Before we agree to anything, you must stop the surveyors who now, at this very time, are going west on the Niobrara."

While we all know that the traders were of a class that took advantage of the untutored savage, we wonder if the soldiers were any better, and we also wonder if this interpretation was not construed to mean something that was not really said, with the view of centering in the military the power and profit which the government had given to civil authority. If so. it fell short of its purpose.

This second conference broke up as did the first, with a call for another, fifty days later, but General Mitchell did agree to stop the Niobrara survey.

Spotted Tail was then the most powerful

Spotted Tail said at these conferences that if the Sioux went to war, they had over 25,- 000 warriors with which to fight. Bad Wound is said to have punished severely some of the young men who broke away and committed depredations.

These councils of 1864, were the sequel of similar events that occurred a great many years before. Colonel Kearney had nearly twenty years earlier addressed the Indians at Fort Laramie in the number of 1200 braves, telling them that he was opening a road for the white people that were going to bury their bones where the waters flow toward the setting sun. Of course this road was already opened, but like Fremont, the Pathfinder, he found paths that had been trod for a generation of white people and many generations by aborigines.