Clark, et al vs. Bates, et al.
wherein it fixed and determined the limits of the Indian country, at that time was modified and changed by the treaty between the United States and the Dakota Nation of Indians made in 1868 as it had been by various other treaties preceding this last; and the country in which the plaintiffs goods were seized, as alleged in the complaint and admitted in the answer, was not and had not been since the ratification of the treaty of 1868, Indian country.
The law as to the Indian country had been modified by a subsequent treaty. The Cherokee Tobacco case, 11 Wallace, 621; Foster and Elam v. Neilson, 2 Peters, 314.
The defendants admit that the instructions given by the court below as to the question of damages is correct as a general rule, but claim that the rule was not applicable to, and tended to mislead the jury in the case at bar. However good the intentions and purposes of the defendants may in fact have been—if we are right in our view of the law as above expressed—they committed against the plaintiffs a willful and unlawful act, from which flowed all the damages they sustained. The suing out of process, and the delivery of the goods to the officer having it, is part of the same transaction, and, in the eye of the law, willfully set on foot and consummated by the defendants against the plaintiffs. The defendants, in our view of the case, wrongfully and unlawfully seized and carried away the plaintiff's goods and property. They falsely represented to a proper officer that they had properly taken them, that they were subject to seizure and condemnation, and did thereby induce such officer to take out process and take these same goods off their hands. The officer, as soon as he became correctly informed and advised of the facts, returned the goods to the plaintiffs. Upon this state of facts, we have no doubt that the plaintiffs are entitled to recover from the original trespassers the difference in the value of the goods when and where taken and the value of the goods when and where returned.
All the damages are unquestionably the result of the unlawful acts of the defendants and such as would reasonably
