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Show AN INCONGRUOUS LAND SYSTEM 453 tory were thus the Delaware, Iowa, and Confederated Peoria trust lands. They amounted to 860,163 acres and cost buyers an average price of $1.77 an acre instead of the $.90 to $1.10 an acre public lands could be acquired for with land warrants. Trust sales, as a way of getting around the preemption law, did not please Kansans who were convinced that an inner circle of white officers was profiting from the management of the Indian lands. They became sure of this when they saw what was happening to the nearly half a million acres of individual allotments the Indians had received, some of which required government approval before they could be conveyed. One small reserve fell directly into the hands of a group working closely with government officers. When next a number of treaties provided for the sale of six entire reservations to railroads, the largest being the 8 million-acre Osage Reservation, Kansas exploded in wrath and forced the withdrawal of the treaty for the Osage sale. Congressional opponents of abuse of the treaty making power used the Osage Treaty as a horrible example of the danger that the entire public land system might be destroyed by this new method of land disposal. Their continued attacks upon the treaty making power finally wore down its defenders. In 1870 the House of Representatives adopted an amendment to an appropriation bill that would end the treaty making power in Indian relations, but it was lost in conference. In 1871 the House had its way. After 5 or 6 years of defending its special prerogative or at times blandly ignoring attacks upon it, the Senate finally surrendered. An Act of March 3, 1871, made it no longer possible for administrative officers secretly to secure Indian approval of "treaties" which, with numerous important and highly significant provisions concerning land policy, became the law of the land when ratified in executive session by the Senate. Treaty making with Indians was thus ended.30 Although the Osage lands did not fall to the railroad by treaty, part of them came to it by virtue of a railroad land grant; the balance was held as trust lands and was neither subject to preemption nor homestead. More than two-fifths of the area of Kansas was either granted to railroads or passed to private ownership through the treaty making process. The individual Indian allotments were enormously attractive to land-hungry whites living near reservations on which they could not otherwise expect to acquire farms. In many instances the Indians rapidly disposed of their allotments im-providently. The allotment policy having been well established in Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, and Kansas, was rapidly developed thereafter, through agreements and legislation rather than treaties. It became a minor but increasingly important means for whites to acquire land. Even Indian reformers for a time came to think that the best way of integrating the Indian into the white culture was to make him an individual landowner dependent no longer on the bounty of the goverment but on the income from his land.37 In 1887 Congress, by the Dawes Act, extended the practice of making allotments to all Indian groups, thereby accelerating the breakup of 39 Cong. Globe, 41st Cong., 3d sess., I, 765 and II, 1811 and App., p. 389. I have relied here on my Fifty Million Acres, Chap. VI, "Struggle over the Osage Reserve: The End of Treaty Making." 37 A defective and very incomplete list of 11,072 patents conveying title to tracts generally of 160 to 640 acres is shown on p. 320, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1885 but if all those conveyed to the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks were included the number would be much larger. On allotments generally before 1887 see Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The Office of Indian Affairs. Its History, Activities and Organization (Baltimore, 1927) , pp. 78 ff.; Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks, passim; J. P. Kinney, A Continent Lost-A Civilization Won, pp. 81 ff. |