OCR Text |
Show POWELL.] INDIAN CLAIM8 TO LAND. 43 difficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their several possessions. Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of our country, the boundaries to whose habitat is to be determined only in the most general way. Concerning some of these, our information is so vague that the very linguistic family they belonged to is in doubt. In the case of probably no one family are the data sufficient in amount and accuracy to determine positively the exact areas definitely claimed or actually held by the tribes. Even in respect of the territory of many of the tribes of the eastern United States, much of whose land was ceded by actual treaty with the Government, doubt exists. The fixation of the boundary points, when these are specifically mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is often extremely difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic names and the consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps. Moreover, when the Indian's claim to his land had been admitted by Government, and the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary cession by actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never attaching to it before. Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, sometimes of different families. It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way out of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties, and in paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a number of different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not infrequently several linguistic families were represented. It was the rule for each tribe, through its representatives, to cede its share of a certain territory, the natural boundaries of which as a whole are usually recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main purpose of the Government in treaty- making being to obtain possession of the land, comparatively little attention was bestowed to defining the exact areas occupied by the several tribes taking part in a treaty, except in so far as the matter was pressed upon attention by disputing claimants. Hence the territory claimed by each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely described, and occasionally not all the tribes interested in the proposed cession are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement applies more particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the data for determining ownership |