Fortunately, numerous texts from the thousands of nineteenth century Indians who could write have survived the passage of time.  My research relies upon letters written by and for Native peoples, predominantly from the 1880s, gathered from Indian Affairs agency records at the National Archives collections in Kansas City, Denver, Oklahoma City, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.  Most Native letters in these collections are buried in unorganized boxes of miscellaneous letters sent and received by Indian agents.  Agency records from the 1880s and early 1890s were haphazardly kept and preserved, some agencies are missing wide gaps of years, and others have few surviving documents from any part of the nineteenth century.  Some are preserved better than others.  The Pine Ridge Agency records were well looked after, for example, but the Fort Hall and Wind River records from the 1880s and early 1890s have disappeared.  The records of the Commissioner’s office in Washington D.C. were well kept and hundreds of letters from Natives were found in its boxes of letters received (which is regrettably sorted by date of arrival rather than by sender).  The office received tens of thousands of letters per year (over forty thousand in 1890 alone) from agents, politicians, companies, the general public, and Indians.