Cato Sells had to be in possession at that very
moment when he wrote that letter to Senator Dillingham, a report from E.B.
Linnen, Chief Inspector of the Indian Office, a report on this very subject,
embodied in this Report Part 6-A, dated January 9, 1915, which confirms,
verifies, and in some instance amplifies the report made by Senator Lane. This
Report of Senator Lane, a member of this Joint Commission to investigate the
conditions on the Blackfeet Reservation, on page 655, describes a shack where
the Indians of this bleak region live, where they allege they are being starved
to compel them from necessity to consent to the sale of their irrigable lands.
I want to know, General Pershing, if you are able to find, anywhere, in the
annals of the deplorable conditions obtaining in starving Russia and
hunger-ridden Armenia, anything more heart rending or deplorable than this
condition on the Blackfeet Reservation,--denied absolutely by Cato Sells, then
Indian Commissioner; unheeded by the late Secretary of the Interior Franklin
Lane; and why it is and how it is that this nation will pour out its treasures
of food and clothing and sympathy on the children of foreign lands while they
leave destitute and dying these Indians, under the control of a merciless
bureaucracy.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.133
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