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Page Number: 19.0

16 

HERRERA v. WYOMING 

Opinion of the Court 

May  11,  1858).  Federal  negotiators  had  every  reason  to
bring  up  statehood  if  they  intended  it  to  extinguish  the 
Tribe’s hunting rights.

In  the  face  of  this  evidence,  Wyoming  nevertheless 
contends that the 1868 Treaty expired at statehood pursu-
ant  to  the  Mille  Lacs  analysis.  Wyoming  does  not  argue
that  the  legal  act  of  Wyoming’s  statehood  abrogated  the 
treaty  right,  and  it  cannot  contend  that  statehood  is  ex-
plicitly  identified  as  a  treaty  expiration  point.  Instead, 
Wyoming draws on historical sources to assert that state-
hood, as a practical matter, marked the arrival of “civiliza-
tion” in the Wyoming Territory and thus rendered all the
lands in the State occupied.  Brief for Respondent 48.  This 
claim cannot be squared with Mille Lacs. 

Wyoming’s  arguments  boil  down  to  an  attempt  to  read 
the treaty impliedly to terminate at statehood, precisely as 
Mille  Lacs  forbids.  The  State  sets  out  a  potpourri  of  evi-
dence  that  it  claims  shows  statehood  in  1890  effectively 
coincided  with  the  disappearance  of  the  wild  frontier:  for
instance,  that  the  buffalo  were  extinct  by  the  mid-1870s; 
that  by  1880,  Indian  Department  regulations  instructed 
Indian  agents  to  confine  tribal  members  “ ‘wholly  within 
the  limits  of  their  respective  reservations’ ”;  and  that  the
Crow  Tribe  stopped  hunting  off-reservation  altogether  in
1886.  Brief for Respondent 47 (quoting §237 Instructions
to Indian Agents (1880), as published in Regulations of the
Indian Dept. §492 (1884)). 

Herrera  contradicts  this  account,  see  Reply  Brief  for
Petitioner 5, n. 3, and the historical record is by no means 
clear.  For  instance,  game  appears  to  have  persisted  for
longer  than  Wyoming  suggests.  See  Dept.  of  Interior, 
Ann.  Rep.  of  the  Comm’r  of  Indian  Affairs  495  (1873) 
(Black  Foot:  “On  the  other  side  of  the  river  below,  there
are  plenty  of  buffalo;  on  the  mountains  are  plenty  of  elk 
and  black-tail  deer;  and  white-tail  deer  are  plenty  at  the
foot  of  the  mountain”).  As  for  the  Indian  Department