Land dispute over Indian reservation lasted 101 years

If there is an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest active land dispute, it has to belong to the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indians in central Oregon.

It was no simple neighborhood kerfuffle, either. The amount of land in dispute was roughly 80,000 acres — close to 10 percent of the whole Warm Springs Indian Reservation. And the dispute burned hot for 101 years.

But maybe it wouldn’t count for the record, as the land was only in dispute for the first 16 of those years. The whole rest of the time was taken up trying to get the government to follow the law and give the stolen land back.

Not until 1972 did Congress finally do the right thing and pass legislation giving it back. And even then, there were still people in the government (notably the Forest Service) who didn’t want to do it.

Here’s how it went down:

In the 1850s, Eastern Oregon was still in the middle of the Indian wars as tribes like the Cayuse and the Modocs battled to hang onto their lands by force.

The tribes in central Oregon, though, didn’t want to go that way. They were trying to use the laws to fend off the settlers who were starting to pour into their lands; but it wasn’t easy. The settlers didn’t recognize the Indians’ claims on the land as legitimate, so they’d just move in and start fencing things off.

Joel Palmer, the Indian agent at the time, could see things were going to get worse. Every year a new crop of settlers was pouring through Central Oregon on its way to the Willamette Valley; sooner or later, the valley would fill up and they’d start grabbing pieces of Paiute, Wasco, and Warm Springs land.

Palmer was afraid if that started happening, the mellow good-citizenship of the tribes would harden into bitterness and anger, and another Indian war would start.

So he presented a solution to them at a three-day council near The Dalles in 1855: A treaty with the federal government in which, in exchange for relinquishing their claim on about 10 million acres of their ancestral lands, the tribes would get clear and undisputed title to 900,000 acres of it.

The tribes were not at all happy with this deal. But they understood that it was likely all they could hope for, and they were grateful to Palmer for facilitating it. They signed, and thereby was the Warm Springs Indian Reservation created.

Well, sort of. When the tribes signed the treaty, the boundaries they were signing for had not yet been surveyed. The boundaries were described precisely enough to know where they lay, give or take a few hundred feet. The next step would be to get a surveyor in to establish the lines, so that settlers could know where they were and were not allowed to stake their claims.

It took a while, but finally, in 1871, government surveyors Tom Handley and R.T. Campbell came out and mapped the exact boundaries of the new reservation.

The problem was, Handley and Campbell don’t seem to have been very careful in their work. Indian agent Palmer had enclosed a hand-drawn map when he sent the treaty back east for ratification; but the surveyors didn’t consult it. Nor did they ask any of the Indians which of the nearby mountain ridges they called “the Mutton Mountains” — they just picked a likely-looking set of promontories and started from there.

Which was a problem, because the mountains they picked were a good distance south of the actual Mutton Mountains. So, starting from that point, the reservation they ended up marking out was a good 80,000 acres short. Specifically, a hefty strip of the north end of the reservation and a narrower, but still large, spike-shaped slice of the western end.

As a glance at a Google Maps satellite image of the reservation shows, this disputed strip was some of the best land on the entire reservation — well watered, flattish and forested.

The tribes immediately lodged a protest. But the federal government, even as it responded to the protest by ordering a new survey, promptly approved the Handley-Campbell survey and started opening up the disputed lands for settlers to claim. Which, of course, they promptly started doing.

The new survey didn’t happen until 1886, when surveyor John McQuinn started it. His survey was complete the following year, and it confirmed that the tribes were right: the earlier survey had been wrong.

But by the time the new survey was done, a bunch of settlers had grabbed pieces of the reservation. They fought furiously against any suggestion that they give it up.

Congress dithered. It formed a commission to study the problem; the commission basically decided that yeah, the Indians had been cheated out of their rightful legal due, but who cared? They were Indians. So the commission recommended sticking with the faulty survey and telling the tribes “suck it up, life’s not fair.”

The tribes continued to protest and argue for their rights under the treaty. In 1917, Congress tried to solve the problem by throwing money at it, offering to buy the tribes out. The tribes were not interested in that; they wanted their land.

