| OCR Text |
Show round numbers, there remain approximately 1,370 Indians for whom no provision has been made, nearly all of them wives or children of reservation allottees. If these Indians are to secure lands it must be from the public domain in North Dakota and Montana. But pro-tests have been made against their taking up so much of the public domain in these States, because the lands will remain untaxable as long as they are held in trust by the Government. The Office there-fore intends to ask the Congress at its next session to appropriate a sufficient sum of money to pay to these 1,370 Indians an adequate amount in lieu of the lands to which they are entitled. Uintah.-My last report dwelt at some length on the condition of allotments on the Uintah Reservation in Utah, because it presented such an illustratio; of the unwisdom of doing in haste work t h ~ t demands deliberation. I have had to keep an allotting force on the ground the greater part of the jear, endeavoring to straighten out the difficulties arising from the fact that the act of Congress provid-ing for the opening limited our time so that we had no chance to survey the lands before making the allotments. The field work of the survey, when finished, was found to be faulty. The lands were assigned by regular subdivisions as far as practicable, but the changes in the surveys and plats will make it necessary to cancel a very large percentage of the allotments and to issue new certificates or trust patents showing the lands which the Indians are actually to receive. Walker Riuer.-There have been made to the Indians of the Walker River Reservation in Nevada 491 allotments, and patents for all except six, which are on unsurveyed land, were sent on May 15, 1907, to the superintendent of the Carson School for delivery. Be-sides the.allotments, which cover a total of 9,783.25 acres, there were set aside for agency and school 80 acres; for cemetery 40; for the Methodist Episcopal Church 160; for grazing 37,390.29; and for timber 3,356.62 acres. By Presidential proclamation of September 26,1906, all the remaining lands were opened to settlement on October 29 and made subject to disposal under existing law. White Ea~th.-The Chippewa Commission, when it disbanded in 1900, had not completed the allotments on the White Earth Reserva-tion in Minnesota under the act of January 14, 1889 (25 Stat. L., 642), and since then the superintendent in charge has taken up the work. The chief difficulty in the way of accomplishing it is the un-willingness of the Mille Lac, Sandy Lake, and White Oak Point bands to remove to White Earth, or their indifference. Though every reasonable appeal has been made to them, those who have come have straggled into the reservation only a few at a time, and many still hold off. On June 5, 1907, Superintendent Michelet submitted a schedule of 505 allotments made to the members of the various bands of Indians entitled under the act of 1889, embracing an approximate |
