Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/171

 calls of the Salisheutte reservation as laid down by the treaty of 1855, which treaty reserved to those Indians, "all lands between Harper's Basin and the Pacific Ocean southward to and including the South Inlet to the said basin." Hornblower's points were:

First, that the survey of the said land boundaries was not made until thirty-five years after the date of the treaty.

Second, that the late John Wilkinson, in making this survey, erred in running it along the shore, not of the south inlet, but of the middle inlet, which had been ever since erroneously called South Inlet, while the real South Inlet had got down on the maps as Squaw River.

Third, that by this mistake—or fraud perhaps—there had been excluded from the just inheritance of the Salisheutte Indians and opened to United States patent—which Boland had secured—all that vast acreage of timber upon which his fortunes rested and upon a portion of the soil of which the town of Edgewater was built.

That was the case.

Henry coolly dynamited it by admitting that Squaw River was indeed the real south inlet to Harper's Basin, but proved by testimony that the Salisheutte Indians had actually never ranged south of the middle inlet and in their own nomenclature always referred to it as South Inlet; that, therefore, when the old treaty said "South Inlet" it meant middle inlet and the survey was properly run and the land patented to Boland was properly so patented.

This was so perfectly obvious, so much a matter of common knowledge, so highly palatable to the public, that it was easy to make a joke of Hornblower's con-