The interactive below, designed using a geodatabase built for an article in the March issue of the Journal of American History, maps the long history of the Louisiana Purchase for the first time. It tracks 222 Indian cessions within the Louisiana Territory. Made by treaties, agreements, and statutes between 1804 and 1970, these cessions covered 576 million acres, ranging from a Quapaw tract the size of North Carolina sold in 1818 to a parcel smaller than Central Park seized from the Santee Sioux to build a dam in 1958.
Historians have long known that Indians were paid something for their soil rights, but we’ve never been able to say how much. The closest we had was a guess—about 20 times the acquisition price, or $300 million—floated in the 1940s and erroneously cited as gospel ever since. Figuring out how much the United States has actually spent to extinguish Indian title to the Louisiana Territory, tracked here from 1804 through 2012, yielded a figure much higher than anyone previously imagined—and yet still far from what the land was actually worth. All told, it adds up to about $2.6 billion, or more than $8.5 billion adjusted for inflation. [...]
Federal authorities preferred acquiring Indian land by treaties because it was a more humane, and cheaper, method than outright war. But the treaties were backed by the looming threat of violence. The deals the government made specified compensation that came in a variety of forms, from one-time disbursements to annuities, goods, services, and more. In the allotment era, it became increasingly common to promise indirect compensation in the form of pledges to manage assets in tribal trust funds generated by the sale or lease of reservation land. Most arrangements for direct payments have long since ended. They were either broken, amended, exhausted, or, in the case of permanent annuities, commuted for lump sums. Just one lonely line item for Indian land ceded in the Missouri River Valley survives on the federal budget: $30,000 a year to the Pawnees of Oklahoma for 9,878,000 acres of what’s now Nebraska and South Dakota, ceded in 1857. [...]
In 1973, a federal commission found that this arrangement amounted to a valuation of a half a cent an acre for the ceded land. It also found the part of the Sac and Fox cession west of the Mississippi had a market value of 60 cents an acre in 1804. To make the Sac and Fox whole, the commission ordered an additional payment of 59.5 cents per acre, or $1,969,585, for the portion of the cession within the Louisiana Territory. Interest wasn’t part of the settlement, which enabled the government to pay a debt calculated in 1804 dollars with cash from 1973. [...]
Because these awards were arrived at after long delays, and typically excluded interest or any consideration of value not dictated by markets, they ultimately served more to quiet claims than deliver justice. This is why the Sioux rejected the most famous award, a 1980 Supreme Court judgment for $106 million for the taking of the Black Hills after nearly 60 years of litigation. While the court admitted that the 1876 agreement had been coerced with threats of starvation (and that it violated an earlier treaty from 1868), its decision left no room for what the Sioux actually wanted. As the Dakota novelist Elizabeth Cook-Lynn explained, the court added insult to injury by sanctioning a brazen theft, then adding, “we will now pay you X-millions of dollars, and the Sioux have said, ‘No, we want to talk about return of stolen lands.’ ” Nearly 30 years later, the judgment remains uncollected.
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