AZ vs. CA:21 California Exhibits, Vol. XXI; Nos. 4501-4597

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-2- A second statute which was thought by the court below to reflect upon the occupancy rights of the Walapai Indians is the act of March 3, 1865 (13 Stat. 541, 559) (Appendix I, F). The court regarded the establishment of the Colorado River Reservation by this act as effectuating a termination of such Walapai occupancy rights outside of that reservation as may theretofore have existed (R. 208). Such an inference is wholly unwarranted. It is true that an Indian agent once claimed that he discussed with Walapai chiefs the establishment of this reservation, but on this very point the evidence on which respondent relies (R. 130-132) makes it clear that no binding agreement was ever consummated.19 In fact, the whole grandiose scheme of subjugating and irrigating 75,000 acres of irrigable land and concentrating thousands of diverse and mutually hostile Indians thereon collapsed completely when the difficulties and expenses involved in i9"# * * These Indians there assembled were willing, for a small amount of beef and flour, to have signed any treaty which it had been my pleasure to write. I simply proposed to them that for all the one hundred and twenty thousand square miles, full of mines and rich enough to pay the public debt of the United States, they should abandon that territory and confine themselves to the elbow in the Colorado river, not more than seventy-five thousand acres. But I did not enter into any obligation on account of the United States to furnish them with seeds and argricultural implements. I simply told them that if I was elected to represent that Territory in this Congress I would endeavor to lay their claims before the Government, which they understood to be magnanimous, and that I hoped that this Congress would have the generosity and the justice to provide for these Indians, who have been robbed of their lands and their means of subsistence, and that they may be allowed to live there where they have always made their homes." (Statement by Superintendent Poston, Congressional Globe 1320, March 2, 1865.) A secondary reference to this proposal is contained in a statement by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in his annual report for 1864. (W.P. 33.) This statement makes it clear that the proposal was merely a plan considered but not definitely accepted either by the Walapai Tribe or by the United States.