as to whether the Indian has any rights that can be enforced when the assertion of his claims is opposed by the interests of white people. This doubt is the natural outgrowth of our dishonest and vacillating dealings with the Indians through the legislative and executive branches of our government. The Supreme Court of the United States, however, in an opinion just handed down has put a different face on this matter. It perceives no distinction to the prejudice of the Indians when they and white litigants ask that great court to measure and determine rights and obligations growing out of contracts between them. This doctrine was announced in a case of great importance which secures to the Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes property interests estimated to be over thirty million dollars in value which the white people of Oklahoma otherwise would have secured.

Our treatment of the Indians has not been creditable to our race. Solemn undertakings with them have been considered lightly, and with little compunction have been put aside on specious arguments. When the observance of treaty rights was inconvenient to us, they have been disregarded upon the theory that as the Indian tribes were not sovereign powers they could make no treaties with our government that would bind us. But whenever the authority of the Supreme Court was

invoked to protect the Indians, that court has never hesitated in a case properly before it, to hold as inviolate upon the plainest principles of justice every right secured to them by a fair interpretation of the language relied upon. And with a practical and accurate sense of justice the court has gone further and said that it will construe a treaty with the Indians as that unlettered people understand it, and as justice and reason demand in all cases where power is exerted by the strong over those to whom they owe care and protection, and counterpoise the inequality by the superior justice which looks only to the substance of the right without regard to technical rules of construction.

The attitude of our Supreme Court toward the Indian should bring a glow of pride to the cheek of every lover of justice and fair play. While Congress has yielded to the importunities of white people to divest the Indians little by little of their power, their lands and their character, the Supreme Court has taken high ground when the Indians have gone before it for protection, and by refusing to sanction measures intended to destroy rights guaranteed to them, has saved us as a people from standing exposed and humiliated as entirely faithless to our promises, our trust and a decent sense of honor.

The status of the American Indian under our government is anomalous and little understood. It was first defined by the United States Supreme Court in the year 1832 in the case of

secured to the Cherokee nation by the United States Government, but the Georgia court overruled his plea, and he was convicted and sentenced to four years at hard labor in the State penitentiary. From the judgment of the court he appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The main opinion of the Supreme Court was announced by the great Chief Justice Marshall. It was a profound discussion of the rights of the Indians within the jurisdiction of the United States, and the conclusions of the court as to the binding effect of treaties between the Indians and the United States established the foundation upon which the rights of Indians since then have been secured whenever those rights were assailed before the Supreme Court. It was there decided that the discovery of parts of this continent gave to the government by whose subjects it was made only the exclusive right as against other nations to purchase the soil from the Indian occupants, but gave no dominion over the Indians themselves.

The making of treaties between the mother countries and the Indians, and later by the United States and the Indians, was a necessary and logical proceeding to define the relations of the parties, and was greatly desired to secure the friendship and aid of the powerful tribes in the event of war with an enemy. The treaties were clothed with all the formalities and terms employed by one nation when dealing with another, and the independence and integrity of the Indian nations were fully recognized and never questioned. It was only when by the great growth of white population the Indians' prowess began to wane and their co-operation was less essential that claims began to be asserted that our treaty obligations were not binding on us, and that we might restrict the activities, assail the integrity and question the property rights of the Indian tribes.

The court held that the legislation of the State of Georgia was in direct hostility to treaties which marked the

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boundaries of the Cherokee nation, and guaranteed to them all the land within the boundary; pledged the faith of the United States to restrain their citizens from trespassing on it, and recognized the pre-existing right of the Cherokee nation to govern itself. That as the forcible seizure and abduction of Worcester was in violation of rights secured by the treaty with the Cherokees the sentence of the trial court was void and the release of Worcester was ordered.

This decision of the Supreme Court while establishing a great principle, restored to the Indians at that time no substantial rights. The officers of the State of Georgia treated the mandate of the Supreme Court with contempt, and President Jackson refused to enforce the remedies allowed by the court for the protection of the Indians. Indignities and cruelty were heaped upon them until, to end the intolerable condition, the Cherokees reluctantly entered into a treaty with the Federal government providing for their removal to a recently acquired domain west of the Mississippi River, known as the Louisiana Purchase, on a tract of land which was so far away that it was assumed white people would never have use for it. The others of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles, likewise were removed to this same Indian country in response to popular clamor from their white neighbors, who wished to be rid of them and possess themselves of the Indians' lands. Technically, these removals were authorized and justified by treaties entered into between the government and the Indians, though with extreme reluctance on the part of the Indians. Under thesc treaties the removal of the Indians was accomplished between 1830 and 1840.

The Indians left their old homes in sorrow, but they were in a measure compensated by the assurance that in the new country to which they were going conditions were to be very different, and they would be happy again. The treaties provided that the new

lands allotted to them in exchange for those they were leaving should be owned by the tribes in fee simple; that they should have the right to govern themselves according to their forms of government, unvexed by the strange conventions and sense of honor of the white man. It was contemplated that they should find here what the government had vainly guaranteed to them in the East-a home on their own lands, protected from the intrusion of white adventurers and from the intermeddling of white lawmakers.