Then in 1930, Congress decided to toss this hot potato over to the Judicial Branch, giving the tribes clearance to sue over it.

They promptly did, and so was launched one of the more outrageous legal farces of Oregon history. The court, in 1941, ruled that yes, the Indians were entitled to the land of the McQuinn Strip. However, the judge ruled that they could not simply have their property back; instead, they would have to accept payment for it.

The proposal for payment was the best part, and by “best” I pretty much mean “worst.” The judge started off by decreeing that the stolen land would have been worth $1 an acre in 1871. (Land was actually selling for $5 to $15 an acre at that time, depending on how well-watered and productive it was. The McQuinn Strip would probably have landed somewhere in the middle of that range.)

Therefore, the judge announced, the Indians were entitled to $80,925 plus interest, or $241,084. But, he added, the government had spent $252,089 “in behalf of the tribes” during that same period, so actually the Indians needed to hand over the land AND pay the government an extra $11,005.

I haven’t been able to learn for sure whether the tribes took this as an insult, but surely they must have. Wouldn’t anyone? In any case, the tribes rejected the offer and continued to protest.

But this really obvious show of bad faith on the court’s part seems to have raised the tribes’ profile in some important places. In 1943, Oregon Senator Charles McNary and Rep. Lowell Stockman introduced a bill that would have cut straight to the heart of the matter, simply revising the reservation boundary on the McQuinn line and letting the chips fall where they might. The Roosevelt Administration’s Department of Justice (J. Edgar Hoover and friends) and Department of Agriculture (home of the Forest Service, which controlled most of the land in the strip) lobbied against it, and it failed.

But after the war, in 1948, Oregon Sen. Guy Cordon tried again — introducing a bill that rather than changing the boundary, simply required the government to give the tribes the gross revenues in grazing fees and timber sales from the disputed lands.

This proposal passed relatively easily, probably because the government wasn’t getting very much revenue from it. That changed, though, as the years went by, and by 1970 the tribes had banked almost $6 million from the deal. This income stream helped the tribes build their legendary Ka-Nee-Ta Resort in the 1960s.

But around the end of the 1960s, lawmakers started working behind the scenes to get all parties on board with a plan to give the land back for real. Rep. Al Ullman took the point on it, and by the time he was introducing the bill to give the land back, in late 1971, there was widespread agreement that it was high time to make things right.

This seems to have been news to John McGuire, the chief of the Forest Service, though. In what seems to have been intended as a surprise move to kill the bill, late in the process McGuire suddenly announced that the Nixon Administration opposed the bill. He said the Forest Service wanted to spend two years on a study of all the borders of all the Indian reservations before considering signing off on adjusting this one.

Was he playing for time? Was he hoping the Forest Service would pick up a few acres in the process? Whatever the motive, it made little difference, because a few weeks later Senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood got an identical bill out of the Senate Interior Committee and by early August it had passed the Senate with ease.

The following month, it passed in the House — literally unanimously.

When the bill landed on President Nixon’s desk, he promptly signed it. Whether McGuire was right or not in saying his administration opposed it, it had passed by more than enough votes to be veto-proof, so Nixon didn’t waste any political capital opposing it.

And that’s how, at long last, after 85 years of intransigent possession of stolen property, the U.S. government finally gave the Warm Springs Indians back their land.

The tribes took possession of all the public lands, and announced that the owners of private lands in the McQuinn Strip would have their property rights respected as they always were, but that if they should ever want to sell, the tribes would make an offer.

(Sources: “The McQuinn Strip Boundary Dispute,” an un-by-lined article on the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Website at warmsprings-nsn.gov; “McQuinn Strip Land Dispute,” an article by Joshua Binus published on the Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon History Project Website in 2002; “101-Year Land Dispute,” an article by George W. Linn published in Little Known Tales from Oregon History, Vol. 1 (ed .: Geoff Hill) by Sun Publishing in 1988)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.