consideration for this territory was the same number of acres elsewhere located. The inducement to the bargain set forth in the treaty was ‘the anxious desire of the Government of the United States to secure to the Cherokee nation of Indians a permanent home, and which shall, under the most solemn guarantee of the United States, be and remain theirs forever—a home that shall never in all future time be embarrassed by having extended around it the lines or placed over it the jurisdiction of a Territory or State, or be pressed upon by the extension in any way of the limits of any existing State.’ To assure them of their title, a patent for the Territory was issued.”
This was the view of the Department of the Interior in 1870. In 1876 the Department says that affairs in the Indian Territory are “complicated and embarrassing, and the question is directly raised whether an extensive section of country is to be allowed to remain for an indefinite period practically an uncultivated waste, or whether the Government shall determine to reduce the size of the reservation.”
The phrase “whether the Government shall determine to reduce the size of the reservation” sounds much better than “whether the Government shall rob the Indians of a few millions of acres of land;” but the latter phrase is truth, and the other is the spirit of lying.
The commissioner says that the question is a difficult one, and should be “considered with calmness, and a full purpose to do no injustice to the Indians.” He gives his own personal opinion on it “with hesitancy,” but gives it nevertheless, that “public policy will soon require the disposal of a large portion of these lands to the Government for the occupancy either of other tribes of Indians or of white people. There is a very general and growing opinion that observance of the strict letter of treaties with Indians is in many cases at variance with their own best interests and with sound public policy.” He adds, however, that it must not be understood from this recommen-