They found their new home to be a garden spot. Here they prospered and became in a still larger sense civilized Indians. They took root in the resources of the country and expanded. They organized their governments, built churches, school houses and seminaries, and their youths were taught to value education. Their governments, laws and institutions met their simple needs, and they were in a fair way of realizing their hopes of a peaceful

career, when again came the inevitable white man. Attracted by a fertile soil, salubrious climate and opportunities for profitable merchandizing, the white people came, a few at first, and as the character of the beautiful country became known abroad, they continued to come in large numbers, as no effectual measures were employed by the government to keep them out, until in 1880 they outnumbered the Indian owners of the soil. To govern this heterogeneous population there were no adequate laws. Society and rights of property demanded that the white residents of this country should conform to some kind of organized government, and it was no longer possible adequately to protect the property interests of the Indians theretofore guarded as an interest in the tribal estate, in the old way. Accordingly, it was proposed that preparations be made to create a State of this Indian country with or without the consent of the Indians.

This situation created one of the most perplexing problems that ever faced our government. We had failed

in our undertaking to keep white people out of the Indian domain, and in 1900 it was reported to Congress that there were then in the Indian Territory three hundred and fifty thousand American citizens, other than Indians, without any political privileges, without local self-government, mere tenants at will and peasants of the soil, to seventy thousand persons of Indian extraction. They could build neither roads nor bridges, neither schools nor higher institutions of learning, neither asylums for the unfortunate, nor refuges for the poor.

Foreseeing the inevitable occupation of Indian Territory by the dominant race, in 1898 Congress passed an act, called the Curtis Act, for the protection of white people in the Indian Territory. One of the principal features of this act was that providing the method by which white people could acquire title to the lots occupied by them in the towns and cities that had grown up over the land. Previously to this act, white people had enclosed, occupied and built upon these town lots without a vestige of title; they had bought and sold a mere possessory right to lots of bills of sales, trusting to an indulgent Congress in the future to confirm these claims of title. This faith in the action of Congress induced the building of valuable and lasting improvements, business blocks and residences in scores of Indian Territory towns before this law was passed.

The legal title to the lands of the Five Tribes was in the tribes for the common use of their members, but the fact that so extensive an area was held under a system that did not recognize private property in land presented a serious obstacle to the creation of the State, which Congress desired to organize for that part of the country. And, with the view of removing these difficulties, it had provided by an act in 1893 for the appointment of a commission, known as the Dawes Commission, authorized to enter into negotiations with these tribes for the extinguishment of their title, either by cession to the United States or by allot

ment in severalty among their members. As might have been anticipated, the commission found that many of the Indians were greatly opposed to any change; some of them held passionately to their institutions from custom and patriotism, and others held with equal tenacity because of the advantages and privileges they enjoyed. After several years of negotiations, their opposition was so far overcome that provisional agreements were inade which contemplated most radical changes in the political and property rights of the Indians. These agreements provided for enrolling the members of the tribes and the allotment of all their lands among the members so enrolled.

The Indians were conscious of their inability to cope with the white man upon equal terms in the struggle for existence, and it is not surprising that they were unwilling to have their lands formed into a State and to exchange their former sense of security for a precarious and untried mode of living, subject to a State government organized and directed by white men, and expose to hazards with which they were entirely inexperienced, the tenure of their allotted land, which was to furnish the only means of subsistence for most of them. The desideratum of the white people here, as elsewhere, was the ownership of the Indian lands. Through the operation of natu. ral laws, this result was to be facilitated by the Indian's inexperience and ignorance of values; of business methods and ideas of husbandry, and his weakness to resist an offer of money for his land. But a more insidious agency for divesting him of his land, and one justified by the law, would be created by the exercise of the power to tax, which has been characterized as the power to destroy.

Pressed for an agreement to abolish his tribal government and consent to the allotment of the lands in severalty to the members of the tribes (he was not asked to agree to statehood, though that change was in view), the Indian said he would agree to it upon

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certain conditions. This agreement may be illustrated by the negotiations with the Creeks. In March, 1900, they formally entered into an agreement with the United States government, which was the first co-operative progress of the Creek Tribe and the government in breaking up the old order. This agreement was ratified by Congress and approved by the President of the United States. Among the first provisions of that agreement was a condition imposed for the protection of the Indian under the Indian under the contemplated white man's regime. It provided for an allotment of 160 acres of land to each member of the tribe, and that each citizen should select from his allotment 40 acres of land as a homestead, which should be non-taxable and inalienable and free from any incumbrance whatever for twenty-one years, for which he should have a separate deed conditioned accordingly.

Afterward on June 30, 1902, a supplemental agreement was made between the government and the Creeks to include matters not previously considered, and the agreement to make the homestead non-taxable for twentyone years was incorporated also in this supplemental agreement. The lands of the Creek Tribe were accordingly allotted to over 18,000 members of the tribe, and in each instance two deeds or patents were made, one for 120 acres, and the other conveying 40 acres in which the above covenant appears. It was provided also that the acceptance of such patent or deed should operate as an assent on the part of the Indian to the allotment of the lands in accordance with the provisions of the agreement and as a relinquishment of all his interest in other parts of the common property.

In 1906 Congress passed an act providing for the admission of the State of Oklahoma, including the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes. The Constitution of the State, which was adopted the next year, provides that all existing rights of the Indians shall continue as if no change in the government had taken place, and that