One chief has two wives; men leave their wives, or change them as they please.
What if children are born irregularly?
Well, the reservation feeds and supports all who are on it.

Nobody suffers.
Are the women often diseased?
Yes, nearly all of them.
Have you a hospital, or do you attempt to isolate those who are diseased?
No; the families all take care of their sick.

The doctor visits them in their shanties.

(Bear in mind this reservation was established, and has had Indians on it since 1860.) Do the Indians have to ask permission to go to the town?
No; they go when they please.
Is there much drunkenness?
No; singularly little.
Do you attempt to make them rise at any specified hour in the morning?
No.
Have you a list or roster of the Indians who belong on the reservation?
No.
How many Indians own horses?
I do not know.
On Sunday there is preaching; the audience varies; and those who do not come to church--where the preaching is in English--play shinny.
Is not all this deplorable?
Here is a company of ignorant and semi-barbarous people, forcibly gathered together by the United States Government (with the help of a mob), under the pretense that they are the "unfortunate wards of the nation;" and the Government does not require the officers it sets over them to control them in any single direction where a conscientious guardian would feel bound to control his ward.

How can habits of decency, energy, order, thrift, virtue, grow up--nay, how can they continue, if in the beginning they existed, with such management?
Captain Jack and his forty-five Modocs were at least brave and energetic men.