While constructing a bridge over the St. Lawrence River, the Dominion Bridge Company hires several Mohawk men from the nearby Kahnawake Reserve as day laborers. The men balance on and climb the high steel beams so adeptly and confidently that construction companies begin routinely hiring Mohawk as ironworkers on bridges and other steel structures. (See also entries for 1915 and for AUGUST 29, 1907.)
United States v. Kagama upholds the Major Crimes Act.
The legitimacy of the Major Crimes Act (see entry for MARCH 3, 1885), which gave federal courts jurisdiction over major crimes occurring on reservation land, is tested in United States v. Kagama. The case is brought against two Indians who in a federal court were convicted of killing another Indian on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California. The criminals challenge the verdict, maintaining that despite the Major Crimes Act only a tribal court can try them for a crime committed on a reservation.
The Supreme Court dismisses their argument and decides that the conviction, and by extension the Major Crimes Act as well, are constitutional because Indians are legally wards of the U. S. government. The ruling reverses the Court’s earlier controversial decision in Ex parte Crow Dog (see entry for DECEMBER 17, 1883), which held that federal courts had no jurisdiction over criminal activity on Indian-held lands.
Geronimo surrenders to the U. S. Army.
Geronimo, exhausted by the military’s efforts to subdue his renegade band, asks to meet with General George Crook—whom he had surrendered to nearly three years earlier (see entry for JUNE 1883)—at Canyon de los Embudos. Crook again threatens to kill all of Geronimo’s people if they do not surrender. He insists that they will be sent to prison in the East but promises that after two years they will be allowed to return to the San Carlos Reservation, in present-day Arizona. On
March 25, after days of discussion, Geronimo accepts Crook’s terms. In less than a week, however, he and Apache leader Nachez lead 20 men and 13 women back to their mountain hideaways in Mexico.
The Indians remain renegades for five months before Geronimo makes his final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon on September 4. Miles’s terms are harsh: He insists that Geronimo’s band be sent to deportation camps in Florida, along with all of the Chiricahua and Warm Spring Apache (including the army’s Indian scouts) from the San Carlos Reservation. Geronimo’s
Geronimo and his followers meet with General George Crook and other U. S. military officers to discuss the renegade Apache's surrender. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Call no. X-32942)
Surrender marks the end of the Apache’s armed resistance to reservation life.
World History
