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Show 3 REPOBT OF COM1\IISSIONEB OF INDIAN AFFILES. a radical departure from the old method of handling suci proposi-tions, and are particularly notable for their recognition of the United ? States Forest Service as a cooperative factor in the administration of Indian Affiirs. A valuable aid to the clearing of titles to Indian lands is found in an act which authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to issue patents in fee directly to purchasers of lnnds sold either by an allottee or his 'heirs through the medium of the department. This process will at one stroke dispose of the cloud which now hangs over much of the land thus disposed of, owing to the uncertainty whether all the tech& cal requirements of the law have been scrupulously observed. Further progress is made by the session's legislation in the pro-gramme for allotting the Indians on the Flathead Reservation and opening their surplus lands to settlement; a special act takes the pre-liminary steps for opening the Fort Peck Reservation; an act for opening a considerable tract of territory $ North and South Da-kotas, now included in the Standing Rock and Cheyenne Xtver reser-vations, was passed during the last hours of the session; a means is I provided for leasing the lands on the Uintah Reservation which the , Indians will not cultivate themselves, thus assuring the preserv a t' ~ o n of their water rights; and the IUamat11 Indians obtain their long-sought compensation for the lands which, by a decision of the Su-preme Court, mere .taken from them and given to the California and Oregon Land Company. COOPERATION BETWEEN BUREAUS. In a former report I mentioned a plan I had carried long in mind, and a little way into operation, for systematic cooperation between various departments and bureaus of the Government, so as to get rid of the wheels within wheels " which are so grave a source of waste in administration. For example, the Office of Indian Affairs, when I assumed charge of it, not only performed the functions naturally to be expected of a benevolent guardian engaged in raising a race of human beings from barbarism to civilization, but maintained a little reclamation service, a little forestry branch, and several other minor organizations for work along lines commonly cared for, and pre-sumptively better cared for, by special bureaus established by law for the benefit of the American people at large. Recognizing the broad economic principle that no extensive public work can be con-ducted so successfully on a retail as on a wholesale basis, and as the needless multiplication of machinery for doing the same class of work tends to retard rather than advance the attainment of the ends sought, I opened negotiations for a cooperative arrangement with the Recla-mation Service, and with your assistance succeeded in effecting one which thus far has proved highly successful. In general terms, it |