A Matter of Reconciliation: General James Clark Strong Practices American Indian Law in Gilded-Age Buffalo

Abstract: James Clark Strong of Buffalo served as attorney for the Seneca Nation in western New York and the Cayuga Nation of the Grand River in Canada during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike other attorneys at the time, he saw them as transnational peoples with legitimate grievances related to violations of their treaty rights. Strong was heavily influenced by the teachings of missionary Marcus Whitman and by his own personal experiences on the frontier in the Pacific Northwest and in the Civil War. While never achieving his goal of winning cases for his two Native American clients and bringing reconciliation between Indian and non-Indian to make up for a violent and unjust past, he, nevertheless, was the first attorney to use the legal reasoning based on violations of the Federal Trade and Intercourse Acts. This argument was successfully resurrected by attorneys in the last half century to win back lands and financial compensation for Native American communities from Maine to South Carolina.