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sioners, and to prepare from them summaries of their statements of existing conditions and needs which were studied by the members of the staff before visiting the jurisdictions. For the jurisdictions visited later, it was not practicable to take his time from field work for this task. Through the courtesy of the Indian Office and the Board of Indian Commissioners, however, duplicates of reports asked for were kindly forwarded to the survey staff while in the field so that they could be studied prior to the visit. For the Five Civilized Tribes the survey had the advantage of a special memorandum prepared for it from existing reports by Dr. L. F. Schmeckebier of the regular staff of the Institute. Each member of the staff had also a set of documents regarding the Service as a whole, furnished by the Indian Office, and the executive clerk carried a small library, including recent congressional hearings and certain of the reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution.

Conferences with Superintendents. Upon arrival at a jurisdiction the first step was generally to hold an informal staff conference with the superintendent and such of his assistants as he called in. These conferences generally began with a general discussion of conditions on the reservation. The object was primarily to get the views and opinions of the superintendent himself. Some superintendents took the lead and presented fully and freely a comprehensive general statement. Others waited for specific questions from the survey staff and confined their answers fairly closely to the questions asked. These differences were due primarily to differences in temperament, for almost all the superintendents apparently welcomed the visits and sought to give the staff all the information desired and to furnish them with all facilities for studying the situation.

After discussing the general situation with the superintendent each member of the staff took up with him the question as to the most practicable means of seeing those activities that lay in his particular field. At the schools this problem was generally simple enough because everything was close at hand, the different staff members could say fairly precisely what they wished to see and all could be arranged in a few minutes. On reservations the problem was very different, complicated as it was by the factors of distance, road conditions, means of transportation, and sometimes lodgings at the far end of the trip. An outstanding illustration was at San