Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

NUMBER 30 69
to the financially distressed Blackfeet. In the
meantime, Hamilton moved to challenge directly
Campbell's authority on the reservation (NA,
1921b, 1921c; U.S. Senate, 1932:12768-12774).
Biennial elections gave both Campbell and
Hamilton a platform from which to air grievances.
Campbell proved Hamilton right when
Campbell directly intervened in elections to assure
that Blackfeet sympathetic to his development
program were elected to council positions.
In 1924, when Hamilton failed to gain a council
seat for the first time in over ten years, he immediately
laid plans to wrest the council from
Campbell's supporters. In the process it forced
Hamilton to make a choice that he had avoided
in the past. Since Campbell's influence rested
primarily with the full blood population of the
reservation, Hamilton made an overt appeal to
disgruntled mixed bloods and consequently exposed
a factional split in the tribe that had always
been near the surface (NA, 1924a).
In 1926 his effort brought success. Once again
Hamilton was on the tribal council with a majority
supporting him. Unsatisfied with regaining
control of the council, Hamilton proceeded to use
it as a means of dismissing Campbell from his
position as superintendent. In the election of 1926
Hamilton had allied himself with State Senator
Frank McCabe, a shadowy figure on the reservation
who was often accused of using his influence
with tribal members to secure their allotments
(NA, 1926a, 1926b).
Government policy since 1917 had allowed
individual allottees to request an early end to the
trust period established under the allotment acts.
Generally, an allottee could not sell or encumber
his allotment until after a 25-year trust period
had expired. The administration of thousands of
trust patents, however, proved such a burden to
the overworked Office of Indian Affairs that a
request for a fee simple patent from an allottee
was usually approved. Some authorities were suspicious
that McCabe was bribing allottees to
request fee patents and then buying their land.
Many full bloods who had not become accustomed
to working their allotments were easily
persuaded to ask for fee patents. Campbell ac­
cused McCabe of fraudulently acquiring land
from full bloods and obtained a federal indictment
of the State Senator. Although a jury acquitted
McCabe of wrong doing, Campbell made
an issue of his friendship with Hamilton (NA,
1919c, 1926a, 1926b, 1926c, 1926d).
At the first meeting of the 1926 Council, Hamilton
as the presiding officer inappropriately
turned the meeting over to McCabe. McCabe
forced a resolution out of the council condemning
Campbell, and, acting beyond the council's authority,
dismissed him from office. The Office of
Indian Affairs refused to recognize the council's
action and sent an investigator to the reservation.
The investigation proved that the charges against
Campbell had little substance and resulted in the
Indian Office refusing to further deal with the
tribal council. For several years the council had
met on a regular basis, but after 1926 the Office
of Indian Affairs insisted that it meet only at the
call of the superintendent. Hamilton had apparently
hoped that his extreme action would lead
to an airing of the differences between his ideas
for the reservation's future and Campbell's, but
the investigator chose not to deal with substantive
questions of reservation policy. By 1928, carrying
the scars of two decades of political war with the
Office of Indian Affairs and reservation agents,
Hamilton refused to run for a council seat (NA,
1926c, 1926d).
Ironically, by 1928 Campbell had become convinced
that the future of the reservation depended
on the development of cattle and sheep grazing,
a position that Hamilton had taken from the
beginning. The allotment of the reservation into
over 3,000 separate units, however, made it difficult
to establish grazing on an economical basis.
To assure adequate range, hundreds of leases
were executed each year with individual allottees.
Failure to secure even one lease could exclude
several hundred acres from use in the middle of
a grazing range and make it virtually unusable.
The problem of multiple tenures interfering with
efficient range management was not a problem
restricted to Indian reservations. The difficulty
existed throughout the State of Montana, where
land within natural grazing ranges might contain