252 CESSIONS OF LAND BY INDIAN TRIBES. 
the opinion of the court in important cases involving the Indian status 
and rights. In the second of these cases (The Cherokee Nation vs. The 
State of Georgia) it was maintained that the Cherokees were a state 
and had uniformly been treated as such since the settlement of the 
country ; that the numerous treaties made with them by the United 
States recognized them as a people capable of maintaining the relations 
of peace and war; of being responsible in their political character for 
any violation of their engagements, or for any aggression committed on 
the citizens of the United States by any individual of their community; 
that the condition of the Indians in their relations to the United States is 
perhaps unlike that of any other two peoples on the globe; that, in gen- 
eral, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other, 
but that the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by 
peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else; that the 
Indians were acknowledged to have an unquestionable right to the lands 
they occupied until that right should be extinguished by a voluntary 
cession to our government; that it might well be doubted whether those 
tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United 
States could with strict accuracy be denominated foreign nations, but 
that they might more correctly perhaps be denominated domestic depend- 
ent nations; that they occupied a territory to which we asserted a, title 
independent of their will, but which only took effect in point of posses- 
sion when their right of possession ceased. 
The Government of the United States having thus been committed in 
all of its departments to the recognition of the principle of the Indian 
right of possession, it becomes not only a subject of interest to the stu- 
dent of history, but of practical value to the official records of the gov- 
ernment, that a carefully compiled work should exhibit the boundaries 
of the several tracts of country which have been acquired from time to 
time, within the present limits of the United States, by cession or relin- 
quishment from the various Indian tribes, either through the medium 
of friendly negotiations and just compensation, or as the result of mili- 
tary conquest. Such a work, if accurate, would form the basis of any 
complete history of the Indian tribes in their relations to, and influence 
upon the growth and diffusion of our population and civilization. Such 
a contribution to the historical collections of the country should com- 
prise : " 
1st. A series of maps of the several States and Territories, on a scale 
ranging from ten to sixteen miles to an inch, grouped in atlas form, upon 
which should be delineated in colors the boundary lines of the various 
tracts of country ceded to the United States from time to time by the 
different Indian tribes. 
2d. An accompanying historical text, not only reciting the substance 
of the material provisions of the several treaties, but giving a history of 
the causes leading to them, as exhibited in contemporaneous official cor- 
respondence and other trustworthy data. 
