubtedly explained the furious attacks the Iroquois mounted against the Hurons in 1649. Terrorized by a midwinter invasion, the Hurons starved and became nearly extinct. Perhaps the Iroquois were simply bent on acquiring additional hunting grounds of their own or maybe they wished to establish themselves as masters of the northern fur trade. The latter explanation seems more plausible when later events are noted. Since agriculture played a central role in the Hurons' trade, it might also explain the Iroquois determination to eliminate the agricultural tribes no longer under Huron dominance and protection.⁸

The dispersement of the Hurons created a vacuum of power that other ambitious tribes attempted to fill. The Ottawa Nation moved quickly to replace the Hurons in the fur trade and presented a formidable obstacle to Iroquois ambitions. Unlike the Iroquois, who produced foodstuffs in abundance, the Ottawa required the productive efforts of the Petun and Neutral Nations. Very likely frustrated in their drive to subdue the Ottawa by force of arms, the Iroquois chose to destroy the Ottawa's source of agricultural trade goods. With ample supplies of their own the Iroquois did not need outside sources of food. Indeed, the existence of outside sources invited competition and diminished the accomplishment of their own plans.⁹

A similar explanation probably accounted for the Iroquois's extraordinary war against the Illinois tribes in 1680. By the late seventeenth century the fur trade had moved farther into the interior with French trading stations at Sault Ste. Marie and Prairie du Chien. Agricultural tribes in the area provided the vital food supplies that brought the hunting tribes to the French trading stations. Still bent on dominating the fur trade and unsuccessful in their earlier efforts, the Iroquois chose to follow the same course they had taken against the agricultural people of Lake Erie.¹⁰

West of the Mississippi where the hunting nomadic horsemen of the plains captured historical interest and popular imagination, strategically placed agricultural tribes controlled and directed the development of the western fur trade. Near the great bend of the Missouri River the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa Indians maintained a flourishing agricultural economy that sustained themselves and the nomadic tribes as ,veil. To the south along the Niobrara and Platte Rivers the planting Pawnee assumed a similar role, while on the Arkansas and Washita the Wichita supplied agricultural products to the wandering Kiowa and Comanches.¹¹

The availability of relatively large and stable sources of agricultural Supplies from the planting tribes of the plains was crucial to the success of the fur trade. Indian agricultural products, particularly maize, provided the universal exchange in trade between Indian tribes and between Indians and whites. In some instances, the agricultural tribes acted as middlemen between white traders and nomadic hunters. Sioux and Cheyenne buffalo hunters frequented the agricultural villages on the Missouri. There they traded for food and European trade items in exchange for furs and hides. The agricultural tribes nearly monopolized the early trade with the nomadic people of the plains. The Hidatsa proved particularly hostile to white traders who appeared intent on moving up the Missouri beyond their villages and bypassing their own trading centers on the great bend.¹²

A symbiotic relationship developed between the hunting and agricultural people of the plains that extended communication from the Upper Missouri to the Pueblo plateau in the southwest. The connecting points along the trade routes north and south were the agricultural villages of the river valleys. In every case Indian agriculture fueled the system. The arrival of white traders in the plains enhanced the position of the agricultural villages making them a cohesive link between hunter and trader.

The fur trade, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and declined in the nineteenth century, literally fed on Indian agriculture. Mackinac Island in the Great Lakes became a well-known market for Indian agriculture. The Sac and Fox raised thousands of bushels of corn that they sold to the traders at Prairie du Chien. The villages of the Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, and Omaha were the markets for the traders of the Upper Missouri, while the Pawnee and Wichita established the connection with the hunting tribes of the southern plains. The farming people of the southwest plateau established a southern limit to the nomadic trail. At the very least, without Indian agriculture, the fur trade would have taken on a distinctly different character had it proved possible to sustain at all.¹³

