Opinion of the Court
May 11, 1858). Federal negotiators had every reason to bring up statehood if they intended it to extinguish the Tribe’s hunting rights.
In the face of this evidence, Wyoming nevertheless contends that the 1868 Treaty expired at statehood pursuant to the Mille Lacs analysis. Wyoming does not argue that the legal act of Wyoming’s statehood abrogated the treaty right, and it cannot contend that statehood is explicitly identified as a treaty expiration point. Instead, Wyoming draws on historical sources to assert that statehood, as a practical matter, marked the arrival of “civilization” in the Wyoming Territory and thus rendered all the lands in the State occupied. Brief for Respondent 48. This claim cannot be squared with Mille Lacs.
Wyoming’s arguments boil down to an attempt to read the treaty impliedly to terminate at statehood, precisely as Mille Lacs forbids. The State sets out a potpourri of evidence that it claims shows statehood in 1890 effectively coincided with the disappearance of the wild frontier: for instance, that the buffalo were extinct by the mid-1870s; that by 1880, Indian Department regulations instructed Indian agents to confine tribal members “ ‘wholly within the limits of their respective reservations’ ”; and that the Crow Tribe stopped hunting off-reservation altogether in 1886. Brief for Respondent 47 (quoting §237 Instructions to Indian Agents (1880), as published in Regulations of the Indian Dept. §492 (1884)).
Herrera contradicts this account, see Reply Brief for Petitioner 5, n. 3, and the historical record is by no means clear. For instance, game appears to have persisted for longer than Wyoming suggests. See Dept. of Interior, Ann. Rep. of the Comm’r of Indian Affairs 495 (1873) (Black Foot: “On the other side of the river below, there are plenty of buffalo; on the mountains are plenty of elk and black-tail deer; and white-tail deer are plenty at the foot of the mountain”). As for the Indian Department
