Katcho spends spring break in Cuba with powerful lobbyist

Katcho and friends are beginning to smell like the Quakers Hiram W. Jones, the Indian agent at the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma back in 1873, and his superior, Enoch Hoag, of Lawrence, Kansas.

After the Modoc war (1872-73), the Modocs, after a series of removals to a reservation in Oregon as well as flights back home from there, were finally captured and shipped out to the Midwest, ending up in Oklahoma after a 2000 mile train ride. Jones and friends were operating an “Indian ring,” i.e., they were total swindlers and taking advantage of the Indians.

As the Modoc website says,

“The Modoc experience at the Quapaw Agency would prove no better than the treatment they received on the reservation in Oregon, and indeed, much worse. As historian Albert Hurtado has written, “the Modoc were victims of a Quaker Indian ring that operated at the Quapaw Agency for nearly a decade during the 1870’s”. Of the 12 agency employees, 11 were relatives of Agent Jones or Superintendent Hoag.

Soon after the Modoc were settled at the Quapaw Agency, Agent Jones restricted all trade with them to a store constructed next door to the agency building, thus eliminating all trade with merchants in nearby Seneca, Missouri. Superintendent Hoag’s first cousin, T. E. Newlin, operated the store. When Seneca residents filed numerous complaints concerning the intolerable conditions suffered by the modoc, their claims were dismissed. It was presumed that the complaints were from disgruntled merchants who were bitter at being cut out of the lucrative Modoc trade.

Hiram jones’ swindling of the Modoc’s already meager rations of bad food and inadequate medical created such deplorable conditions that the Modoc mortality rate continued to climb. Because of persistent complaints by the Modoc and their non-Indian neighbors, Jones’ Indian Agency was investigated by the Office of Indian Affairs in 1874 and again in 1875, but few changes and no criminal charges were made as a result. It wasn’t until the third investigation in 1878 that a system of nepotism and corruption was officially reported. It was described as a family Indian ring whereby Jones and his family members would receive kickbacks from local merchants for the inflated prices and inferior quality of goods and services provided to the agency on behalf of the Modoc. Apparently, Jones’ religious convictions did not protect him from the greed enjoyed by so many of the less pious Indian agents. Still, it wasn’t until the following year that Hiram Jones and his family ring were relieved of their duties at the Quapaw Agency.”

http://www.modoctribe.net/history.html

Moral of the story: Californians is starting to look like one giant Indian reservation, complete with swindlers, shysters, and con artists. The natives seem helpless to stop them.