While Indian agriculture failed to gain much notice in historical texts, the subjects of those texts were well aware of its importance. Much of the conflict between Indians and whites on the frontier revolved around the agricultural year. French invasions of Iroquois lands in New York coincided with the early harvest when troops could wreak the greatest damage on Iroquois fields. In 1779, General George Washington ordered John Sullivan to march on the Iroquois and specifically noted the need to destroy their growing crops at a time when it was too late for replanting. Kentucky frontiersmen nearly made it an annual event to attack the Shawnee along the Wabash in the late summer, sure in the knowledge that if they did not destroy Indian cornfields, the Shawnee would attack them when the harvest was in. Persistent destruction of Indian fields reduced many tribes to relying almost exclusively on the hunt and conforming to a life whites insisted the Indian savages represented. Debilitated and destitute tribes became an easy prey to the land-grabbing schemes of frontier governors who insisted that the Indians made no use of the land. Engrossment of Indian lands to make way for white farmers remained the most tragic circumstance in which agriculture linked Indian and white destinies.¹⁴

Frontiersmen in the early nineteenth century carried cultural as well as material baggage across the Alleghenies. Their belief in the virtues of agrarian life and the savage state of the native population was paramount. Firm in the notion that they were the vanguard of civilization, to acknowledge that Indians could be farmers too required admissions that few were willing to make. Hunting and savagery were synonymous in the frontier mind and no one doubted the savagery of the Indians. Yet, the same frontiersmen literally bet their lives on their ability to carve out farming communities in the wilderness. To do so they relied on techniques only marginally different from those practiced at Plymouth

Agriculture in the first two hundred years of American history was woodlands farming. Pioneer farmers habitually avoided the open areas presumably in the belief that the absence of tree growth suggested a lack of fertility. The idea, while logical on the surface, had the ring of rationalizing. Probably the lack of capital and implements needed to prepare the dense soils luxuriating in tall grass was more to the point. Besides, the frontier farmer arrived equipped with the skills and tools suited to the woodlands and an inclination to keep risk to a minimum. Girdling trees and planting corn after grubbing out the underbrush dominated western agriculture until well into the nineteenth century. III short, white farmers continued to practice what they knew best, the agriculture of the woodlands Indians.¹⁶

By the time technological innovations such as the steel plow came into Wide use on the open prairies, the former inhabitants were largely removed from the area. By the end of the 1830s, most of the agricultural tribes of the East were engaged in efforts to reestablish their lives west of the Mississippi. In the meantime, the federal government agonized over the Indians' future. Public officials persistently advanced policies to effect a metamorphosis in Indian character that would reflect a vague image of Jefferson's yeoman farmer. At the heart of government programs for the Indians was confinement to individually held plots and instruction and aid in agriculture.¹⁷

Agriculture had served as the major vehicle for Indian assimilation since the earliest days of the new nation. Insisting that the Creeks of Georgia and Alabama were exclusively hunters, the government in 1790 promised to furnish them from "time to time ... useful domestic animals and implements of husbandry." Similar provisions appeared in treaties with the Cherokee and the Six Nations of New York. In 1794, a treaty with the Wyandots, Shawnee, Delawares, and others promised government support for a gristmill and gave the tribes the option to accept annuities in the form of agricultural implements. After 1804, treaties frequently contained provisions for employment of government farmers to teach agricultural skills to the Indians. Often government farmers knew less of farming in the wilderness than the people they were sent to instruct. In each case the intent of the commitment was to induce the Indians to give up the life of a hunter, a life that only marginally sustained them before the arrival of whites.¹⁸

Acceptance of government agricultural support, however, proved a temporary barrier to further encroachments on Indian lands. A treaty with the Quapaw in 1824 indemnified the members of the tribe for "losses they will sustain by removing from their farms and improvements." In 1831, in a treaty with the Ottawa living in Ohio, the government demanded a forced sale of Indian livestock and farming implements and agreed to indemnify the Ottawa for improvements on their land only after they had arrived at a new residence west of the Mississippi. Nevertheless, the government continued its policies to establish agricultural communities among the Indians. And the effort was not confined to eastern tribes.¹⁹

