A statute, not an order with Lincoln's name on it

The sentence that created the Colorado River reservation is in the statutes at large, and the Supreme Court quoted it in 1941 because a railroad case turned on what the sentence did and did not extinguish. Justice Douglas, in United States v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co., prints the Act of March 3, 1865, 13 Stat. 541, at page 559: "All that part of the public domain in the Territory of Arizona, lying west of a direct line from Half-Way Bend to Corner Rock on the Colorado River, containing about seventy-five thousand acres of land, shall be set apart for an Indian reservation for the Indians of said river and its tributaries."

That is the instrument. March 3, 1865, is also a day on which Abraham Lincoln was alive. He would be shot in April. Some later retellings, including pages that circulate as tribal newsletters and local histories, say he created this reservation by executive order on that date. The Court is quoting a statute. Kappler's compilation, which prints the later boundary orders, says the reserve was established by the act of March 3, 1865, and by the executive orders that followed. An executive order with Lincoln's signature setting these lines aside was not in the documents opened for this essay, and the statute was. The claim does not survive the citation.

Poston's council, and a canal instead of a treaty

Douglas goes to the floor of the House for the intention. Charles D. Poston, territorial delegate and a former superintendent of Indian affairs, explained the bill on March 2, 1865. The Globe passage the Court uses says Poston had called a council of the confederated tribes of the Colorado, attended by principal chiefs and headmen of the Yuma, Mojave, Yavapai, Walapai, and Chemehuevi. He told them they should abandon their lands and confine themselves to a place on the river that he would later ask Congress to reserve. He made no written treaty. He said he thought the government could treat them fairly without one, and that the people at the council, for a small amount of beef and flour, would have signed any treaty he wrote. He proposed, instead, to try to get Congress to provide for them if he were elected.

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in 1864, described the same arrangement as a compromise. If the Indians confined themselves to the reservation and yielded claims beyond it, they would get, instead of an annuity, an irrigating canal estimated at something near $100,000, meant to insure their crops so they could support themselves. Douglas's reading of all this is narrow and explicit. Congress was making an offer it hoped would be accepted. He finds no clear sign that the 1865 act was meant to extinguish every right the Walapai held in their own country. The Walapai, he writes, did not accept the offer. In 1874 they were forcibly removed to the Colorado River reservation and left in a body the next year. They were then allowed to remain in their old range during good behavior. The case is a Walapai case. The statute's words, "Indians of said river and its tributaries," are wider than one nation. The Court's point still governs the document: the act set land apart. It did not, by itself, record a treaty the river tribes had signed.

Who went, and who stayed

Bean and Vane's Mojave chapter is the place to watch the split that the statute did not describe. After the reservation was established south of the Mojave Valley, on ground earlier associated with the Halchidhoma and later with the Chemehuevi, about eight hundred Mojave under Aratêve moved toward it. Aratêve is Irataba. The rest, under the five more militant leaders, stayed in the Mojave Valley. The overview calls that a permanent division. Agents urged people to resettle and had moderate success. Many who moved stayed only a short time. The people who refused remained near Fort Mojave, where they had been before the Americans.

The early years at the new reservation, as the overview compiles them from agents' reports, were bad farming years. Travelers disrupted floodplain planting. In 1867 Mojave began an irrigation canal and the government funds ran out six months later. A whooping-cough epidemic at Fort Mojave in 1868 killed about a hundred Mojave and spread downriver. In 1870 a canal finished in July flooded, destroyed crops, and washed banks. The overview, citing Price, says Aratêve was becoming disenchanted with alkaline soil and too little water, and it gives a figure of three thousand Mojave at Fort Mojave against a few hundred at the reservation. Those counts are the agents' counts, through Bean and Vane. They are not a door-to-door census this site re-did. They are enough to show that "the Mojave went to the reservation" is false.

Kappler's heading on the compiled orders lists the Colorado River reserve as occupied by Chemehuevi, Walapai, Kowia, Cocopa, Mohave, and Yuma, with an area he states as 376 square miles, established by the 1865 act and the executive orders. That heading is a compiler's description of occupancy, not the text of the act. The act names "the Indians of said river and its tributaries" and the seventy-five thousand acres. Later orders enlarged the ground.

Grant's lines, and the reservation that stayed at the fort

On November 22, 1873, Grant withdrew from sale and added to the reservation a section of bottomland adjoining it on the north, extending to within six miles of Ehrenberg, bounded on the west by the river and on the east by mountains and mesas. On November 16, 1874, he set a larger tract that reached into California: from where the La Paz Arroyo enters the river four miles above Ehrenberg, east to the crest of La Paz Mountain, north to Black Mountain, northwest across the river to Monument Peak, southwest to Riverside Mountain, and back to the beginning. On May 15, 1876, he noted that the 1874 order had purported to cover, and had not covered, all the lands of 1865 and 1873, and that the 1874 order had not revoked the 1873 order. He declared that lands withdrawn by either order were still set apart, and he restated the boundaries. Those three documents are executive orders. They amend a reservation Congress had already created. They are not the 1865 act, and they are not Lincoln's.

The people who stayed in the valley got a different reservation, later. Bean and Vane write that agriculture in the old style had become impossible, with the railroad taking land and a dam on the river proposed, and that a renewed effort to move the valley Mojave down to the Colorado River reservation failed. In 1910 and 1911 the government set aside the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation: about 14,000 acres of the old military post and an additional 17,328 acres. The overview is the source for those acres. The executive-order numbers sometimes attached to the Fort Mojave lines were not the pages open beside the 1865 statute, so they are not recited here. The acres and the years are.

In 1937, Bean and Vane write, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, including some Chemehuevi, adopted a constitution. That is as far as the overview's sentence goes. A precise approval date and the Indian Reorganization Act's section numbers were not re-checked in the statute book for this essay, so they are omitted rather than copied from memory.

Irataba's death, one last time

The overview says Aratêve died in 1874, citing Smith, and that the death compounded the reservation's troubles. Dickinson College, citing a different book, says 1878. The reservation essay does not need him to die in a single year to be true. It needs the statute, the offer Poston described, the split between the eight hundred who went and the people who stayed, Grant's boundary orders, and the later acres at the fort. Lincoln's executive order is the item that does not belong on the list.

The novel ends before most of this. Readers finish a book set in 1858 and 1859 and meet a fort that is still a fort. The reservation is the aftermath. It is also the reason a modern address in Needles and a modern government at Parker are not the same story, even though both are Mojave stories. This site is not affiliated with the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe. The Tribe's own site is the place for the government that exists now. This page stops at the documents that drew the lines.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• United States v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co., 314 U.S. 339 (1941), opinion of Justice Douglas, quoting the Act of March 3, 1865, 13 Stat. 541, 559, and discussing Charles D. Poston's explanation in the Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 2d Session, March 2, 1865, p. 1320, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1864. LII text.
• Charles J. Kappler, compiler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 1, executive orders for the Colorado River Reserve dated November 22, 1873, November 16, 1874, and May 15, 1876, signed by U. S. Grant. Read from a standard Kappler printing of those orders.
• Bean and Vane (2002), Mojave chapter, for the movement of about 800 Mojave under Aratêve, the people who stayed in the valley, the acreage of the Fort Mojave reservation in 1910-1911, the 1874 death date via Smith (1977), and the Colorado River Indian Tribes constitution in 1937. NPS history copy.

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