The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.63-64

Meantime those people encamped on the reservation line awaiting to rush in and secure property, will be starved and frozen out and the “syndicate” will find clear sailing to wind up the schemes which will give them possession of the country. No poor man has any chance of securing anything of value there and he will waste both time and money if he makes the attempt. There will be one or two good towns there, but everything will be in the hands of the “jobbers” and themselves. I would like to see the conspiracy opened up, but it involves the names of a large number of influential men and the facts are pretty hard to get at just at present. Later on the “ringsters” will get fighting over the spoils and then perhaps the inside history of the rotten deal will be made public.”

                                    Captain Cooke, reservation prospector

T.C. Power’s associate Alex Johnson continued to build shoddy agency buildings that were swiftly condemned even as he captured rehabilitation contracts issued for repair of agency buildings only two years old. White stockmen trespassing on the reservation surpassed the Indian cattle ranchers for the control of the cattle industry on the Blackfeet reservation as Indian-owned cattle dropped to 6,000 head, while squaw men kept over 2,800 head on the reservation, which in turn competed for the grass against over 12,000 head of white stockmen’s cattle herds. Small pox had again appeared on the reservation in 1894. Agent Cooke requested 10,000 rounds of ammunition to eradicate packs of dogs which were destroying cattle.

Charles Conrad’s “Conrad-Valier Investment Company” on the southern reservation boundary at Birch Creek irrigated 108,000 acres of farm land and diverted all the water when they changed the channel of Birch Creek by damming the stream at the upper end to divert the creek further south to the ex-confederates irrigated lands and reservoirs near the border-towns of Valier and Conrad, leaving Indian farm lands dry. There was a persistent rustling of Indian cattle by white stockmen and commercial timber stolen from the tribal timber reserve by border-whites. Former Agent George Steell joined the cattle rustlers when he doubled the size of his herd by rounding up Indian cattle from the reservation and driving them across Birch Creek to his ranch.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.63-64