Source: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Smith_v._Stevens
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 13:10:24+00:00

Document:
By treaty of June 3d, 1825,  the United States concluded a treaty with the Kansas Indians, containing mutual cessions of territory. The sixth article of the treaty contained a provision that there should be reserved for the benefit of each of the half-breeds of the Kansas Indians named in it (Victoria Smith being one of them), a certain specified allotment of land out of the quantity ceded by the nation to the United States; to be located, &c.
The lands were afterwards surveyed, located, and numbered according to the treaty, and the half-breed Indians took possession each of his own reservation.
These statutes being in force, Victoria Smith, one of the half-breeds named in the treaty of 1825, being in possession of her tract, executed on the 14th of August, 1860, a deed to one Stevens, purporting to convey it to him, and Stevens went into possession.
About two years after this deed was made, that is to say, on the 17th of July, 1862,  Congress by joint resolution repealed the above-mentioned second and third sections of the act of 1860.
Victoria Smith now brought an action of ejectment against Stevens in a local State court in Kansas, to recover possession of the tract. Stevens in bar of the suit offered in evidence Victoria's deed of the 14th August, 1860, for the same land, but the court excluded the deed from the jury on the ground that the plaintiff by virtue of the Indian treaty of 1825 and the act of Congress on the subject, was prohibited from executing the deed. The Supreme Court of the State, on appeal, affirmed the ruling of the lower court, and the case was brought here to test the correctness of that decision.
2. But if the title did not pass by the treaty, it did pass in fee by the act of Congress, 26th May, 1860, and the reservees after that act had the right to make a deed in fee. The words of conveyance are very comprehensive. The statute is a grant and is to be taken most favorably for the grantees. There is nothing left in the United States which could draw to it the reversion. Words of perpetuity in such an instrument, made with such full intent, were not needed.
If they 'vested' the fee in the grantees, any restraint upon alienation would have been void. They took freed from such condition, if there was one. And so Congress seem to have considered it, for they do not prohibit future alienation.
Since, then, to allow the second and third sections of this act to be restraints on the disposing power of the grantees, and to limit that power to an application to the Secretary of the Interior, by whom the sale was authorized to be made, would be a plain violation of one of the canons of the law regulating real estate, no such construction can be given unless the intent is too clear to admit of doubt, such construction cannot prevail.
Those two sections are susceptible of a different construction, in harmony with the construction already put upon the first section. The government had already conveyed the lands to the Indians with an unincumbered title. But they desired to protect the Indians against their own improvidence, and to do so imposed this trust on the secretary, to be exercised on the application of the owner of the lands. It was a new duty assigned to the secretary, but neither in terms nor by necessary intendment does it fetter the right of the Indian to dispose of his lands as he may see fit. This view reconciles the act with the established principle of law. And this view is strengthened by the terms of the eleventh article of the treaty, prohibiting the sale of the lands reserved to the nation, but not prohibiting the sale of the private reservations.
Again. There is no prohibition in either the treaty or the act of 1860 against future sales. The Indian had clearly a title to the possession with an inchoate title to the fee. Being in such possession, Victoria conveyed whatever title she had. Congress, by the joint resolution of July 17th, 1862, repealed the second and third sections of the act of 1860. This repeal operated by relation to vest in the purchaser the full title which was vested in her by the first section of the act of 1860.
Mr. J. S. Black, contra, citing Goodell v. Jackson, 20 Johnson, 694, 718, 733; Shawnee County v. Carter, 2 Kansas State, 115; Hunt v. Knickerbacker, 5 Johnson, 332-34; St. Regis Indians v. Drum, 19 Id. 127; Jackson v. Wood, 7 Id. 290; Pettit's Administrators v. Pettit's Distributees, 32 Alabama, 288; Lee v. Glover, 8 Cowen, 189.
^1 7 Stat. at Large, 244, 245.
^2 12 Stat. at Large, 21.
^3 12 Stat. at Large, 628.
^4 United States v. Brooks, 10 Howard, 442; Doe v. Wilson, 23 Id. 457, 463, 464.

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