Jobbery

"JOBBERY IS ALLEGED" is the headline of the Anaconda Standard in 1895, with the sub-title, "A Rich Mineral Belt is said to be Under Covetous Eyes-In the Blackfoot Reserve-Rumor Has It That Influential Men Are Scheming to Gobble the Whole Tract When Congress Says the Word- Prominent politicians, alleged statesmen, members of Congress, federal officials, army officers, railway magnates, and well-known businessmen in and out of Montana have been charged with being members of a powerful "ring" which it is maintained, has been organized for the sole purpose of gobbling up the more valuable mineral properties and town site locations on the reserve, and utilizing the same to the personal advantage of members of the syndicate. No poor man has any chance of securing anything of value there." United States Treaty Commissioner Pollock told the Blackfeet Indians there was a gold rush that even the army could not stop, and that the government would not force the Indians to sell the "mineral strip" discovered by Indian Agent Cooke and his son Irvin, employed as Issue Clerk. Horace Clark, the half-breed son of Malcolm Clark, who was killed by his in-laws, suggested the government should help the Blackfeet Indians to develop the ores for themselves. Treaty Commissioner Pollock said the negotiations were ended, but he knew the land cession funds from the 1887 Sweet Grass Hills sale of 17,000,000 acres for $1.5 million was wasted on agency salaries and robbed by Indian Bureau officials and the Indians were broke once again. The Blackfeet Chiefs "Sold the Rocks" and reserved the timber, grazing lands, and water holes for the Blackfeet cattle industry which was a success. By 1904 George Bird Grinnell wrote the Congress the Indians were broke once again due to agency mismanagement of the $1.5 million received for the 1896 land cession to the United States. Agent Steell, the "Morphine eater" exposed by Dr. Jenkins said Steell regularly took a dose of 1/2 gram to a full gram daily, and would only talk to the Blackfeet Chiefs through a hole cut in the door to his office while the chiefs sat in a room outside his office. Steell was replaced after he scattered the Indians cattle herd of 25,000 head toward his cattle ranch on the southern border at Birch creek. After no gold was discovered the mineral belt was used to create Glacier Park and the Lewis & Clark National Forest on the ceded lands reserved by the Blackfeet Chiefs in the 1896 Agreement. The Indians were broke again, and the next target of the "ring" was the allotted lands of the Blackfeet Indians robbed by the hundreds of thousands of acres, which are the subject of current Blackfeet land fraud claims, which I have brought to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 1980, 2001, 2007, and there they lie, on a shelf in Washington D.C. ignored by the U.S. Congress; dominated today by the moral character of the criminal syndicate of frontier Montana. Bob Juneau Sr. A Blackfeet and American patriot, who works for justice for the Indians every day.