Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the end of the Nineteenth Century. By Blue Clark. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. xiv, 182 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-8032-1466-9.)

Federal Indian law is among the most historically grounded areas of jurisprudence, an area of law in which historical argument is routinely made and hundred-year-old cases are routinely cited. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock is among the saddest of American cases. Justice Edward D. White, speaking for a unanimous court, held that Congress could abrogate Indian treaties unilaterally. Moreover, Indian lands could be taken by Congress without the consent of the tribes and without compensation. The decision was the farthest extension of a "plenary power" doctrine, set out eighteen years before, that held that the power of Congress over Indian...