West of the Mississippi River contact with the nomadic Indians of the plains increased after 1840. In the 1850s treaties with the Kiowa, Comanche, and some Apache tribes anticipated the end of their nomadic existence. In 1853, in a treaty with the Kiowa, the government reserved the right to alter annuity agreements to use promised funds for establishing farms. Similar provisions appeared in treaties with the Rogue River and Cow Creek Indians of Oregon that same year.²⁰

Although the government had from time to time provided for allotment of Indian lands before, the 1850s witnessed an intensification of the policy. Allotment carried a rationale of its own apart from the objective of making the Indians self-sufficient farmers. The idea of individually held farmsteads became a kind of nineteenth-century imperative that carried every protest before it. Indian agents and Commissioners of Indian Affairs confronted both successful Indian agriculture and disasters with the healing balm of allotment. Indian Agent A. D. Banesteel, writing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1858, noted that "the country given to [the Indians] is cold, by no means fitted for farming purposes and altogether inferior to the land conveyed by the Indians to the United States." Nevertheless, he determined that the only hope of Indian survival was through allotting the plowed land into five-acre plots. A neighbor in Minnesota, Agent Joseph R. Brown, insisted that the Indians under his charge were progressing rapidly in their agricultural pursuits. Yet he held out no hope for their future unless the land was allotted. Brown echoed a familiar sentiment, calling allotment the "great link in the chain of civilization." "The common field is the seat of barbarism," Brown stated, "the separate farm the door to civilization,"21 Existing evidence seemed to belie the efficacy of transforming all Indian into anglicized farmers. in 1861, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported that outside of the Indian Territory there were 244 Indians farms tinder his jurisdiction. The Commissioner further reported that out of a total of only 6,112 acres in those farms, nearly 3,000 acres were worked by employees of the government. Farms worked by the Indians averaged barely over twenty-five acres. In few cases did such enterprises yield sufficiently to support the Indians working them.²²

A few thoughtful and experienced voices questioned the government's rush to establish Indian farms. In 1868, Henry Boller, an educated and experienced fur trader with the Arikara, Mandan, and I Hidatsa proposed that the government encourage stock raising among the nomadic peoples of the plains. He suggested that the Indian Service confine its agricultural efforts to those people who had a tradition in farming. Boller was sensitive to the variety of Indian cultures. Eastern "friends of the Indians" recognized the difference in Indian cultures as well but rather than accommodate they sought to destroy. In the minds of eastern reformers, the Indians could survive only by ceasing to be Indians and taking up the white man's plow.²³

The pressure for general allotment reached its apex in the 1880s. A confluence of interests including demands for opening more territory to white farmers, railroad promoters, and genuine concern on the part of many reformers culminated in congressional passage of the Dawes Act in 1887. While the General Severalty Act did not apply to the Five Civilized Tribes, later legislation brought the allotment process to those people as well. The Five Civilized Tribes had picked up their lives twice in the previous half century following their removal from the East in the 1830s and the destruction of much of their property during the Civil War.²⁴

The Civilized Tribes had left substantial farms in the East and repeatedly reestablished themselves in agriculture. By 1877, the Five Civilized Tribes dominated Indian agriculture. That year they produced over 69 percent of the wheat grown on Indian reservations, 81 percent of the corn, and over 43 percent of the vegetables. The statistical evidence suggested that within traditional tribal structures the Indians could sustain a prosperous agricultural economy. The very success of the Five Civilized Tribes, however, made them a special target of the allotment advocates.²⁵

The year Congress passed the Dawes Act, Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. C. D. Atkins complained that in the Indian Territory "already the rich and choice lands are appropriated by those most enterprising and self-seeking." Rather than applaud the Civilized Tribes' apparent acceptance of white values, he sought to destroy their system of land use and tribal government. The year before, Senator Henry L. Dawes lauded the material progress of the Five Civilized Tribes, but lamented their persistent tribalism. The Civilized Tribes, Dawes insisted, were simply not "selfish enough" for civilized life. With mind boggling inconsistency public officials and Indian friends moved toward the common panacea of allotment.²⁶

