After a somewhat careful examination of the question I do not believe that the lands for which this money is to be paid were, to quote the language of section 15 of the Indian appropriation bill, already set out, “ceded in trust by article 3 of the treaty between the United States and said Choctaw and Chickasaw nations of Indians which was concluded April 28, 1866,” etc.  It is agreed that that treaty contained no express limitation upon the uses to which the United States might put the territory known as the leased district.  The lands were ceded by terms sufficiently comprehensive to have passed the full title of the Indians.  The limitation upon the use to which the Government might put them is sought to be found in a provision of the treaty by which the United States undertook to exclude white settlers 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