relation to the Indians. Now when the Government sees fit to waive that, why then that obstacle is removed and the supreme court of the State said it could be done retroactively. Now I would say the point you raise is an item on which I could proceed for hours.

Mr. FLANERY. The point I intended to bring out is that the purpose of this bill is to validate or confirm title without any litigation. Mr. SEMPLE. They are stricken by this infirmity.

Mr. FLANERY. If this legislation was enacted, there would be a constitutional question and the object of this legislation would be defeated.

Mr. SEMPLE. If the supreme court held that Congress was without power, that is true; but I would say, as one gentleman has stated in the early days of our hearing, there ought to be in the act, as well as in these other acts we have for hearing today, a broad declaration that that act does not take away or limit the power of the Indians to litigate the same title, if and when the title to the land is obtained through fraud or other irregularities. Nobody wants to validate assignments obtained by fraud. We want to protect the public, the people buying these lands, who are interested in getting legislation that will cure titles which are not questionable from the standpoint of considerations of fraud.

Mr. FERNANDEZ. In one case I know the suit was brought by one of the heirs.

Mr. SEMPLE. Yes, sir.

Mr. FERNANDEZ. And all the other heirs were brought into the picture.

Mr. SEMPLE. Yes, sir. I can tell you one case and I will not name the party. There is a case which has been presently in my mind now and one of the companies has got the case. There is $250,000 in money involved in the case. That particular title came under my observation. It involved farmers and Indians and in this particular case they went into the country and paid something like $5,000 for a piece of land that was not worth any more than that. Nobody questioned the appraisal. When you file that suit you bring them into court and the Indians come in and answer the probate attorney, who almost invariably comes in and represents them. The probate attorney is notified of the pendency of the case and he speaks for the Interior Department. He does not have anything to do, but he is like a paid attorney in New Mexico who represents the Department. We file proceedings in the case, but they never have brought in the United States Government.

Mr. FERNANDEZ. The attorney would appear in the case and plead for the Indians but not for the Government?

Mr. SEMPLE. That is right; he just appears and represents the Indians.

Mr. STIGLER. But he was a United States probate attorney.
Mr. SEMPLE. Yes, sir; for the Federal Government.

Mr. STIGLER. And also in that connection there always has to be an appraisal made by the Government.

Mr. SEMPLE. That is right, and the probate attorney had to pass. on it; so that, insofar as the equity of the Indians are concerned, no man in the world could advance a contention that when the land was partitioned, that the fair value of the land was not paid.

Mr. GALLAGHER. But wasn't it worth more later on?

Mr. SEMPLE. Yes, sir.

Mr. GALLAGHER. It did not have the potential value at that time. Mr. SEMPLE. No, it did not have the potential value at that time. The oil was developed later. It had an enhanced value, but if you are going to destroy title because future discoveries may enhance the value, you will never have a stable title; because if you take into consideration prospective value, it will be a hopeless task facing you. Why I then could go and sue for a conveyance I made 10 years ago, since we have found out now that land is worth $200,000.

Mr. MUNDT. I would like to question you further as to what we can put in to protect the Indians, where a fraud is perpetrated.

Mr. SEMPLE. There is a separate provision in one of the other bills. Mr. MUNDT. I could not find it in H. R. 1199 and H. R. 1197. Mr. SEMPLE. Mr. Chairman, I do not know whether I am violating any confidence or not, but I understand the Department of the Interior has made a suggestion in the form of a substitute for the other two bills, and they have language in the bill which I think would take care of it. Here it is:

Provided, That if any such conveyances are subject to attack upon grounds other than the insufficiency of approval or lack of approval such conveyances shall not be affected by this section.

In other words, there is a broad provision under which you could propose any of these.

Mr. MUNDT. Now you have brought the Department of the Interior substitute in the picture. I wish you would tell the committee what you think of the comparative merits of it.

Mr. STIGLER. The bill Mr. Semple spoke about does not affect the Hellard case or H. R. 1200, but it affects the other two bills.

Mr. MUNDT. According to a letter of the Department of the Interior, they suggest that, as I understand it.

Mr. STIGLER. No, sir; the Hellar case is not mentioned.

Mr. SEMPLE. That is right, Congressman. As I understand, the Government suggestions or amendments, they do not cover the Hellard case at all. They only cover the other two.

Mr. MUNDT. Is not H. R. 1200 the same as S. 54?

