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the reserve with the Poncas, and I returned to Arkansas City.  I traveled two days with one band of the Poncas, three Chiefs, White Eagle, Gahega, and Mishell were with them, and I had a good opportunity to learn their desires and wishes, and I was led by this intercourse to the following conclusions:

Being a very small tribe, totally unarmed, and being well informed of the power of this government of fifty million people, they are in constant fear for their lives, and this fear has increased, since one of their leading men, Big Snake, was murdered by the orders of Agent Whitman.  The present agent has a very large force of white employes, well supplied with breech-loading carbines, and the tribe is thoroughly subdued, and fear to do anything but obey his orders.

Doubtless, from time to time, some will slip away as they have opportunity, but I am convinced that a large majority of them will be afraid to undertake it, and suffer on, as they have suffered, in silence, enduring their exile as best they may.

There has been a large amount of money expended on the Ponca reservation where they are now located. But while there are less than four hundred Indians to care for, there is a very large force of white employes.  A magnificent private residence has been built for the agent.  There are eight or ten other residences for employes, constructed in a substantial and costly style, but the houses built for the Indians scarcely deserve the name.  They are mostly constructed of logs, are very small, and are covered with cottonwood shingles.  I should judge that three times as much money has been expended to build houses for the white men on the reservation as has been expended for dwellings for Indians.  The Indians seem to have lost all hope, are brokenhearted and disconsolate.  With one or two exceptions, they are making no effort to help themselves.  Their so-called farms are miserable little patches to which they pay very little attention.  One of them said to me, "If the government forces me to stay here it can feed me.  I had a good farm back at our old home, and if I was back there I would farm again.  I have no heart to work here."  The one hundred and fifteen who are back on the old reservation have a much larger amount of land under cultivation, than the whole four hundred who are held in the Indian Territory, have kept their crops in good condition and are full of energy and hope.

After leaving the Poncas on their way to their reserve, I returned to Arkansas City, where I was confined to my hotel by sickness for four days.  On Saturday, June 19th, I was informed by a Ponca Indian, who evidently had come from the Reserve to tell me, that the agent was coming to Arkansas City the next day.  This information he communicated to me mostly by signs, as he could only speak one or two words of English.  The next morning I procured a horse and rode into the country.  I started for a ranch on the Fort Sill trail, from which place I intended to go and see Chief Joseph of the Nez Percees, who have been treated in the same shameful manner as the Poncas.  I was overtaken by a violent storm on the open prairie and did not reach the ranch until daylight the next morning.  I laid
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over here one day, and the next proceeded to the Nez Percee Reserve There are six or seven houses on this Reserve in one of which a white man lives.  Here I got dinner, after which I found the interpreter, who sent for Chief Joseph.  Joseph was not at home, having gone to another part of the reservation.  I waited for the return of the messenger until about four o'clock, when I was arrested by a body of four armed white men and one Nez Percee Indian, who took me by force to the Ponca Agency, some fifteen or twenty miles away. These men informed me that I was arrested under orders direct from Washington.  While I was under arrest and a prisoner in the hands of these men, I was most vilely insulted and every abuse possible heaped upon me by the agent and his clerk.  The other employes acted like gentlemen.  The chief of the Agency police, who had me in charge for several hours, did not speak an insulting word to me. I bore the insults of the agent for some time, but at last they got beyond endurance, and I said to him that no gentlemen, no, no one but a coward would insult an unarmed prisoner, and that it was only because he knew I could not resist that he dared to do it. After that he never said an insulting word.

During the course of the conversation with Agent Whiting, which must have lasted over an hour (and I heard the same thing from other persons) he said he had orders to arrest any of the Omaha Committee or the attorneys, if they came upon the reservation.  He denounced Messrs Poppleton and Webster, and the members of the committee, in the most unmeasured terms, applying to them every epithet of denunciation and contempt possible to conceive.

After being kept under arrest until 10 a.m. the next day, I was started out of the Territory under the guard of four armed Indian police, and two white men.  Half way to the state line we met a party of Ponca Indians with one of their chiefs.  The chief denounced my arrest and the Indian police, for obeying the agent's orders to guard me, in the most unmeasured terms.  At the state line I was released with orders, that if I over came back I would be much more roughly handled.

In conclusion I would say that the present condition of the Ponca Indians is deplorable in the extreme.  They live in constant dread and fear, they are as much imprisoned as if they were in a penitentiary and yet they never committed any crime.  The action of the Secretary of the Interior is a direct insult, not only to the best citizens of Nebraska, but to the United States Courts and the Senate of the United States, both of whom have fully investigated this case and pronounced against him.

Very Respectfully,

T.H. TIBBLES.