Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1869

The ratification of the treaty and its amendments did little to ease conditions. The long-delayed government payments, goods, and services began finally to reach Lawyer and his headmen, but conflicts with the whites continued, and the treaty bands remained anxious about their future, fearful of the threatened allotment of the reservation, their forced dispersal onto small individual lots, and the opening of the rest of their country to whites. A lack of funds kept postponing the surveying of the reservation into lots, but even that distressed Lawyer. Until the lots were marked off, the non-treaties could stay off the reservation, where they were free to make trouble, as he saw it, and influence the treaty Indians, He repeatedly complained about the "wild" and "heathen" Nez Perces, and the agents kept promising him that they would soon be forced onto the reservation. (pp. 109-110)