322 INDIANS. 



citizen in the sale of liquors if lie takes out a licence. 

 Decision after decision has been made in the interest of 

 parties who were trying to reconcile the right to permit 

 one man to sell liquor, with the right to prohibit another 

 from getting drunk, until at the present time ' Indian 

 territory' means simply the ground inside an Indian 

 reservation. A squatter who goes over that line to sell 

 liquor subjects himself to fine and imprisonment. If he 

 remains on his own side of the line, he can with im- 

 punity sell all the liquor he pleases to Indians who come 

 to him. Whether this is the intent of the law may be 

 questioned, but that it is the actual practical working of 

 the Indian laws is well known to every frontiersman. 



The Indian will give everything he possesses for 

 whisky. I have already spoken of the habitual sale by 

 the Brule Sioux of a wife for a bottle. I have known an 

 instance where an officer was earnestly importuned by a 

 Cheyenne to give him one bottle of whisky for a mule 

 worth $150. 



With such profit in prospective, it would require an 

 army of detectives to keep the frontier liquor dealers 

 from trading with the Indians. And when the Indian is 

 as eager for whisky as the trader is for ponies and 

 peltries, it is hardly necessary to say that the traffic is 

 incessant. 



Mexicans from New Mexico fit out great caravans for 

 trade with the Kioways, Apaches, and Comanches. The 

 southern part of the State of Kansas is populated with 

 perambulating groggeries. One grog-shop keeper of 

 Dodge City kept, during the winter of 1872-3, several 

 4 outfits ' in the field with such profit to himself that a 

 few such winters would qualify him for the highest social 

 or political honours of his State. His regular price for 

 one gallon of watered whisky was one pony, or five 

 Indian dressed buffalo robes. One Arrapahoe chief is 

 said to have bartered at that rate over fifty ponies during 

 the winter. 



