In 1888, he and other agents accompanied a large delegation of chiefs from the six Sioux reservations to Washington, D.C., to meet with Bureau of Indian Affairs officials to discuss the Dawes Act. A photograph of McLaughlin and the Standing Rock delegation, including the noted chief Sitting Bull and interpreter Louis Primeau, along with U.S. Commissioners, U.S. Indian Agents, interpreters and many Sioux chiefs, was taken on the front steps of the capital in 1888. The leaders were meeting to discuss implementation of the Dawes Act at the Great Sioux Reservation, then consisting of 22 million acres. The act called for distributing the reservation's communal lands as allotments to heads of individual households. The government intended for the Lakota to adopt subsistence-style farming on the European-American model and give up their nomadic hunting lifestyle. Under the legislation, the government would declare remaining lands after allotment as "surplus," to be made available for sale to non-Lakota people.