There was the need of the services of some disinterested person to manage the difficult matter of dividing the tribal tracts and allotting to each Indian his own acres, and Miss Fletcher was asked by the President to undertake this work.
"Why do you trust Miss Fletcher above any one else?" asked President Cleveland on one occasion when he was receiving a delegation of Omahas at the White House.
"We have seen her in our homes; we have seen her in her home. We find her always the same," was the reply.
The work which Miss Fletcher did in allotting the land to the Omahas was so successfully handled that she was appealed to by the Government to serve in the same capacity for the Winnebago and Nez Percé Indians. The law whose passage was secured by her zeal was the forerunner the Severalty Act of 1885 which marked a change in policy of the Government and ushered in a better era for all the Indian tribes.
"What led you to undertake this important work?" Miss Fletcher was asked.
"The most natural desire in the world—the impulse to help my friends where I saw the need," she replied. "I did not set out resolved to have a career—to form and to reform. There is no story in my life. It has always been just one step at a time—one thing which I have tried to do as well as I could and which has led on to something else. It has all been in the day's work."
Miss Fletcher has been much interested in the work of the Boy and Girl Scouts and in the Campfire Societies, because she feels that in this way many children are brought to an appreciation of the great out-of-doors and win health, power, and joy which the life of cities cannot give. For them she has made a collection of Indian games and dances.
"Just as the spirit of Sir Walter Scott guides us through the Scottish lake country and as Dickens leads us about old London, so the spirit of the Indians should make us more at home in the forests of America," said Miss Fletcher. "In sharing the happy fancies of these first children of America we may win a new freedom in our possession of the playground of the great out-of-doors."