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No one who studies the Indian Service can fail to be impressed with the diversity of its activities. No other government agency exceeds it in the number and variety of the fields of human activity which it embraces. It must minister to all the needs of well over 200,000 Indians who are, without any possibility of legal quibble, still wards of the government, and it is deeply concerned with the entire Indian population numbering over 300,000.

In behalf of its wards the government must make provision for the promotion of health, education, economic development in agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and a great variety of other industries, advancement in social conditions including family life and community activities, and the maintenance of law and order. It must also conserve and often manage the property of its wards, in some instances a task of great financial responsibility.^[1] These functions must be performed, not with respect to a concentrated homogeneous population embraced in a comparatively small area, but with respect to widely scattered groups often living in almost unbelievable isolation and varying all the way from extremely primitive to those who have reached approximately the same scale of development as the prevailing white civilization of their communities. The economic and social conditions with which the Service must deal are equally varied. Many different kinds of agriculture must be known to the Service—ordinary farming with a sufficient rainfall, dry farming, farming under irrigation in a climate which will give seven cuttings of alfalfa in a year, farming under irrigation where the season is so short that maturing a crop is a problem, livestock raising whose summer and winter feed are both available, and livestock raising where the problem of wintering stock is serious. The economic resources of the wards vary all the way from those of the Osages, submerged by a flood of unearned income,^[2] to the many Indians submerged by extreme poverty occasioned by the utter lack of agricultural or industrial resources on their lands.

Add to the administrative problems the pressure coming from the encroachments of white civilization with both its good and its bad;