Mr. SEMPLE. I do not have S. 54 before me.

Mr. FLANERY. For the information of the committee, the substitute bill has nothing to do with H. R. 1200.

Mr. SEMPLE. I did not understand you.

Mr. FLANERY. The substitute bill prepared by the Department, to which you referred, has nothing to do with H. R. 1200.

Mr. STIGLER. That is the observation I made.

Mr. SEMPLE. That is what I thought.

Mr. HOLMES. In clarification of the matter raised by Mr. Gallagher, can you give us an idea of the length of time consumed between the transfer of some of these partitions and title to the actual time that the value of the land is shown in new ownership?

Mr. SEMPLE. Congressman, that would be hard to answer, with any degree of satisfaction, because you would have varying times in that. Just broadly speaking, partition proceedings in the State courts can be conducted to final judgment in about 60 days. That is the ordinary time consumed, and then your final judgment is rendered.

Mr. HOLMES. If A had a piece of land transferred for, say $5,000, to party B, in the course of time party B pays out this $5,000, and

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after the land was transferred it was found that it was a very lucrative investment. There would be suspicion, perhaps, that purchaser B had a suspicion of the value. Now if all that developed immediately after the transfer of title, there would be the suspicion that purchaser B had some knowledge of the value of the land and bought it for that reason. There would be that suspicion in such a case, but not if the higher value did not develop until 10, 12, or 15 years after. Mr. SEMPLE. Yes, I think so.

Mr. HOLMES. That has to do a lot with the potential value of the land in determining as to whether or not fraud is involved.

Mr. GALLAGHER. Yes; and if he knew there were possibilities of oil under the land. It is a little different than other land where values are stable, but this is a kind of heritage and an unearned increment that comes from the finding of oil.

Now in Minnesota the Indians have had valuable timber lands and all those timber lands got away from them and they are, of course, in a poverty-stricken condition today; and if they had kept their timber land or it had been conserved for them, they would not be in want and be poverty-stricken and all that would be done away with. So we should be very careful in seeing that the Indians preserve their heritage. It is valuable.

Mr. SEMPLE. Congressman, I agree with you. As far as I am concerned I do not think the time should ever come in the near future when the Federal Government should withdraw its strong arm from the Indians; but like your chairman, Mr. Stigler, and myself and Judge Rice and Judge Welch, we are Indians in a way and yet for all practical purposes we are white people; and over in the Choctaw and Cherokee country you have 30,000 Cherokees enrolled, and according to a finding of a subcommittee of the House you have only about 2,000 restricted Indians over whom the Government exercises any concern in the capacity of guardian.

You can go down to the Choctaw country and find out what the situation is in the Choctaw country. I had an allotment of land originally. My father and mother were Choctaws; my grandfather was a chief and my great grandfather was a chief. My restrictions were removed in 1908. I am on the same basis as a white man. As to those who are still under the Federal Government's protection, they are those from half-bloods up to full-bloods; as to them, they are only a small group in the Choctaws and Chickasaws and all told they are not a great many people. I would say to you that you are absolutely right in maintaining restrictions in regard to those Indians. They are not ready for citizenship and you still need the guardianship functions for the full-blood Indians. You need a guardian for that Indian to take care of his interests in the event that title passes. Mr. MUNDT. Provided there is no fraud or suspicion of fraud. Mr. SEMPLE. That is right.

Mr. MUNDT. I did not get your answer to the question of Congressman Holmes in which he asked you what you considered to be a reasonable amount of time to elapse between the transfer and the discovery of oil on a piece of land.

Mr. SEMPLE. Congressman, I do not know how to answer that with any degree of satisfaction at all. Oil fields come with lightning quickness, so to speak. This year, for instance, take Bryan County;

that is my home county down in the southern Oklahoma area, where over night last week, I was just getting ready to come to town, and they discovered oil-lots of oil, 200 barrels in 10 hours. So there is an enhanced value today that ranges up into the thousands of dollars, probably, as the result of that discovery of oil.

Mr. MUNDT. Now if a white man had bought that land just prior to the discovery of oil, he would be subject to suspicion.

Mr. SEMPLE. Yes; they would consider that he had filed in anticipation of the enhancement of the value.

