Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920

Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920. By Larry C. Skogen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. xx, 290 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8061-2789-9.

As the United States expanded in the nineteenth century, its leadership faced the problem of ameliorating tension and violent conflict between the white settlers and Native American nations. Historians have traditionally pointed to the competition for land as the root of this friction, but Larry C. Skogen demonstrates that scholars should perhaps pay greater attention to frontier disputes spawned by the theft and destruction of personal property. In Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920, Skogen describes and evaluates the large federal bureaucracy designed to compensate the victims of theft and destruction in the struggle for the West.

What Skogen calls the "depredation claims system" (p. xv) was established by President George Washington and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox. Administered through several Trade and Intercourse Acts, the system was designed to compensate white and Indian victims of a "depredation," which Skogen defines as an "illegal destruction or theft of property under conditions of force or coercion" (p. xix). Washington and Knox hoped that intervention by the federal government would quell potential conflicts, promote a general frontier peace between whites and Indians, and provide an orderly process for westward expansion. The original plan was modified dozens of times over the next century and required the participation and oversight of, at various times, the War Department, Congress, the Indian Office, and federal courts. Skogen concludes that, rather than reducing conflict in the West, the system may have only encouraged settlers who were aware of the federal government's implicit offer to reimburse their expenses and insure their risk of loss.

Although the objectives of the claims system were honorable, the nature of the nineteenth-century federal government prohibited implementation of a just and effective claims procedure. The federal system not only was hamstrung by transportation and communication difficulties, but the Department of the Interior and the Indian Office were also too often poorly managed, inadequately funded, and poisoned by corrupt political influence. More often than not, Skogen concludes, the government neglected or rejected genuine cases of property loss and instead compensated well-connected claimants who made fraudulent filings for reparations. Skogen shows that during the era when claims were being adjudicated by the Court of Claims (1891-1920), almost 20 percent of the funds disbursed by the United States government went to attorneys and claims agents, whereas only a very small percentage of genuine claimants obtained compensation. Those lucky enough to succeed waited years and even decades before receiving awards; for many of them, only their estates benefited. The depredation claims system, Skogen concludes, was "naively conceived" and an "abject failure" (pp. xvi, 213).

Some historians have suggested that the federal government used the depredation process to plunder treaty annuities owed to Native American nations. Skogen shows, however, that, except during the administration of Indian Office Commissioner Ely Parker, depredation claims rarely affected annuity payments to Indian nations and that Native Americans, in general, were "minimally, if at all, affected" (p. 208) by the claims system.

Skogen is the first historian to examine systematically the more than ten thousand depredation claims that spanned over a century, and his work reveals that these records are worthy of examination by Native American ethnohistorians. In his best chapter, a case study of the depredation claims surrounding the 1864 Sand Creek massacre, Skogen splendidly combines the bureaucratic paper trail and local historical records to describe how truly capricious the federal government could be in resolving claims. He is both fair and critical in his assessment of individual cases and carefully corroborates his conclusions. However, Skogen's work is single-minded in its focus on the mechanics and logistics of the system. Perhaps in future studies he will seek to identify how different legal cultures treat property loss and how disputes over personality affected the larger issue of Native American national sovereignty.

TIM ALAN GARRISON Portland State University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 1998
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