Charges of corruption, inefficiency, and failure dogged the Indian Service in the later years of the factory system and during Indian removal. As we have seen, many of these charges were off the mark – administration of the factories and of removal produced the results sought. It became advantageous to certain interests, after administrators had achieved their goals, to condemn the policies and the administrators. Simultaneously, the closest allies and supporters of those policies dropped out of the political debates swirling around Indian affairs, leaving the Indian Office vulnerable to its critics and open to newly active interests that sought to use Indian policy for their own ends.

This pattern recurs in the reservation era. Understanding the primary purpose of the reservations – containment of Indian populations as part of a managed expansion across the continent – reveals that the reservations did their job. So did reservation administrators. The gradual creation of reservations as parts of the removal experience and of constantly changing administrative environments forced field agents to adapt and develop administrative procedures and localized goals, even as they sought to synchronize those adaptations within the outlines and procedures of the agency's mission, previous decisions, and institutional structures. The adaptation and novel situations facing the Indian Office in the reservation era required the continued delegation of broad discretionary authority to field agents. Yet the same dynamics of Indian affairs politics carried over from the earlier eras.