Private speculators failed for fifty years to get tribal land purchases ratified

Evidence

The companies and their shareholders knew they were taking big risks by buying directly from tribal leaders, and this book describes the tortuous path they followed in attempting to get approval of the purchases, first from the British Crown, then from colonial governments, state governments, and ultimately the federal government and the Supreme Court. They failed at every turn for fifty years, and instead the United States exercised its preemption right under discovery to be the only purchaser of tribal lands when it purchased most of the lands at issue in Johnson from the tribes in treaties in 1813. — Robert J. Miller, Review of Buying America from the…, 17

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: fifty years of lobbying that lost — a case study in how Indian-title speculation was legally impossible in settler states, and why the doctrine existed precisely to block it.