lers and in the expressions
found in the treaties made at the same time with the Creeks and other
tribes of the purpose of the United States to use the lands ceded by
those tribes for the settlement of friendly Indians.

The stipulation as to the exclusion of white settlers might well have
reference solely to the national lands retained by the Choctaw and
Chickasaw tribes, and the reason for the nonincorporation in the treaty
with them of a statement of the purpose of the Government in connection
with the use of the lands is well accounted for by the fact that as
to these lands the Government had already, under the treaty of 1855,
secured the right to use them perpetually for the settlement of friendly
Indians. This was not true as to the lands of the other tribes referred
to. The United States paid to the Choctaws and Chickasaws $300,000, and
the failure to insert the words that are called words of limitation
in this treaty points, I think, clearly to the conclusion that the
commissioners on the part of the Government and the Indians themselves
must have understood that this Government was acquiring something
more than a mere right to settle friendly Indians, which it already
possessed, and something more than the mere release of the right which
the Choctaws and Chickasaws had under the treaty of 1855 to select
locations on these lands if they chose.

Undoubtedly it was the policy of this Government for the time to
hold these and the adjacent lands as Indian country, and many of the
expressions in the proclamations of my predecessors and in the reports
of the Indian Bureau and of the Secretary of the Interior mean this and
nothing more. This is quite different from a conditional title, which
limits the grant to a particular use and works a reinvestment of full
title in the Indian grantors when that use ceases. But those who hold
most strictly that a use for Indian purposes, where it is expressed,
is a limitation of title seem to agree that the United States might
pass a fee absolute to other Indian tribes in the lands ceded for their
occupancy. Certainly it was not intended that in settling friendly
Indians upon these lands the Government was to be restrained in its
policy of allotment and individual ownership. If for an adequate
consideration, by treaty, the United States placed upon these lands
other Indian tribes, it was competent to give them patents in fee for
a certain and agreed reservation. This being so, when