Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer on the southern Plains, made an interesting observation in the late nineteenth century. He noted that between 1880 and 1890 five million people had immigrated to the United States, where they found work, raised their children, and abandoned "their language, their Arabia, their Turkey, their Italy, their Russia, their Spain, with all their former habits, and have become American citizens in ten years." Yet at the same time, it proved to be nearly impossible for 250,000 Indians to become incorporated into American society. In his first annual message to Congress, President Chester A. Arthur noted the same vexing problem: "We have to deal with the appalling fact that though thousands of lives have been sacrificed and hundreds of millions of dollars expended in the attempt to solve the Indian problem, it has until within the past few years seemed scarcely...