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effective work in the real Indian country. Distances are great, roads often poor, sometimes passable only after strenuous physical labor in snow, rain, or mud, bridges are often doubtful and sometimes entirely absent, and the temperature ranges are extreme. Often a trip to a distant part of the jurisdiction requires the better part of a day, driving through a country so remote that the persons in the car are almost entirely dependent on their own resources in case of any trouble. Lunch must be carried or eaten out of cans at a trader’s store along the road. When night comes the superintendent is fortunate if he can put up with one of his district employees in a warm house, where he can get a meal prepared by a good cook and have a good bed in a room with the chill off. He may be where he is thankful to have a bed at all and to have a stove and firewood.

Under conditions such as these, it is not surprising to find some of the superintendents of advanced age becoming office men, spending much of their time on paper work that more vigorous superintendents delegate to their chief clerks, making their Indians come long distances to them even regarding fairly petty matters, and depending almost entirely for the necessary information as to actual conditions upon the reports of their district employees, reports the reliability of which the more vigorous superintendents check by first hand observation. The district employees find themselves left pretty much to their own devices, with only such direction and inspiration as the superintendent can give them at the agency office. The Indians, quick to observe and often to criticize, do not miss the facts. Their feeling sometimes is bitter, especially if a considerable part of the cost of administering the reservation is paid from tribal funds, or if they have previously had a superintendent whose belief was that a superintendent’s main job is to be out on the reservation with his Indians, stimulating them to economic effort and to the improvement of home conditions. The best superintendents do take this view, and although they require a great deal of their district employees and place responsibility on them, they really supervise and direct their work on the spot where they can see conditions with their own eyes, and talk with the Indians involved, not in a hurried interview in the office, dependent entirely upon words exchanged through an interpreter, but right on the Indian’s own land or in his own shack with the family gathered