The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.56-57

Meanwhile Indian School Superintendent Dorchester declared that agency contractor Alex Johnson’s new school construction was a “farce” already in a dilapidated condition although it was only one year old. The Fort Benton contractors failure to deliver beef, annuity goods, and the failure of Indian crops once again caused Agent Steell to report, “We are in the dark here, having not yet received coal oil.”

Confederate gold miners, squaw men, and agency employees on the reservation placed Mrs. Steell’s name on a mining claim at St. Mary lake for “luck” and filed mining claims for other Montana “high society” members at Swift Current, as they testified later, when the illegal mineral claims became a matter of Official Congressional Investigations prior to the opening of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation “mineral strip” by the 1896 Agreement, but they retained their illegal mineral claims through it all.  Sadly, for the perpetrators no gold was found in paying quantities, but they were not done exploiting Indians, as George Bird Grinnell and James J. Hill sold tall tales and scenery to tourists.

Great Northern Railroad “threatened incursion”

John Nicholas Brown of Newport R.I. wrote Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan on Sept. 16^th, 1890 informing him of the news article from the New York Tribune of Monday Sept. 15^th; “That is worthy, I think, of being brought to your attention. I feel you will do what you can in the matter in the threatened incursion of the Blackfeet Res. by whites.”

The Article was entitled-Encroaching On The Indians-The Blackfeet Reserve Menaced; Protection Needed Against the Thrift of the Great Northern Railway: [From An Occasional Correspondent of the Tribune] Helena, Mont., Aug. 29-“Much dissatisfaction is felt by the Indians of the Blackfeet Agency, north of Helena, over the prospect that the Great Northern Railway will seize a right of way through this reservation without making any arrangements to pay the Indians through whose land they must pass. It is stated that the lines of this railroad have been actually located through the Blackfeet reservation on the east side of the mountains, that grading will begin this month, and that contracts have been let for the completion of the line from Great Falls to the summit of the main range of the Rocky Mountains by January 1, 1891.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.56-57