In 1852 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs writes: "Notwithstanding the mountain and prairie Indians continue to suffer from the vast number of emigrants who pass through their country, destroying their means of support, and scattering disease and death among them, yet those who were parties to the treaty concluded at Fort Laramie, in the fall of 1851, have been true to their obligations, and have remained at peace among themselves and with the whites."
And the superintendent writes: "Congress made a very liberal appropriation of $100,000 to make a treaty with the prairie and mountain tribes. A very satisfactory treaty was made with them last fall at Fort Laramie, the conditions of which, on their part, have been faithfully observed—no depredations having been committed during the past season by any of the tribes parties to the Fort Laramie treaty. The Senate amended the treaty, substituting _fifteen_ instead of _fifty_ years as the period for which they were to have received an annual supply of goods, animals, etc., at the discretion of the President. This modification of the treaty I think very proper, as the condition of these wandering hordes will be entirely changed during the next fifteen years. The treaty, however, should have been sent back to the Indians for the purpose of obtaining their sanction to the modification, as was done in the case of the Sioux treaty negotiated by Commissioners Ramsey and Lea. It is hoped this oversight will be corrected as early as practicable next spring, otherwise the large amounts already expended will have been uselessly wasted, and the Indians far more dissatisfied than ever."
To comment on the bad faith of this action on the part of Congress would be a waste of words; but its impolicy is so glaring that one's astonishment cannot keep silent—its impolicy and also its incredible niggardliness. A dollar apiece a year, "in goods, animals," etc., those Indians had been promised that they should have for fifty years. It must have been patent to the meanest intellect that this was little to pay each year to any one man from whom we were taking away, as the commissioner said, "his means of support." But, unluckily for the Indians, there were fifty thousand of them. It entered into some thrifty Congressman's head to multiply fifty by fifty, and the aggregate terrified everybody. This was much more likely to have been the cause of the amendment than the cause assigned by the superintendent, viz., the probable change of localities of all the "wandering hordes" in the next fifteen years. No doubt it would be troublesome to the last degree to distribute fifty thousand dollars, "in goods, animals," etc., to fifty thousand Indians wandering over the entire Upper Missouri region; but no more troublesome, surely, in the sixteenth year than in the fifteenth. The sophistry is too transparent; it does not in the least gloss over the fact that, within the first year after the making of our first treaty of any moment with these tribes—while they to a man, the whole fifty thousand of them, kept their faith with us—we broke ours with them in the meanest of ways—robbing them of more than two-thirds of the money we had promised to pay.