The Five Civilized Tribes fought to prevent allotment, but could not prevail before a determined Congress and Office of Indian Affairs. Allotment proceeded for several years after 1902. In most instances, its consequence was to reduce those farming areas that had prospered to small acreages incapable of supporting a family. In 1906, D. W. C. Duncan, a Cherokee, spoke for many when he reported to a senate committee that before allotment he had farmed 300 acres, but with the division of the land lie was reduced to making a living on 60 acres. The Five Civilized Tribes took little comfort in the knowledge that they had entered a white man's world.²⁷

The ultimate result of the allotment program was to create a number of white-owned-and-operated farms on what was once Indian land. As allotment proceeded the Office of Indian Affairs found it had created an intolerable administrative burden. Barely able to administer existing reservations, as a result of allotment the Office faced a host of mini-reservations each requiring individual attention. Government programs for encouraging agriculture floundered, with government farmers acting more as Clerks and leasing agents than farmers or instructors. The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by repeated efforts to get agricultural enterprises under way on the reservations.²⁸

Allotment produced an irresistible force to reduce the Indian Office's administrative tangle. After 1900, a stream of legislation flowed from Congress designed to open more land to white farmers, ease leasing restrictions, and speed the issue of fee patent titles to individual Indians. Land agents and neighboring white farmers scrambled to relieve the Indians of the burden of ownership. County officials waited at the reservation agents' doors ready to add newly patented land to county tax rolls. Unaccustomed to tax systems and often only vaguely of what land they owned, many Indians proved easy victims to purchase schemes and loss through tax delinquencies.²⁹

By the 1920s even the most ardent champions of allotment had second thoughts. Somehow in the rush to make the Indians independent farmers they had created dismal pockets of rural poverty. In the years after 1887, the proponents of allotment had created a mythical agrarian society to which the Indians were to aspire and created a mythological Indian upon which to work their magic. The result by 1934 and the end of the allotment period was the loss of most of the land the Indians had held before 1890.³⁰

Agriculture and independent landholding did not lose their appeal even after the allotment movement had lost its vitality. The Indians' entry into citizenship was accompanied by a ceremony rife with agricultural symbolism. To complete the initiation, the Indian subject first shot an arrow into the air, intoning an oath to end his wandering days. Then placing his hand upon a plow he swore to abandon the hunt, take up agriculture and live the life of a white man. Presumably the final transformation had occurred: the Indians had beaten arrows into plowshares.³¹

^l William T. Davis, ed., Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646 (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1908), 100, 115-16, 141; Percy W. Bidwell and John 1. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1925), 41.

² Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia: The Tidewater Period, 1607-1710, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 1: 12, 14, 25-26; Nancy 0. Lurie, "Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization," in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 39-44.

³ M. K. Bennett, "The Food Economy of the New England Indians, 1605-75," Journal of Political Economy 63 (October 1955): 394.

⁴ Davis, Bradford's History, 208.

⁵ George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940; paperback ed., 1967), map between pp. 7-8. 53-65.

⁶ Ibid., 56-57; Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio: A. H. Clark, 1896-1901), 7:57.

⁷ Thomas R. Wessel, "Agriculture and Iroquois Hegemony in New York, 16101779," Maryland Historian I (Fall 1970): 93-104.

⁸ The reasons for the Iroquois war against the Hurons have been long debated. See Allen W. Trelease, "The Iroquois and the Western Fur Trade, A Problem in Interpretation," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 June 1962): 48-49; and Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 34: 124-38, 203-6.

⁹ Hunt, Iroquois Wars, 96-98. Hunt assumed the Iroquois viewed the Neutrals as simply a barrier to their movement west.

¹⁰ Ibid., 149-51.

¹¹ Joseph Jablow, The Cheyenne in Plains Indian Trade Relations, 1795-1840 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1950), 21-23.

¹² F. V. Hayden, "on the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 12 (1863): 353Jablow, The Cheyenne, 23, 37.

