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