er the
present Secretary and Commissioner, and 7,600 additional allotments
have been made for which patents are now in process of preparation. The
school attendance of Indian children has been increased during that time
over 13 per cent, the enrollment for 1892 being nearly 20,000. A uniform
system of school text-books and of study has been adopted and the work
in these national schools brought as near as may be to the basis of the
free common schools of the States. These schools can be transferred and
merged into the common-school systems of the States when the Indian has
fully assumed his new relation to the organized civil community in which
he resides and the new States are able to assume the burden. I have
several times been called upon to remove Indian agents appointed by me,
and have done so promptly upon every sustained complaint of unfitness or
misconduct. I believe, however, that the Indian service at the agencies
has been improved and is now administered on the whole with a good
degree of efficiency. If any legislation is possible by which the
selection of Indian agents can be wholly removed from all partisan
suggestions or considerations, I am sure it would be a great relief to
the Executive and a great benefit to the service. The appropriation for
the subsistence of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians made at the last
session of Congress was inadequate. This smaller appropriation was
estimated for by the Commissioner upon the theory that the large fund
belonging to the tribe in the public Treasury could be and ought to be
used for their support. In view, however, of the pending depredation
claims against this fund and other considerations, the Secretary of the
Interior on the 12th of April last submitted a supplemental estimate for
$50,000. This appropriation was not made, as it should have been, and
the oversight ought to be remedied at the earliest possible date.

In a special message to this Congress at the last session[35] I stated
the reasons why I had not approved the deed for the release to the
United States by the Choctaws and Chickasaws of the lands formerly
embraced in the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Reservation and remaining after
allotments to that tribe. A resolution of the Senate expressing the
opinion of that body that notwithstanding the facts stated in my special
message the deed should be approved and the money, $2,991,450, paid over
was presented to me May 10, 1892. My special message was intended