This is a letter to the editor copied from the Chickasaw Enterprise for 9 August, 1894. I have left in spelling variations, which may have been the typesetter's fault. My comments follow after.

After the "Quill Driver" of the Register and Capt. McKennon of Dawes Commission

He tells us that Congress has no more right to Monkey with an "Injin" patent than it has With that of a "po white man." -- He Chugs us in the Ribs, too.

Editor Enterprise. -- It has not been long since the Enterprise christianed the quill driver of the Parcell Register with the appropriate nom de plume of "Mud Slinger" and just why the Enterprise can now stoop to pick up a criticism on our last article from such a disreputable source and air it through its valuable columns as a matter of news we aro at loss to know. But the die is cast and to disabuse the public of any error we hope the Enterprise will allow us to present our position more fully. We are not afrade of the poodle on the Register for it is a well-known fact that they never bite, lest it is the big dog's the first excites from his kennel that the stranger most dreads. With this appology for assurring to notice the opprobrious epithet from the "Mud Slinger" of the Purcell Register, we would advise him on the same line that he advises us, "to take allotment now because it is sure to come," to prefer his soull and die now because death is sure and without preparations it will be hell, and we feel confident he can make better terms with his maker now than he can with "old Sin Bad" infernial regions of pandemonium.

We do not deny that but allotment will come, but we hope to defer that time until our peopleare sufficiently educated to accede to the management of so great an estate without the Government's embargoon its value by an alienation claus.

Capt. McKennon in his address at Muldrow acknowledges these Indains inability to manage their own property when he suggests that, "We would divide all the lands between the Indians,each family would have a homestead of 160 acres which could not be sold." But he makes no preparation for residence, he knows they are not able to take care of it else why put an alienation on 160 of it? Yet he sais, "God knows my heart is right and that I would not do the Indians an injustice." As far as conscience goes, he can with draw federal protection over the Indian lands when he knows they are not capable of withsstandingthe tempting snares of the wileful speculator and go to God and say "I would not do the Indians any injustice."

Yet the Purcell Register would advise the Indians to come to terms with such a man while they have the opportunity. Strange coincidence of justice! The only solution is that they are slaves to the same God.

In 1830 Congress found it impossible to move the Indians west of the Mississippi without something more substantial than a Treaty which it had made and remade until the Indians were all but homeless, accordingly on May 30 of that year, Congress passed an act authorizing the President with the advise and consent of the Senate to issue patents or grants in fee simple, to them and their descendants, while they shall exist as a nation, and live on it," with only this extenuation, "provided always that such lands shall revert to the United States if the Indians become extinct or abandon the same."

The foundation of the free American government is a written constitution that belongs to people and congress {under} this constitution has no more right to rob an Indian than it has to rob a white man, Negro or a mule, if I can be pardoned for using the expression, for I assure you I loose patience when I hear of a learned man getting up before an audience of sensible men to say that the Indians have no right to this country that congress is bound to respect.

If congress can destroy the patents to these Indian lands it will have the same right to destroy titles to other corporations and it requires but a casual thought of a thinking mind to picture the sea of chaos to which the assumption of such despotic authority would lead.

F. Tecumseh Waite

This is the same Fred Waite who rode with Billy the Kid as one of the Regulators upon the murder of their employer Lord John Tunstall. Waite, a Chickasaw (his mother was half white), was born in what was the Territory of the Five Civilized Nations (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and two others I can't bring immediately to mind) that later became Oklahoma. Historians don't know a lot about him, and we certainly don't know why the oldest son of a good family left the farm to the care of his younger brother and rode off to the Southwest Territories (which became New Mexico in 1912) in 1876, but that's what he did.

Two years later, what was left of the Regulators, including Billy the Kid and Waite, road into Tascosa, Texas with a string of stolen ponies, and stayed there for a while, until the money ran out. And then Fred decided to turn back toward home, "while I am able." Sources say he offered hospitality to Billy, but the Kid declined and went back to New Mexico.

Fred Waite went home, settled down, married, and became active in the government of the Five Nations, rising to the position of Attorney General before his death in 1895, at age 42.