Court Opinion

ID: 9745270
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 22:44:48.522985+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:58.335601
License: Public Domain

WHITAKER, Judge
(dissenting).
I am not persuaded that there is no “substantial evidence” to support the findings of the Indian Claims Commission. I agree with the Chief Judge in what he said in his concurring opinion relative to the weight to be given the findings of this Commission.
The defendant bought some eight hundred sixty-five thousand acres of land for 34 cents an acre. Over a period of about 12 years it sold about half of the acreage, and the balance in the next 20 years. These sales were on a four-year installment basis at $1.25 an acre. They were of 160-acre tracts. One hundred sixty acres is about one five-thousandth of the total acreage, and for each sale of one of these small plots the defendant got only four times what it paid for the plot on the basis of the purchase price of the whole 865,000 acres. A real estate man who buys a large tract of land and subdivides it expects to sell the individual lots for many times what he paid for them.
If the Indians had put their lands up for sale as a whole or in parcels I doubt that they could have done so well.