May 27, 1902
[Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the United States Statutes at Large, Volume 32, Part 1, which contains the public laws passed by the Fifty-Seventh Congress during its first session in 1902. The following text is from Chapter 888 (32 Stat. 263).]
That the Secretary of the Interior, with the consent thereto of the majority of the adult male Indians of the Uintah and the White River tribes of Ute Indians, to be ascertained as soon as practicable by an inspector, shall cause to be allotted to each head of a family eighty acres of agricultural land which can be irrigated and forty acres of such land to each other member of said tribes, said allotments to be made prior to October first, nineteen hundred and three, on which date all the unallotted lands within said reservation shall be restored to the public domain: Provided, That persons entering any of said land under the homestead law shall pay therefor at the rate of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre: And provided further, That nothing herein contained shall impair the rights of any mineral lease which has been approved by the Secretary of the Interior, or any permit heretofore issued by direction of the Secretary of the Interior to negotiate with said Indians for a mineral lease; but any person or company having so obtained such approved mineral lease or such permit to negotiate with said Indians for a mineral lease on said reservation, pending such time and up to thirty days before said lands are restored to the public domain as aforesaid, shall have in lieu of such lease or permit the preferential right to locate under the mining laws not to exceed six hundred and forty acres of contiguous mineral land, except the Raven Mining Company, which may in lieu of its lease locate one hundred mining claims of the character of mineral mentioned in its lease; and the proceeds of the sale of the lands so restored to the public domain shall be applied, first, to the reimbursement of the United States for any moneys advanced to said Indians to carry into effect the foregoing provisions; and the remainder, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, shall be used for the benefit of said Indians. And the sum of seventy thousand and sixty-four dollars and forty-eight cents is hereby appropriated, out of any moneys in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, to be paid to the Uintah and the White River tribes of Ute Indians, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, whenever a majority of the adult male Indians of said tribes shall have consented to the allotment of lands and the restoration of the unallotted lands within said reservation as herein provided.
Said item of seventy thousand and sixty-four dollars and forty-eight cents to be paid to the Uintah and White River Utes covers claims which these Indians have made on account of the allotment of lands on the Uintah Reservation to Uncompahgre Indians and for which the Government has received from said Uncompahgre Indians money aggregating sixty thousand and sixty-four dollars and forty-eight cents; and the remaining ten thousand dollars claimed by the Indians under an Act of Congress detaching a small part of the reservation on the east and under which Act the proceeds of the sale of the lands were to be applied for the benefit of the Indians.
Approved, May 27, 1902.