Letter from Secretary of the Interior E. A. Hitchcock to President Theodore Roosevelt
This item is a letter regarding an Act of Congress, approved May 27, 1902, that permitted allotments of land on the Uintah Reservation to Uncompaghre Indians. Hitchcock relates the challenges and requests that Inspector McLaughlin be assigned to negotiat
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above quotation from said resolution.
With these conferences and that determination vividly
in mind, and in view of the letter and spirit of the resulting
legislation, I feel constrained to regard it as mandatory that
the said payment shall be made "to the Indians entitled thereto
without awaiting their action" upon their proposed allotment and
cession, and thereby free the negotiations, as the law clearly
intends, from the unjust and coercive influence of withholding such
payment until after the proposition has been submitted to the
Indians.
Furthermore, the law provides that -
"in addition to the allotments in severalty to the Uintah and
White River Utes of the Uintah Indian Reservation in the State of
Utah, the Secretary of the Interior shall, before any of said
lands are opened to disposition under any public land law, select
and set apart for the use of the common Indians of that reserva-
tion, such an amount of non-iirigable grazing lands therein at
one or more places as will subserve the reasonable requirements
of said Indians for the grazing of live stock.
Until, therefore, the lands in the reservation are
surveyed, the allotments cannot be made, nor can the grazing
lands "for the use in common of the Indians" be selected. It is
provided that such allotments and selections shall be made "be-
fore any of said lands are opened to disposition under any public
land law."
Congress having failed to make provision for the cost
of making such allotments and survey in the act authorizing the
negotiations, on the sixth of June last, I submitted to the Senate
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