The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.76-77

Agent Monteath’s utopian colony would lead to more poverty related deaths for the Indians. The combination of wasted funds and neglect of the Indians cattle took its toll on the previously successful Blackfeet cattle industry guaranteed in the 1896 Agreement/Article Five Provision to hold the Indians grazing tracts in common where the Indian cattle could graze “undisturbed”. The Indian cattle herds were nearly gone.

 The Blackfeet parents demanded that the Willow Creek School be abandoned immediately as unsanitary and a waste of tribal monies. The Indian cattle ranchers dug small irrigation ditches to water their rich buffalo grasses for winter feed for their stock. The tribal council requested discharge of all un-necessary employment of agency workers when Monteath’s changes take effect and a quarterly cash payment from the annual $150,000 treaty funds, so the individual Indian could improve his home and live.

Their request to close the Willow Creek School was of immediate importance, as School Supervisor Chalcroft inspected the school and recommended the classes be suspended because of the standing water in the basement, a problem which remained since the building was constructed. The agency physician agreed there was a danger of typhoid, but Monteath recommended through temporary repairs the school could remain open until the new building planned for Cut Bank Creek was constructed.

Inspector Jenkins arrived a few days later and asked the school be closed permanently and the children sent home. He wired the Indian Office that the sanitary conditions were “most deplorable” as the stagnant standing water in the basement had defied efforts at repair for a decade. Commissioner Jones decided the school would remain open. Agent Monteath was called to Washington in March, 1902 to report on his new farm policy and the agency schools, which were making headlines in the newspapers for their unsanitary conditions. Monteath provided the Washington Post with an interview on the condition of the school at the Blackfeet Agency: “The Blackfeet will soon disappear. At one time the reservation contained nearly 7,000 Indians. Now there are only 2,100 Indians there. The Indians have intermarried for so many years that many of them are weaklings. The Indian schools maintained by the government are well attended and the government employees have very little trouble keeping the young Indians in school.”
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.76-77