¹³ George F. Will and George E. Hyde, Corn Among the Indians of the upper Missouri (St. Louis, Mo.: William Harvey Minor, 1917), 91n, 190-93; Jablow, VIC Cheyenne, 23.

¹⁴ Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 50:145, 60:318n, 63:275, 277, 65:25; E. B. O'Callaghan ed., The Documentary History of the State of New York, 3 vols. (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1850), 1: 69-70, 333-34; Wessel, "Iroquois Hegemony," 100; Manuscript journal of Lieutenant Obadiah Core, Sparks Collection, Harvard University Library, vol. 22.

¹⁵ Roy H. Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indians and the idea of Civilization (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 130-31; Bidwell and Falconer, Agriculture in the Northern United Slates, 9, 158.

¹⁶ Bidwell and Falconer, Agriculture in the Northern United States, 158-59.

¹⁷ Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790-1834 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962; paperback ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 53-54; Donald Jackson, "William Ewing, Agricultural Agent to the Indians," Agricultural History 31 (April 1957): 3-7; Paul W. Gates, "Indian Allotments Preceding the Dawes Act," in John G. Clark, ed., The Frontier Challenge: Responses to the Trans-Mississippi West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971), 141.

¹⁸ Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 5 vols. (Washington: GPO, 1904-1941), 2: 28, 31, 36, 42, 70.

¹⁹ Ibid., 210, 336-37.

²⁰ Ibid., 601-2, 604, 607.

²¹ U.S. Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1858 (Washington: GPO, 1858), 30, 49.

²² U.S. Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1861 (Washington: GPO, 1861), 28.

²³ Henry Boller, Among the Indians: Eight Years in the Far West, 1858-1866 (Philadelphia, Pa.: T. Ellwood Zell, 1968), 426-28.

²⁴ Delos S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 33-39; Laura E. Baum, -Agriculture Among the Five Civilized Tribes, 1865-1906," (master's thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1940), 122-26.

²⁵ U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report for the Year 1877 (Washington: GPO, 1877), 308-10, 316.

²⁶ U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report for the Year 1887 (Washington: CPO, 1887), iii-vi; Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonh Conference of the Friends of the Indians (Philadelphia, 1886), 43.

²⁷ Wayne Moquin and Charles Van Doren, eds., Great Documents in American Indian History (New York: Praeger, 1973), 286-89.

²⁸ Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield to Congressman Scott Ferris, April 1908, File 24476-08-354; "Narrative Report, Kiowa Agency, 1921," Kiowa Agency Records, Box 104; "Narrative Report, Pine Ridge Agency, 1916," Pine Ridge Agency Records, Box 162, Record Group 75, National Archives; U.S. Congress, House, Committe on Indian Affairs, The Conditions of Various Tribes of Indians (Washington: GPO, 1919),1: 42; Albert H. Kneale, "Promoting Agriculture Among Indians," Indian School journal 14 (April 1914): 371-73; E. B. Linnen, "Let Us Farm," Oglala Light 18 (May 1917): 5-9.

²⁹ Superintendent Will J. Oliver (Zuni Agency) to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 19 April 1907, Zuni Agency Records, vol. 15603, Federal Records Center, Denver, Colorado; Superintendent Horton H. Miller (Fort Belknap Agency) to Agency Farmer J. P. Heaton, 27 January 1914, Fort Belknap Agency Records, Series 4, Federal Records Center, Seattle, Washington; Indian Rights Association, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report, 1909 (Philadelphia, 1910), 11-12, 16.

³⁰ Randolph C. Downes, "A Crusade for Indian Reform, 1922-1934," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (December 1945): 331-54; Edgar B. Meritt, The American Indian and Government Administration, Office of Indian Affairs Bulletin 12 (Washington. GPO, 1926), 15-16.

³¹ U.S. Department of the Interior, "Ritual on Admission of Indians to Full American Citizenship," copy in the Joseph W. Wellington Collection, Montana State University Library, Bozeman, Montana. This form and ritual was used until passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924.