our friends this for me, and tell them the Commissioners know that we
signed it of our own will because we believed it was for the good of our
people." I told him I would write it East.

* * * * *

The instability of the Indian.--It used to be a proverb among the
Indians that "The white man is very uncertain." The following brief
extract from the letter of a missionary among the Indians not only shows
that the Indian is unstable, but illustrates the difficulty of fixing
the Indians in a given locality and at steady work:

The Commissioner was at ---- the other day, and our Indians
had a chance to sign, and almost all of them did so, but
still to many of them the opening seems an evil. I am afraid
they are not going to maintain their places in the face of
settlement by the whites. Already six families have slipped
away to the Indian Territory, and I shall not be much
surprised if in the next two years a considerable majority
of them go; and still it is about as difficult to tell what
an Indian will do, as it is to forecast western weather. I
think they have never done so well in farming as this year,
but one case will illustrate how unstable they are. One man
sold three young horses for about half what they were worth.
He had about eight acres of wheat, twelve acres of corn, and
an acre of oats, all of which he abandoned to go South,
though all his crops were very fine and had been well worked
by _himself_.

* * * * *