Mr. MUNDT. The only thing I would like to see in this legislation, and I think it is a problem which must be solved as it is the crux of the whole thing and I am not convinced that we have yet solved it, and that is how to protect the full-blood Indians and the half-blood Indians and the incompetent Indian who has been deprived of his lands under the shadow of suspicion so that he still has title to the land. I remember when our investigating committee was in Oklahoma last summer I was traveling from Öklahoma City in company with some of the splendid Indians who are here today, and I was some distance away from Oklahoma City when they pointed out a piece of land and they said: "This piece of land was purchased from an Indian by a white man and 90 days thereafter he sold it to the oil company and he made' I have forgotten the figure because the figures in Oklahoma on oil are like New Deal figures on the budget-millions of dollars. That is a thing I do not want to be a party to and approve.

Mr. SEMPLE. Congressman, I think a provision could well be drawn to take care of that situation.

Mr. MUNDT. I would suggest that Mr. Stigler, Mr. Schwabe, who both come from your section of the country and who are members of the committee, and yourself get together and figure out an amendment to take care of that; because if you do not, even though we put it through this committee, it will never go through the House and we will be up against the same thing. But if you work something in so that everybody in the House is sure all those cases will be taken care of, then you will have no trouble to get it approved.

Mr. SEMPLE. I thank you for that suggestion, Congressman. I think it is very apropos. I think we should draft something like that and nobody has any objection to that.

Mr. STIGLER. We will now hear from Mr. Marlin, secretary to the Commissioners of Land Office of Oklahoma.

STATEMENT OF WALTER MARLIN, SECRETARY, COMMISSIONERS OF LAND OFFICE OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA

Mr. STIGLER. For the purpose of the record, state your name and your official position.

Mr. MARLIN. I am Walter Marlin, secretary to the Commissioners of Land Office of the State of Oklahoma.

I might say by way of introduction that this Commission is composed of the Governor, the State auditor, the secretary of State, the president of the State board of agriculture, and the State superintendent of public instruction. At their regular meeting on the 26th of February they adopted a resolution and in that resolution they authorized and directed me to appear before this committee and furnish any information available that the committee might want.

If there is no objection I would offer this resolution, properly identified, as a part of the record.

Mr. STIGLER. Without objection, it will be so received. (The resolution is as follows:)

RESOLUTION Requesting the Senators and Representatives in Congress from Oklahoma to support certain bills introduced by Congressman Stigler relating to Indian land titles in Oklahoma

Be it resolved by the Commissioners of Land Office of the State of Oklahoma: Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Hellard v. United States (88 Law Ed., p. 1155), has recently handed down an opinion holding that the United States is a necessary party to all proceedings involving the partition of lands between Indian heirs of the full-blood, and

Whereas the Circuit Court of Appeals of the Tenth Circuit in Murray v. Ned (135 Fed. (2d) 407) has held that purchased lands acquired by an Indian of the full-blood with unrestricted funds are restricted in his own hands and in the hands of full-blood heirs, and

Whereas the Circuit Court of Appeals has also held in a recent decision styled United States v. Williams (139 Fed. (2d) 83), that lands purchased by full-blood Indians are restricted in the hands of his heirs, and

Whereas the above and foregoing_decisions are contrary to what the bench and the bar in Oklahoma (and the Interior Department itself) have heretofore regarded as the law in Oklahoma, and

Whereas these cases have rendered void many thousands of titles to lands of homeowners in the area formerly comprising the Five Civilized Tribes, and Whereas the School Land Department of the State of Oklahoma alone will suffer a loss estimated to be $500,000 by reason of said decisions, and

Whereas Congressman Stigler has introduced three bills in the House of Representatives known as H. R. 1200, H. R. 1199, and H. R. 1197, designed to cure and validate titles coming within the scope of the above-mentioned decisions: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Commissioners of Land Office of Oklahoma, That our Representatives and Senators in Congress be and they are hereby requested to use their best efforts to procure the passage of all three of the above-mentioned bills; and be it further

Resolved, That the Secretary of the Commissioners of Land Office of the State of Oklahoma personally present a copy of this resolution to the members of the Senate and House of Representatives from Oklahoma, and furnish the committee, to whom such legislation has been referred, with any additional information which would aid in the passage of such proposed legislation. Adopted this the 26th day of February 1945.

Attest: 1

ROBT. S. KERR,

Mr. MARLIN. Without appearing to be presumptuous, it might be well to suggest that the funds under supervision of the commissioners of land office is in the nature of a trust fund.

That in 1889 the United States Government suggested upon the opening of the country that certain sections in each township be set aside for school purposes.