The Mackinac Indian Agency of Mackinac Island was the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C.'s official representative to the many Native people of the northern Michigan area. The Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Mackinac Agency in 1836 was Henry Schoolcraft. The government's Indian policy at the time was one of removal of all Native people to the west of the Mississippi. Schoolcraft (married to a Native woman) was somewhat sympathetic to the desire of the Michigan Native people to remain in their historic homeland. He was instrumental in helping accomplish the Treaty of Washington signed in the summer of 1836. The treaty ceded to the United States a vast territory of more than 13 million acres or about one-third of the present state of Michigan. It was then a territory and thought to be worth many millions of dollars (mostly its timber). Schoolcraft believed that the Ottawa and Ojibwe (Chippewa) people would be better off learning subsistence farming, and that meant giving up their widespread hunting lands.