308 TlMEHRI. 
The great feature in these suggested alterations is 
the prohibition of Indians from selling the timber which 
they may cut to any but official persons and for the 
purpose of the public works. This would bear very 
hardly on the Indians, who cut timber only in very small 
quantities at a time, and, more often than not, in places 
very remote from those where depots are likely to be esta- 
blished, unless these depots should be very numerous and 
widely distributed, and who would constantly infringe 
these regulations to avoid carrying their timber far and 
undergoing the formalities which would surely be observed 
at these Government depots ; and it would bear more 
hardly on the other inhabitants, not wood-cutters, of 
the more remote districts, where it is so difficult and 
expensive to procure imported timber, that colony wood, 
cut by Indians, is employed for almost every 
purpose. As a matter of fact, while the licenced wood- 
cutters are, as a rule, the wholesale cutters of, and 
dealers in, timber, the Indians (together with the robbers 
of crown timber — whose trade ought certainly to be 
stopped) are the very necessary and useful retail dealers. 
Moreover the suggested alterations do not meet the real 
difficulties of the case, which are two in number. In 
the first place, a difficulty exists in the fact that a large 
number of people of more or less mixed blood, some 
having almost no Indian blood in their veins, nearly all 
having more negro than Indian blood, claim the privileges 
of Indians in cutting timber. Among these people of mixed 
blood — cobungrus, they are called — are some who inhabit 
and thought are really Indians; and it would be hard 
to take from these their privileges as Indians. Others 
