102 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 197 



. . . When enumerators find Indians off or living away from reservations, 

 and in no wise dependent upon the agency or Government, such Indians, in 

 addition to their enumeration on the population and supplemental schedules in 

 the same manner as for the population generally, should be noted on a special 

 schedule [7-917] by name, tribe, sex, age, occupation, and whether taxed or 

 not taxed. 



The object of this is to obtain an accurate census of all Indians living within 

 the jurisdiction of the United States and to prevent double enumeration of 

 certain Indians. 



Where Indians are temporarily absent from their reservations the census 

 enumerators need not note them, as the special enumerator for the Indian 

 reservation will get their names. [Ibid.] 



Because of their bearing on contemporary problems of Indian 

 enumeration, these instructions merit additional comment. The first 

 point to be noted is that the regular enumerators were expected to 

 determine whether an Indian found off a given reservation was 

 actually a member of that reservation, or was living independently 

 of its agency or government. If the enumerator determined that the 

 Indian was only away from the reservation temporarily, he was sup- 

 posed to leave his enumeration to the special agent of the reservation 

 concerned, without recording the contact he had made with the in- 

 dividual in question. This procedure did not permit verification 

 of the information obtained by these special agents in regard to per- 

 sons reported to be away from the reservations termporarily. To 

 the extent that such persons were inadvertently or otherwise omitted 

 from mention by their family members on the reservation, they were 

 likely to be omitted entirely from the enumeration. 



The converse situation was, in theory, adequately provided for. 

 If an enumerator determined that an Indian was living off the reser- 

 vation and independent of its agency or government, he was to record 

 the pertinent information both on his regular census schedule and on 

 a special supplementary schedule for Indians. By matching these 

 supplementary schedules against the schedules in use on the appropri- 

 ate reservation, it would be possible to omit duplicate entries. How- 

 ever, there is no evidence that such a matching procedure was under- 

 taken in any systematic fashion. It need hardly be added that the 

 cost of such a matching procedure would have exceeded by far the 

 budgetary limitations within which all of these censuses were 

 undertaken. 



In actual practice, therefore, there remains the possibility that, on 

 the one hand, temporary absentees from the reservation were missed 

 entirely, while on the other hand, persons who were "permanently" 

 away might have been enumerated twice. It can be argued that 

 mider the patterns of settlement that prevailed among both on- 

 reservation and off-reservation Indians at this time, both groups 

 were likely to have been underenumerated, so that despite the possible 



