The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.76

Monteath now proposed that irrigation become the major source of employment for the Indians, who would be paid in cash from the treaty funds, and those who would not work should be treated as “idlers” and he thought it might be necessary to start a chain gang. The fundamental threat to the Piegan’s economic future was Monteath’s doomed farm program that would become a major social and economic disaster engineered by the agency ring and white stockmen to destroy the Indian’s heretofore successful tribal cattle industry economy, and to make room for their cattle herds.

 Monteath recommended that irrigated farming was to become the major industry, to devote the land primarily to raising of grains and roots and let stock raising be a side issue; “I would advise and insist upon these people being agriculturists instead of stock men for the reason that they could be located upon a comparatively small scope of country, where they could be visited daily and their acts supervised. Their cattle would be taken from them in the spring and placed in the hands of herders during the grazing season, and returned after the Indians had harvested their crops.”

He admitted it might take a troop of cavalry to get the Indians onto the farms, which Monteath described as “this Utopian Colony of mine” but then the agent felt that those who did not get in, could get out of the reservation entirely. The “progressive” half-breeds, who had made valuable improvements on scattered sections of the reservation, would not be expected to move to Monteath’s farming colony, but his plan applied to all able-bodied full bloods, the main target of his ration reforms. Conscious of his earlier reports that stressed the utter failure of farming on the reservation Monteath proclaimed, “It would be a daring man, indeed, who would lightly go on record with the statement that agriculture was impracticable here” but the Indians pointed out it would be an equally stupid man to ignore the killing frosts in July and blizzards in August which occurred regularly to make farming an impossibility even for “experts.”
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.76