to earn their living; and it has given them individual bank accounts, which are held by the government, as an adminstrator of an estate would hold property and funds for a minor heir. Only such sums are given to the Indians as they actually need in further clearing the land from which the timber has been cut, or in building little cottages, barns and sheds on the embryo farms.

The establishment of the saw-mill and the subsequent lumbering operations have done more towards developing the Indians than a half century of teaching. It was rather difficult in the beginning to get the Indians to do a good hard day's work, such as is demanded of men who go into the woods to cut down trees and prepare the logs for the saw-mill, drive the logs down stream to the mill boom where they are stored, or serve at

payments that are made by the Stearns Lumber Company for the timber on these lands. Payment is made in each case just as soon as the timber is cut. The government has a scaler on the reservation to determine the number of feet yielded by the timber on each allotment. It will no doubt surprise many hardworking farmers throughout the United States to know that at the present time some of these Indians each have $5,000 to their credit, held for them by Uncle Sam, the best banker in the world; and in addition to this they still have their farms, valuable now and destined to become much more so as the process of development continues; all this in addition to the fact that they are earning their wages in the saw-mill, on the river drives or in the woods. It is difficult to inagine that less than ten years ago these same workers were "blanket" Indians, content to sit by their wigwams, calmly smoking their pipes and waiting for the

next government appropriation to arrive. Their chief occupation then was to watch and wait, the interim between appropriations some times being so extended as to start within them the pangs of hunger and incidentally stir them to mutterings against the Great White Father who left them penned in on a small reservation and yet fed them so tardily.

Argue the matter as much as we will the fact still remains that there is no race of people that seems so content with indolence as the Indians. The trend of the government's policy for years has been to increase this natural propensity. Whenever its officials make a distribution of cash among them it simply puts off the day when it will have to undo this policy and teach the Indians that there is no recompense without work.

The influence of the single saw-mill on the Bad River Indian reservation has done more than a hundred years of isolation and itinerant teaching to make the

of lumber inspecting and is regularly employed by the Stearns Lumber Company as one of its inspectors. One of the crews on the river is composed entirely of Indians and has an Indian fore

Indians independent and give them "grown-up" ideas of existence. When it began operations there, the Indians were not actually earning a cent towards their own support, excepting in isolated instances: now about half of them are employed at something in connection with the lumbering operations. And they are paid good wages, too, the same as white men engaged in the same work. Last year the Stearns Lumber Company paid $32,325.37 in wages to the Indians it employs, a monthly distribution of about $3,000 among them. The influence of their wages is already being evi

denced by the cozy little cottages erected in the little village of Odanah, where the saw-mill is located. The Indians are building real homes. They are painting these little homes like white people; they embellish them with pretty little dormer and bay windows. Not only in the homes but in the manner of dress, the Indians are showing the unconscious influence which daily contact in occupation with white people has on them. They do not expend their last penny on gaudy colors as did the aboriginal. With the advance of civilization comes the desire for more modest colors.

One Indian boy who went into the mill at the commonest kind of work, is now engaged in one of the most responsible positions in the manufacture of lumber, that of sawyer, and he earns over five dollars per day. Another Indian has mastered the intricate details

man.

The crew does as good work as

a crew of white men. The foreman makes his regular reports to the officials of the company, in a highly satisfactory manner. This is one of the most gratifying signs of their growth, showing that in this particular line of work which seems to appeal to the Indians more than any other, they progress without the constant vigilance of the white man's supervision. They seem to enjoy outdoor work along the rivers and are very fond of the large teams of horses which are used in logging operations.

Large contracts for logging have been let by the Stearns Lumber Company in two or three instances to Indians who have shown remarkable ability in grasping the work of logging. These jobbers have earned profits like any white men contractors. They have hired Indians and white men to labor for them, all on

the same footing. One Indian contractor who goes by the English name of Edward Haskins is employing 105 men in the woods on the reservation this winter and will cut from 7,000,000 to 8,000,000 feet of logs and prepare them for the saw mill.

The Bad River reservation is one of about half a dozen mill reservations, which are under the care of Major Campbell, who was an officer in the Civil War.

ning only seven years. The Indian village of Odanah now looks like a prosperous settlement of white people and is gathering the air of thrift and enterprise each year. The surrounding land is being cleared rapidly and fields of grain are taking the places of forest fastnesses for wigwams. Instead of the gutteral grunt of the blanket Indian, salutations are now of the white man's coinage,"Hello!" the favorite greeting, and "So

He is known as Indian agent, and all of these small reservations taken together are known as the La Pointe agency, with headquarters in the government building at Ashland. The agency takes its name from the historical old settlement on Madeline Island in Chequamegon Bay, Lake Superior, where Father Marquette did some of his early missionary work and where the first John Jacob Astor established one of his original trading posts.

A careful estimate places the duration of these logging operations at ten years more. At present half of the Indians are working and the mill has been run

long," at parting. This among the men; but among the women: "Good morning" and "How d' do;" and at parting, "Good-bye" or "Good evening."

Strange that we should herald a sawmill as the advance agent of civilization instead of the Indian schools and other of the government's expensive experiments for theoretical education. But, after all, not so strange when we stop to consider that it is an occupation that directly interests the Indians. We actually bring them into contact with the whites, where gradually they assume the same responsibilities and gain the same hopes and aspirations.

T is possible that talk of statehood may, for the first time in a quarter of a millenium, interest English-American in Mexican-American citizens.

The statehood proposition is certain to give a few citizens of the East and middle West paroxysms closely akin to those enjoyed by anti-Imperialists over the Filipinos.

Whether statehood for New Mexico comes now, or after the next presidential election, or ten years hence, is of slight concern except to office-holders and office-seekers, but it will come before the people of the United States have

an intelligent appreciation of their new sister, even if the campaign of enlightenment should begin today.

I am writing on this lovely "Chreesmus' day of 1902 on the broad veranda of the Castaneda in the mellow rays of the sun that has scarcely found a cloud the size of a man's hand in his last 365 visits to Las Vegas. "Castaneda, "-the name, carries us back 460 years, almost four-score years before the wee little boulder at Plymouth dreamed of fame; back to Castaneda, the strangely fascinating man whose letters of 1542, now resting in the inner sanctuary of the