delivered 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 general, 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 dependent nations; that they occupied a territory to which we
asserted a title independent of their will, but which only took effect
in point of possession 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 student
of history, but of practical value to the official records of the
government, that a carefully compiled work should exhibit the boundaries
of the several tracts of country which have been acquired from time to