In 1879 with the U.S. district court's judgment in the Standing Bear case pronouncing, "Means should be devised by which an Indian, when he has attained the necessary degree of civilization, shall be released from the arbitrary control of the Indian Bureau and allowed all the rights and immunities of a free man," the legal basis for confining tribes to reservations and forcing "civilization" on them was dealt a severe blow. Additionally, Standing Bear's extensive tour of the East Coast (although not the first instance of a Native American leader arguing his case before crowds of eastern sympathizers) galvanized criticism of the government's programs, and Indian policy reform became a national issue. Politically powerful reform groups rose articulating the assimilation argument.
Thus the central issue of the 1880s was not whether the reservations system would be changed, but when and how. The popular total assimilation policy was also conveniently advantageous to a wide range of political and economic factions interested in the development of the West. Self-interest opportunely meshed with idealism and between 1880 and 1896, tribes were dispossessed of sixty percent of their remaining land. The Dawes Act of 1887, the first federal program encompassing all Native Americans, while offering the promise of citizenship and a pathway to social integration, proved more often to be a means of encroaching further on Indian lands.
The successful disfranchisement of blacks in the South (upheld by the Supreme Court decisions in civil rights cases and Plessy v. Ferguson) during the 1890s confirmed the power of the state authorities to control access to the voting booth. And if individual states were as eager to exclude Indians from the polls as they were to exclude blacks, they were legally capable of accomplishing their objective. Every state with a significant Indian population had voting regulations that limited Native American participation in elections. With the initiation of the "Jim Crow" laws, by 1919 it was estimated that only 25,000 of the nation's 336,000 Indians cast ballots.
In the case of Montana, the sole restriction to voting was that the elector be a citizen. However, in contrast to tribes like the Oregon Umatillas and the Omahas of Nebraska who had been admitted to citizenship en masse when their reservations were allotted, most Indians in Montana remained on undivided reservations or were allotted after the Burke Act of 1906 had delayed the granting of citizenship.
When Louis Reale attempted to organize the Montana Metis in 1883-84 for the purpose of voting, a Republican judge at Fort Benton jailed him in order to keep him out of the field during the election. When the Metis attempted to vote, many were turned away at the polls, and those who were allowed to vote in certain localities found their votes disqualified by the Secretary of the Territory. Supported by the Democrats who would benefit by the Metis vote, Reale's case was moved to a more amenable Democratic judge in Helena who freed him. Shortly after, however, the Canadian authorities transported Reale back to Canada.
9. Although women had been discouraged from pursuing a professional education well into the twentieth century, it's estimated that by 1870, more than 11,000 women were enrolled in some 582 institutions of higher learning. Most women were earning degrees in education, but the opening of law schools in the Midwest and West and in the major cities in the East gave women the opportunity to study law, even though opportunities to practice were severely limited. The prestigious Ivy League law schools, such as Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, however, resisted enrolling women law students longer than most. Yale first admitted women to their law school in 1918, Columbia in 1927, and Harvard not until 1950.
Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916-36, and a professor there well into the forties, is said to have greatly influenced attitudes at the law school. A graduate of the all-male Harvard Law School class of 1948 relates an anecdote significant of Pound's bias. "One morning in 1945, Pound was presiding over his first-year property class. Pound was quite old by then, a big husky man who in fifty years of New England weather never wore an overcoat, but always had on green eyeshades. His eyesight and hearing were failing but his mind was as sharp as ever. It was customary for students to invite friends to sit in on classes, and this day one of the men brought a girlfriend with him. They sat all the way in the back and probably would have gone unnoticed but her broad-brimmed hat gave her away. Pound stopped the class, squinted, then asked, 'Is that a woman back there?' The student answered, 'Yes, sir, this is my fiancee.' With that Pound thundered back, 'I don't permit women in my classes, get out.' "
At Columbia's law school, Dean Harlan Fiske Stone had exerted similar influence to keep women out of the school. He was known to have promised women would be admitted to Columbia over his dead body. When he left in 1925 to join the U.S. Supreme Court, a motion was introduced the next year at Columbia to allow women applicants for the fall 1927 semester. Several women lawyers who had been denied admission to Columbia but had gone on to graduate from other law schools sent a telegram to Chief Justice Stone the day Columbia's first women took their seats in class, saying: "We suppose you are lying prone on the steps of the Court today."
10. Divorce in France, first enacted by the Code Napoleon in 1804, was repealed in 1816 and reenacted by a law of July 27, 1884, completed and simplified by a law of April 20,
