Let me say right here that if the Interior
Department is guilty of such a “ruling” of setting such a low value on our
grazing rent, it is guilty of a gross injustice and a nice systematic way of
reducing us to poverty and rags. [Former Montana Governor Joe Dixon was now
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture who set the fees for the Indian grazing
lands at ten cents an acre]. What we really do believe is that the big sheep
men, Joe Sherburne, and Horace Wilson brought pressure to bear against the
Department for the ruling of ten cents and they got it. A few years previous to
this time, in 1910 to be exact, our land was allotted to us, and one far seeing
Congressman kindly had a law passed, where by we were not to receive patents to
our land until twenty five years had expired, or where one was eligible a
patent could be procured by a written application with the consent of the
Agent. This I guess he had in mind would give us poor ignorant savages time to
learn the whitemans complex way of living, something about law, how to pay our
taxes and why, and how to make a living from the soil, which is something new
to us. This Congressmen’s intentions were good if they had been carried out as
intended, but like most laws it was full of loop-holes, and it had no teeth for
loop-hole “crawlers.”
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.148
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