206 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



the opening paragraph of Secretary Work's report 

 for the year 1927: 



"The Indian Service has not kept pace with the 

 progress elsewhere along health, educational, indus- 

 trial, and social lines. The appropriations for gen- 

 eral purposes for the fiscal year 1923 were $10,316,- 

 221,30, and in the five fiscal years since they have 

 been increased by about $2,338,463.70, principally 

 for medical and health activities. But the cumula- 

 tive effect of many years of financial neglect has de- 

 manded even larger appropriations, if the Govern- 

 ment may perform its full duty to the American 

 Indian. Underrating the requirements of the Indian 

 service has continued so long that it has become a 

 habit difficult to correct." 



So definitely fixed, through so many years, has 

 become the broad public impression that our Indians 

 are a degenerating, disappearing fragment of a once 

 strong people, driven by force from ancestral lands, 

 decimated by centuries of persecution, wars, and dis- 

 ease, undermined by liquor and drugs which we have 

 sold them, impoverished by official oppression and 

 private fraud, that news of their increase and pros- 

 perity is positively startling to many. 



Still more surprising is the fact that, so far as 

 records permit an estimate, the United States con- 

 tains to-day practically as large an Indian popula- 

 tion as it did even before the coming of the white 

 man. 



It is not surprising that the earliest estimates of 



