Indian Boundaries

The most difficult and laborious feature of the work is that involved under the first of these five subdivisions. The ordinary reader in following the treaty provisions, in which the boundaries of the various cessions are so specifically and minutely laid down, would anticipate but little difficulty in tracing those boundaries upon the modern map. In this he would find himself sadly at fault. In nearly all of the treaties concluded half a century or more ago, wherein cessions of land were made, occur the names of boundary points which are not to be found on any modern map, and which have never been known to people of the present generation living in the vicinity.

In many of the older treaties this is the case with a large proportion of the boundary points mentioned. The identification and exact location of these points thus becomes at once a source of much laborious research. Not unfrequently weeks and even months of time have been consumed, thousands of old maps and many volumes of books examined, and a voluminous correspondence conducted with local historical societies or old settlers, in the effort to ascertain the location of a single boundary point.

To illustrate this difficulty, the case of "Hawkins' line" may be cited, a boundary line mentioned in the cession by the Cherokees by treaty of October 2, 1798. An examination of more than four thousand old and modern maps and the scanning of more than fifty volumes failed to show its location or to give even the slightest clue to it. A somewhat extended correspondence with numerous persons in Tennessee, including the veteran annalist, Ramsey, also failed to secure the desired information. It was not until months of time had been consumed and probable sources of information had been almost completely exhausted that, through the persevering inquiries of Hon. John M. Lea, of Nashville, Tenn., in conjunction with the present writer's own investigations, the line was satisfactorily identified as being the boundary line mentioned in the Cherokee treaty of July 2, 1791, and described as extending from the North Carolina boundary "north to a point from which a line is to be extended to the river Clinch that shall pass the Holston at the ridge which divides the waters running into Little River from those running into the Tennessee."

It gained the title of "Hawkins' line" from the fact that a man named Hawkins surveyed it.

That this is not an isolated case, and as an illustration of the number and frequency of changes in local geographical names in this country, it may be remarked that in twenty treaties concluded by the Federal Government with the various Indian tribes prior to the year 1800, in an aggregate of one hundred and twenty objects and places therein recited, seventy-three of them are wholly ignored in the latest edition of Colton's Atlas; and this proportion will hold with but little diminution in the treaties negotiated during the twenty years immediately succeeding that date.

Another and most perplexing question has been the adjustment of the conflicting claims of different tribes of Indians to the same territory. In the earlier days of the Federal period, when the entire country west of the Alleghanies was occupied or controlled by numerous contiguous tribes, whose methods of subsistence involved more or less of nomadic habit, and who possessed large tracts of country then of no greater value than merely to supply the immediate physical wants of the hunter and fisherman, it was not essential to such tribes that a careful line of demarkation should define the limits of their respective territorial claims and jurisdiction. When, however, by reason of treaty negotiations with the United States, with a view to the sale to the latter of a specific area of territory within clearly-defined boundaries, it became essential for the tribe with whom the treaty was being negotiated to make assertion and exhibit satisfactory proof of its possessory title to the country it proposed to sell, much controversy often arose with other adjoining tribes, who claimed all or a portion of the proposed cession. These conflicting claims were sometimes based upon ancient and immemorial occupancy, sometimes upon early or more recent conquest, and sometimes upon a sort of wholesale squatter-sovereignty title whereby a whole tribe, in the course of a sudden and perhaps forced migration, would settle down upon an unoccupied portion of the territory of some less numerous tribe, and by sheer intimidation maintain such occupancy.

In its various purchases from the Indians, the Government of the United States, in seeking to quiet these conflicting territorial claims, have not unfrequently been compelled to accept from two, and even three, different tribes separate relinquishments of their respective rights, titles, and claims to the same section of country. Under such circumstances it can readily be seen, what difficulties would attend a clear exhibition upon a single map of these various coincident and overlapping strips of territory. The State of Illinois affords an excellent illustration. The conflicting cessions in that State may be briefly enumerated as follows:

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