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Show 24 few of their habits; in all other respects superior to all but a few of the civilized Indian tribes of the country, and the equal of the most civilized thereof. This description of the pueblo Indians, I think, will be deemed by all who know them as faithful and true in all respects. Such was their character at the time of the acquisition of New Mexico by the United States; such is their character now. At the time the act of 1834 was passed there were no such Indians as these in the United States, unless it be one or two reservations or tribes, such as the Senecas or Oneidas of New York, to whom, it is clear, the eleventh section of the statute could have no application (Federal Indian Law, pp. 899-900). When it became necessary to extend the laws regulating intercourse with the Indians over our new acquisitions from Mexico, there was ample room for the exercise of those laws regarding nomadic Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and other tribes whose incapacity for self-government required both for themselves and for the citizens of the country this guardian care of the General Government. The Pueblo Indians, if, indeed, they can be called Indians, had nothing in common with this class. The degree of civilization which they had attained centuries before their willing submission to all the laws of the Mexican Government, the full recognition by that government of all their civil rights, including that of voting and holding office, and in their absorption into the general mass of the population (except that they held their lands in common), all forbid the idea that they should be classed with the Indian Tribes for whom the Intercourse Acts were made, or that in the intent of the Act of 1851 its provisions were applicable to them. The Tribes for whom the Act of 1834 was made, were those semi-independent tribes, whom our government has always recognized as exempt from our laws, whether within or without the limits of an organized State or Territory, and left, in regard to their domestic government, to their own rules and traditions; in whom we have recognized the capacity to make treaties, and with whom the governments, state and national, deal, with a few exceptions only, in their national or tribal character, and not as individuals. If the Pueblo Indians differ from the other inhabitants of New Mexico in holding lands in common, and in a certain patriarchal form of domestic life, they only resemble in this regard the Shakers and other communistic societies in this country, and cannot for that reason be classed with the Indian Tribes of whom we have been speaking. We have been urged by counsel, in view of these considerations, to declare that they are citizens of the United States and of New Mexico. But abiding by the rule which we think |