Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties With Various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869

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About the Collection

Ratified treaty no. 42, documents relating to the negotiation of the treaty of October 24, 1804, with the Cherokee Indians (October 21, 1804) page 7

American Indian treaties, like all treaties in American history, require ratification by the United States Senate to become law. Treaties negotiated with Indian peoples in the United States (the original treaties are part of record group 11, which is not currently digitized) are often a valuable source of information for researchers interested in American Indian policy. So too are the supplementary documents that offer context and additional information for the treaties. This collection has been created from the microfilm of record group 75, records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, specifically RG 75, Microcopy T494. These ten reels include instructions to treaty commissioners, reports, letters, and in some cases copies of the treaties. List of documents relating to the negotiation of ratified and unratified treaties with various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869 and Documents relating to the negotiation of ratified and unratified treaties with various tribes of Indians, 1801-1869: introduction and ratified treaties, 1801-1826 both contain substantial descriptions of this record group. These documents were collected by the National Archives from many record sets included in RG 75 and were located in this set. As such, the set digitized here should be seen as starting point, not an exclusive record set, for researches interested in American Indian treaties.

To facilitate use of the collection, descriptions from the List of documents relating to the negotiation of ratified and unratified treaties with various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869, a printed finding aid produced by the National Archives, have been entered beneath each treaty title. This information lists the instructions, records of treaty council proceedings and correspondence for each treaty where such exists and was included in the original National Archives record set. Note that there are many instances in which there is one page for a treaty that contains directions to another record group or special list that has not been included in this digital project.

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.