The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.144

 In 1917 the local agency officials announced to the Indians a new policy of force patenting competent Indian allottees and removing treaty rights to tax free lands, and exposing Indian property to state tax and speculators. All illegal, of course, but part of the agency ring’s “deliberate conspiracy,” exposed by senate investigator, Walter W. Liggitt, in 1920. Blackfeet Indian cattle ranchers had appropriated the St. Mary and Milk Rivers for domestic purposes of developing the tribal cattle industry after the famine years, 1881-1886, following the destruction of tribal buffalo herds by Montana border-whites.

By 1895 Indian cattle ranchers had constructed small diversions to irrigate mountain meadows to produce winter cattle feed and hay for sale to the agency. The low cost irrigation systems of the Blackfeet cattle ranchers watered native grasses and by 1895 there were 22.87 miles of small ditches both for public and private use. The St. Mary and Milk Rivers provided the foundation for a self-supporting tribal cattle industry permitting the tribal ranchers to produce hay for sale and cattle forage. The Blackfeet Indians by 1896 registered over 500 individual brands, and the 1896 Agreement/Article Five with the United States guaranteed the success of the Blackfeet Cattle Ranchers.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.144