The work at hand contains probably the greatest single collection of records pertaining to the Delaware Indians assembled in one volume. Spanning the period 1857-1904 and touching on 20,000 individuals or households, these records, many of which establish relationships between family members, consist, in the main, of censuses or pay rolls, medical records, annuity payments, school attendance records, land improvement records, and abstracts based on the Final Rolls of Cherokees by Blood . . . of the Five Civilized Tribes.

On the basis of both civil and criminal suits, some private and some brought by the government, Professor Tachau demonstrates that the federal courts in Kentucky were immediately accessible, visible, and deeply involved in the lives of the people. The actual legal practice revealed in the records thus contradicts much of the conventional wisdom and traditional assumptions about the "inferiority" of the lower federal judiciary and suggests that a major revision of American legal and constitutional history may be in order. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.