Court Opinion

ID: 9418204
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:12:44.576227+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:21:57.291766
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice McKenna,
dissenting.
1. On the supposition that the findings of the Court of Claims are binding on this court, the case should be remanded to that court for further consideration because of its error in refusing to consider evidence made competent by the jurisdictional act and by the stipulation between the contending Indians.
2. If this court may go behind the findings, as I think it may on the authority of United States v. Old Settlers, 148 U. S. 464, and as it is conceded by the contending Indians that it may, in my opinion the Secretary of the Interior, in apportioning the annuities from 1885 to date, committed error in taking the fixed, unvarying sum of 317 for the Sacs and Foxes in Iowa, and 505 for those in Oklahoma, disregarding any increase or decrease of the respective divisions of the tribe. The tribal rights of the claimant Indians had been recognized, and the jurisdictional *491act required that they should be given "their proportionate shares according to their numbers ... of the appropriations made by Congress for fulfilling treaty stipulations with the confederated tribes. . . .”
I think, therefore, that a fixed, unvarying sum should not have been selected. Annual tests should have been made and the increase or decrease of the Indians ascertained by the Secretary of the Interior.
The Court of Claims found, it is true, that there was no competent evidence of the increase or decrease of the divisions of the tribe. But in so finding the court disregarded, as I have already said, evidence which the jurisdictional act and the stipulations of the contending Indians made competent, and such evidence, though not strong, established that the claimant Indians had increased. It is pointed out in the opinion that the Secretary of the Interior recognized a small increase of the defendant Indians in 1887.