At least half the men on the reservation, the superintendent told me, are competent farmers, and many of the women are excellent and competent house-servants.

No one disputes that while they supported themselves by useful industry in the valleys where were their homes they were peaceable and harmless, and that the whites stood in no danger from them.

Why, then, should the United States Government forcibly make paupers of them?
Why should this class of Indians be compelled to live on reservations?
Under the best management which we have ever had in the Indian Bureau--let us say under its present management--a reservation containing tame or peaceable Indians is only a pauper asylum and prison combined, a nuisance to the respectable farmers, whom it deprives of useful and necessary laborers, an injury to the morals of the community in whose midst it is placed, an injury to the Indian, whom it demoralizes, and a benefit only to the members of the Indian ring.
Round Valley is occupied in part by the Nome Cult Reservation, and in part by farmers and graziers.

In the middle of the valley stands Covelo, one of the roughest little villages I have seen in California, the gathering-place for a rude population, which inhabits not only the valley, but the mountains within fifty miles around, and which rides into Covelo on mustang ponies whenever it gets out of whisky at home or wants a spree.
The bar-rooms of Covelo sell more strong drink in a day than any I have ever seen elsewhere; and the sheep-herder, the vaquero, the hunter, and the wandering rough, descending from their lonely mountain camps, make up as rude a crowd as one could find even in Nevada.

Being almost without exception Americans, they are not quarrelsome in their cups.