The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.121

Joe Sherburne didn’t bother to wear a mask. 

The agency ring struck back when the Blackfeet Agency and Indian Office in 1917-1922 issued hundreds of patents-in-fees to illiterate and incompetent Blackfeet Allottees that resulted in 312,000 acres of the most productive lands of the Blackfeet Indians to be foreclosed upon and tax deeds issued by county courts in just the first two years of the twenty five year trust period requirement to hold the Indian lands free of state taxes. The whites got 312,250 acres of irrigated lands, oil fields, and coal by forced patents issued by the agency superintendent and approved by the agency competency commission, made of members of the “agency ring,” including Joe Sherburne.

 Hundreds of forced patents were issued from 1919-1922 when Glacier and Pondera Counties were created by the state legislature on the reservation absent the consent of the Indians, who were not allowed to vote in the elections. This massive Indian Bureau-state legislature- border-white Indian allotment land fraud created a white apartheid colony incorporated on the most productive lands of the Blackfeet Indian reservation, now known as patent-in-fee lands of Glacier and Pondera Counties.

The agency employees deliberately mismanaged the tribal cattle herd into a loss for the tribe, and individual Indian cattle ranchers were discouraged from building up their cattle herds even on their own land allotments in order that the agency ring might lease allotted grazing lands to white ranchers for ten cents an acre. The Indian lands were made unmanageable. Old time cowboy John Hall told senate investigator Walter Liggitt the agency employees “wouldn’t know which end of the horse to put the saddle on.”
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.121