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To Professor Harper Dear Friend, Your heartfelt sympathies expressed, for the poor Indians and their approaching fate induce me to indite this letter; and to your queries relative to the Piegan Massacre and the prospect of the extermination of the Indian tribes, my answer at the present time must necissarily be brief, but I will make it as explicit and as just as possible.

    As to the first, the Piegan massare, at the recital of which the hearts of all but brutes sicken, my opinion is (like that of all the world who don't think and will from political or interested motives) that it was an unwarlike and cowardly act, and not only disgraceful to its projector and perpetrator; but in the strictest sense, horribly criminal.
    Impolitic, for a great, free, and magnanimous nation, that the lives of these poor defenceless people, and at least 200,000 others, should be placed at the mercy of one man who has the means of their destruction in his hands----and criminal and disgraceful in him, deliberately to convict and pass sentence of indiscriminate death upon a Band of Indians three thousand miles from him, and whom he never saw, because a few wicked and worthless squatters and speculators around them, to get possession of the beautiful valley in which they lived, represented that that their horses were being stolen, and that their neighbours were being murdered in all directions. 
    It has been upon just such wicked and onesided evidence that all the Indian wars for the last thirty years have been got up, and that to my personal knowledge, as I have lived in the midst of it, I have several times so explained it to the government, and as often been told that it was none of my business.
    A cunning and wicked set of speculators conspire together for the conquest and unclear of a beautiful and fertile valley, occupied and owned by a village of Indians, that they may eject the Indians, and divide the lands between them.
    These plodding and heartless adventurers, armed with rifles and revolvers, are too few to cope with the Indians in open combat, and appeal to the general commanding the army, to do the work for them, by forwarding to him at issue?unclear of "thefts and horrible massacres" which never took place, and on receipt of this onesided evidence (of which the Indians have no knowledge, or means of disproving) sentence of death is passed upon the tribe, and the executioner is sent with instructions to strike them "when they are the most helpless," and to "strike them to the death.
    By this infernal process the beautiful valleys of the Great Far West have been (and are being) peopled, and through them all, glorious civilization is making its rapid way. By this system the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Kowjas, and Arapahos, have been butchered, or "swept" from their countries; and by it the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Apache tribes are yet to fall; but