| OCR Text |
Show 112 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONEE OF INDIAN AFFAIES. submitted application for a lease, and urgently insisted that the Depart-ment should apprdve it. This second application covered the same tracts that were covered by the rejected application. It was traus-mitted to this o%ce by Inspector Wright June 22, and by the omce submitted to the Department in a report dated Jnly 8,1899. One ground on which the companies insisted on the making of this new lease was that their offlcers could not in the time allowed, which was thirty days, identify and properly describe the tracts that had actually been improved by them respectively. This office recommended that the application be rejected, aud that Inspector Wright be directed to advise the applicants that it would be useless for them hereafter to submit any applications for a lease in the Cherokee or Creek nations which should not be in compliance with the regulations as amended in the Department's letter of May 22, and this recommendation of the office was approved by the Department in a letter of July 15,1899, addressed to Inspector Wright. No other leases have been considered except the application of the Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway Company for a liceose to mine gravel at a point near Fort Gibson, on Grand River, in the Cherokee Nation. Several applications had been made by different parties under the regulations of November 7,1898, and the railroad company having been tardy in making its application for a lease, was defeated on account of the prior rights of ot,her parties, and consequently an effort was made on its part to evade the law and regulations by this irregular method of a license. In reporting August 23,1899, on the application of the company for its license,, the office suggested to the Department that the Attorney-General iu an opinion dated July 21, 1885 (18 Opin-ions, 235), referring specifically to Cherokee lauds, had held that neither the President nor the Secretary of the Interior has authority to make a lease of Indian lands for grazing purposes, and that section 2116 of the Revised Statutes applies with full force and effect to the lands of the Cherokee Nation. Therefore, Congress having since given the Sec-retary of the Interior authority to make leases only as prescribed in section 13 of the Curtis Act, the granting of a license to mine gravel, as applied for by the Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway Company, would be in excess of the authority of the Secretary, no such license being warranted by sectiou 13. Moreover, to grant such a license would be an encroachment upon the right,s of those parties who made appli-cations prior to the application made by the railway company, end who complied fully with the law and regulations authorizing the leas-ing of lands in the Cherokee country. COLLECTION OF EEVENUES. As before stated, the agent for the Union Agency under date of July 23,1898, was given preliminary instructions for his guidance in the col-lection of revenues, royalties, ete., arising under the contracts, leases, and laws in existence in the several nations as provided for in the |
