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Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian agents provided contradictory reports regarding the influence and reliance on medicine men by Indians. Whether or not these reports were accurate is difficult to ascertain. Due to the often contradictory nature of these reports, it appears that medicine men continued to play prominent roles tribes throughout the nineteenth century. Even though some Indian agents insisted that their Indians were not “superstitiously attached to their medicine men,” others reported that medicine played a prominent role in tribal life.<ref><i>Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian</i> (1843): 201.</ref> Reports from the OIA agents during those years were often wildly inconsistent.
In 1860, B. W. Kimball, the physician for the Medicine Creek Treaty Indians stated the Indians’ trust in their medicine men was declining, but only after declaring that most Indians relied on their own “system of medicine” to treat health problems.<ref> Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian (1860): 201-202.</ref> Dr. Mills, agency physician for the Nebraskan Spotted Tail Agency claimed in 1877 that Indians in his agency had abandoned their own medicine-men and stopped performing their “superstitious and mysterious incantations.”<ref><i>Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian</i> (1877): 70.</ref> In 1884, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs H. Price blamed Indian medicine men’s condemnation of western medicines as “poison” and “the almost universal belief in spirits…” for high the Native American mortality rate. Price argued that Indians could not be effectively treated by agency physicians because they sought treatment from their own medicine men first.<ref><i>Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian</i> (1884): xxxv-xxxvi.</ref> In 1894, Frank C. Blackly the physician for the Southern Ute Agency minimized the importance of the tribe’s medicine men, but acknowledged that they were still able to “keep up the practice of their superstition…”<ref><i>Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian</i> (1894): 130.</ref>
Whether or not agency physicians were better than medicine men is debatable. Western medicine had learned how to control smallpox, but most of the important parts therapeutic revolution would not occur until the twentieth century. Indian agents even blamed their physicians’ incompetence for the continued survival of medicine men. Some agency physicians simply hoped that Indians would stop using medicine men when the older generation of Indians died out. In 1860, Dr. A. Coleman acknowledged that it would take years before Indians would trust western medicine because their practice of medicine had not only been passed “to them by a succession of generations” but was “interwoven with their religion” and government. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indians relied on their native medical practices and, when available, agency physicians. This reliance on agency physicians was ultimately limited by the both the number and quality of agency physicians and their unwillingness to reject their own traditions.
