From the commencement of his term, Grant was willing to aid in at once reducing the abuses of the Indian Bureau and maintaining a peace policy on the plains. The Peace Commission of 1867 had done good work, which would have been more effective had coöperation between the army and the bureau been possible. Congress now, in April, 1869, voted two millions to be used in maintaining peace on the plains, "among and with the several tribes ... to promote civilization among said Indians, bring them, where practicable, upon reservations, relieve their necessities, and encourage their efforts at self-support." The President was authorized at the same time to erect a board of not more than ten men, "eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy," who should, with the Secretary of the Interior, and without salary, exercise joint control over the expenditures of this or any money voted for the use of the Indian Department.
The Board of Indian Commissioners was designed to give greater wisdom to the administration of the Indian policy and to minimize peculation in the bureau. It represented, in substance, a triumph of the peace party over the army. "The gentlemen who wrote the reports of the Commissioners revelled in riotous imaginations and discarded facts," sneered a friend of military control; but there was, more or less, a distinct improvement in the management of the reservation tribes after 1869; although, as the exposures of the Indian ring showed, corruption was by no means stopped. One way in which the Commissioners and Grant sought to elevate the tone of agency control was through the religious, charitable, and missionary societies. These organizations, many of which had long maintained missionary schools among the more civilized tribes, were invited to nominate agents, teachers, and physicians for appointment by the bureau. On the whole these appointments were an improvement over the men whom political influence had heretofore brought to power. Fifteen years later the Commissioner and the board were again complaining of the character of the agents; but there was an increasing standard of criticism.
In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869, and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In 1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872, "the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes, upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may justly be proud."