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HERRERA v. WYOMING 

Opinion of the Court 

ary  of  Law  725  (1889)  (defining  “occupy”  as  “[t]o  hold  in
possession;  to  hold  or  keep  for  use”  and  noting  that  the 
word  “[i]mplies  actual  use,  possession  or  cultivation  by  a 
particular  person”);  id.,  at  944  (defining  “settle”  as  “[t]o
establish one’s self upon; to occupy, reside upon”). 

Historical  evidence  confirms  this  reading  of  the  word
“unoccupied.”    At  the  treaty  negotiations,  Commissioner
Taylor  commented  that  “settlements  ha[d]  been  made 
upon  [Crow  Tribe]  lands”  and  that  “white  people  [were]
rapidly  increasing  and  . . .  occupying  all  the  valuable 
lands.”  Proceedings  86.  It  was  against  this  backdrop  of 
white  settlement  that  the  United  States  proposed  to  buy 
“the right to use and settle” the ceded lands, retaining for 
the  Tribe  the  right  to  hunt.    Ibid.  A  few  years  after  the 
1868  Treaty  signing,  a  leader  of  the  Board  of  Indian 
Commissioners confirmed the connection between occupa-
tion  and  settlement,  explaining  that  the  1868  Treaty 
permitted  the  Crow  Tribe  to  hunt  in  an  area  “as  long  as
there  are  any  buffalo,  and  as  long  as  the  white  men  are 
not [in that area] with farms.”  Dept. of Interior, Ann. Rep.
of the Comm’r of Indian Affairs 500. 

Given the tie between the term “unoccupied” and a lack
of non-Indian settlement, it is clear that President Cleve-
land’s  proclamation  creating  Bighorn  National  Forest  did 
not “occupy” that area within the treaty’s meaning.  To the 
contrary, the President “reserved” the lands “from entry or
settlement.”  Presidential  Proclamation  No.  30,  29  Stat. 
909.  The proclamation gave “[w]arning . . . to all persons 
not  to  enter  or  make  settlement  upon  the  tract  of  land
reserved by th[e] proclamation.”  Id., at 910.  If anything,
this  reservation  made  Bighorn  National  Forest  more 
hospitable,  not  less,  to  the  Crow  Tribe’s  exercise  of  the 
1868 Treaty right.
  Wyoming’s counterarguments are unavailing.  The State 
first  asserts  that  the  forest  became  occupied  through  the 
Federal  Government’s  “exercise  of  dominion  and  control”