Sunday, February 15, 2015

The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.125

In the Great Northern Railway village of Midvale in East Glacier Park on the reservation “One entire section of the village seems chiefly given over to bootleggers and prostitutes. Beer parlors are run openly and a number of mixed-blood girls-in active competition with their white sisters-make prostitution their principal means of livelihood. Profane and filthy language can be heard on the streets at any hour of the day and night; the regular Saturday night dances are drunken revels.”

Horace Wilson became Superintendent of Blackfeet Agency in March of 1919 and between then and his dismissal in 1921 the Blackfeet Indians had approximately 312,250 acres of their most productive land allotments and oil fields stolen by local whites, oil corporations and the agency ring. Like so many other political appointees to the Indian Agent position, Horace Wilson was a bigamist, a confirmed drunkard and crooked as he could get by with and still hold onto the agency superintendent’s job. He showed up to testify in an illegal liquor sales case to Indians in a Federal District Court case drunk himself, and had married several women without divorcing eventually causing his conviction of bigamy and penitentiary sentence. He was so drunk in Washington D.C. that he missed his meetings with the Indian Office. When some Indians refused to sign their patents he went to Montana State Penitentiary and got the most brutal prisoner there and brought him back to the reservation to be the agency jailer. He gave him a salary, an allotment of land on the reservation and an Indian woman.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.125 

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