ations sent the Sheppard
house--to smooth the difficult paths of etiquette and to instruct her in
the many formalities necessarily omitted in her college life, that were
imperative upon being presented in the whirl of fashionable circles. She
was welcomed by various clubs, literary folk, and at state
receptions--this grandly intellectual daughter of a savage chief.

The first great effort she made in behalf of her people was an attempt
to forestall the opening of the great expanse of land in the Indian
Territory to settlement by the white people. A venerable senator from
Massachusetts espoused her cause sufficiently to awaken a hope in her
inexperienced breast that the object could be accomplished. Another,
from a western state, gladly joined in the undertaking, while a
brilliant ex-secretary of state devoted his energies in her behalf.

At a memorable cabinet meeting the question was discussed, and in the
presence of that august body, and of the President himself, Chiquita
delivered her appeal, recounting step by step the claims under which the
prerogative of the Indian to the land in question should be forever
recognized:

"Mr. President, and gentlemen who constitute his advisers, you ask
whence come my people?

"For ages, as countless as the sands of the Big River, the fresh waters
of the great inland seas skirting the first lofty range of the Rocky
Mountains washed in torrents and torrents the salt deposited by the
great upheavals of the western continent, through the yawning canons
which were created by these torrents' own irresistible force, to the
bases of the great barrier where the sun disappears. The fresh waters'
encroaching left their alluvial deposits further and further toward the
setting sun in the same manner as the white settlers dispossessed the
noble red warrior and primeval possessor of the Western hemisphere. The
fresh waters divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller compasses.
In these grand forest-grown, grass-covered areas herds of wild horses,
buffalo, deer, elk and mountain sheep found subsistence. The fertile
valleys and meadows were thronged with villages of beaver, otter and
mink, whose dams were overgrown with the silvery-leafed aspen upon which
these busy families existed. The forests were fragrant with fir, cedar
and pine, among whose branches the birds of the wood built their nests.

"But before these were other possessors of this great mass of tangled
volcanic eruptions, at a