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Show 49 The testimony of Dr- Hurt is probably biased and at points inaccurate, but subsequent historical assessments have said that Hurt's farm policy, had it been pursued as it was begun, might have averted many of the difficulties of the succeeding decades.^ Doubt can be raised about these generous interpretations, for later farms also failed, but the years which followed the failure of Hurt's hopeful enterprise make his attempts appear well-ordered by comparison. The point to be made in relation to the history of the Utes is that they were to continue to decline in their ability to exist on the periphery of the new white society which had replaced them. Jacob Forney, a new Indian agent, came to Utah with the federal troops in 1858. He supported Hurt's actions with the Spanish Fork farm, and allowed improvements to be made even though he believed that the Indians had been given too much help, observing that 1 "Indians are proverbially lazy and only the pinchings of hunger will drive them to work, too much white labor has been heretofore employed to do work for them, and they have not been sufficiently taught that their subsistence depends on their labor." However, even with the "Andrew Love Neff, History of Utah, ^edited by Leland Hargrave Creer, Salt Lake City, 1940, Leland Hargrave Creer, Utah and the Nation, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1929. Gustive 0. Larson, Outline History of Utah and the Mormons, Deseret Book Co., Salt Lake City, 1965. "Jacob Forney to Commissioner Charles E. Mix, September 6, I858, RCIA, 1858, p. 211. |