Clark, et al vs. Bates, et al.
game chanced to be most plenty, and claimed and occupied such regions of country, as for the time being, best suited their convenience. To the government of the United States, little was then known as to much of this region, and still less as to the limits of territory claimed by the several bands of Indians. Under the Act of March 30, 1802, (2 Stat., 139) which provided for a shifting boundary line, such as is contended for by the plaintiffs, from a multiplicity of treaties with the several tribes and bands, it became difficult to ascertain what were the limits of the Indian country, though that Act applied to a timbered country, wherein the Indians are much less migratory in their habits than those who live in prairie regions. We should hardly expect Congress to perpetuate these inconveniences and multiply them ten fold by applying the same principle to the region in question. When a law makes it highly penal to do an act on one side of a line which it is lawful to do on the other side of the line, it certainly is highly important there should be easy means of determining very definitely where such line is.
But the best evidence of the intention of Congress in the premises, is the language used in section 1, of the Act, and whether we give to that language its most plain and obvious meaning, or apply to it the most rigid rules of grammatical construction, it leads to the conclusion contended for by the defendants.
So far as we are aware, there is no reported adjudication of the question under consideration, but the understanding of the framers of the Act of June 30, 1834, was in accordance with our construction of it. The committee which reported the Act to the House, remarked, with reference to the Indian country, as defined by the first section, as follows: "On the west side of the Mississippi, its limits can only he changed by Legislative Act," "on the east side of that river it will continue to embrace only those sections of country not within any State, to which the Indian title shall not be extinguished." (See report of Committee, House of Representatives, No. 474, 1st Session, 23d Cong., 1, 10.) And the present Attorney General of the United States takes the same view of the law
