Opinion of the Court
over the forest territory, including federal regulation of those lands. Brief for Respondent 56–60. But as explained, the treaty’s text and the historical record suggest that the phrase “unoccupied lands” had a specific meaning to the Crow Tribe: lack of settlement. The proclamation of a forest reserve withdrawing land from settlement would not categorically transform the territory into an area resided on or settled by non-Indians; quite the opposite. Nor would the restrictions on hunting in national forests that Wyoming cites. See Appropriations Act of 1899, ch. 424, 30 Stat. 1095; 36 CFR §§241.2, 241.3 (Supp. 1941); §261.10(d)(1) (2018).
Wyoming also claims that exploitative mining and logging of the forest lands prior to 1897 would have caused the Crow Tribe to view the Bighorn Mountains as occupied. But the presence of mining and logging operations did not amount to settlement of the sort that the Tribe would have understood as rendering the forest occupied. In fact, the historical source on which Wyoming primarily relies indicates that there was “very little” settlement of Bighorn National Forest around the time the forest was created. Dept. of Interior, Nineteenth Ann. Rep. of the U. S. Geological Survey 167 (1898).
Considering the terms of the 1868 Treaty as they would have been understood by the Crow Tribe, we conclude that the creation of Bighorn National Forest did not remove the forest lands, in their entirety, from the scope of the treaty.
IV
Finally, we note two ways in which our decision is limited. First, we hold that Bighorn National Forest is not categorically occupied, not that all areas within the forest are unoccupied. On remand, the State may argue that the specific site where Herrera hunted elk was used in such a way that it was “occupied” within the meaning of the 1868 Treaty. See State v. Cutler, 109 Idaho 448, 451, 708 P. 2d
