The report of the Secretary of the Interior exhibits the transactions of the Government with the Indian tribes.  Substantial progress has been made in the education of the children of school age and in the allotment of lands to adult Indians.  It is to be regretted that the policy of breaking up the tribal relation and of dealing with the Indian as an individual did not appear earlier in our legislation.  Large reservations held in common and the maintenance of the authority of the chiefs and headmen have deprived the individual of every incentive to the exercise of thrift, and the annuity has contributed an affirmative impulse toward a state of confirmed pauperism.

Our treaty stipulations should be observed with fidelity and our legislation should be highly considerate of the best interests of an ignorant and helpless people.  The reservations are now generally surrounded by white settlements.  We can no longer push the Indian back into the wilderness, and it remains only by every suitable agency to push him upward into the estate of a self-supporting and responsible citizen.  For the adult the first step is to locate him upon a farm, and for the child to place him in a school.

School attendance should be promoted by every moral agency, and those failing should be compelled.  The national schools for Indians have been very successful and should be multiplied, and as far as possible should be so organized and conducted as to facilitate the transfer of the schools to the States or Territories in which they are located when the Indians in a neighborhood have accepted citizenship and have become otherwise fitted for such a transfer.  This condition of things will be attained slowly, but it will be hastened by keeping it in mind; and in the meantime that cooperation between the Government and the mission schools which has wrought much good should be cordially and impartially maintained.

The last Congress enacted two distinct laws relating to negotiations with the Sioux Indians of Dakota for a relinquishment of a portion of their lands to the United States and for dividing the remainder into separate reservations.  Both were approved on the same day—­March 2.  The one submitted to the Indians a specific proposition; the other (section 3 of the Indian appropriation act) authorized the President to appoint three commissioners to negotiate with these Indians for the accomplishment of the same general purpose, and required that any agreements made should be submitted to Congress for ratification.

On the 16th day of April last I appointed Hon. Charles Foster, of Ohio, Hon. William Warner, of Missouri, and Major-General George Crook, of the United States Army, commissioners under the last-named law.  They were, however, authorized and directed first to submit to the Indians the definite proposition made to them by the act first mentioned, and only in the event of a failure to secure the assent of the requisite number to that proposition to open negotiations