left on the plains half-starved, having been unable to find any game, or any food except wild-turnips. Soine of them went to visit the Omahas, others the Pawnees, where they remained until the little eorn they had planted produced roasting-ears. In the mean time those who were here subsisted mainly wild-cherries and plums and the wild-turnip, and traded away most of their blankots and annuity goods for provisions."

In 1863 the reports are still more pitiful. "They started on their summer hunt toward the last of May, immediately af- ter the first hoeing of their corn ful and found buffaloes; but afterward, the ground being occu pied by the Yanktons, who were sent south of the Niobrara by the general commanding the district, and who were about double the number, and with four times as many horscs, thecy soon consumed what meat they had cured, and were on At first they Were success- compelled to abandon the chase. They commenced to roturn in the lat- ter part of July. They went away with very high hopes, and reasonably so, of a large crop, but returned to see it all wither- ed and dried up In the mean time the plains had been burnt over, so that they conld not discover the roots they are in the habit of digging. Even the wild-plums, which grow on bushes down in ravines and gullies, limbs The building I oceupy was constantly surrounded by a hungry crowd begging for food. I am warned by military authority to keep the Poncas within the limits of the reserva tion; but this is an limits, are withered and dried on the impossibility. There is nothing within its aything be obtained in sufficient quantity, nor can or brought here soon cnough to keep them from starving. The Poncas have behaved well-quite as well, if not better than, under like eircumstanccs, the same number of whites would have donc. I have known whole families to live for days to- gether on nothing but half-dried corn-stalks, and this when there were cattle and sheep in their sight."

At this time martial law was in force on many of the Indian