Harry Kelsey debunked the “fable” of the 1851-52 unratified California treaties in “The California Indian Treaty Myth,” Southern California Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Fall 1973). As he explained, only the copies printed for confidential use by the Senate in 1852 fell under the injunction of secrecy. The Senate returned the record copies of the treaties to the Department of the Interior, where they were filed with all the other unratified treaties and consulted by some scholars. Because “there was no conspiracy to keep the treaties secret,” Harry Kelsey did not directly address the similarly mythic “discovery” of the treaties by “accident” in 1905, when the treaties were intentionally sought out at the initiative of the Northern California Indian Association to assist in passing legislation to support the Indians of Northern California.
I stumbled upon a striking piece of evidence supporting Harry Kelsey’s assertion that the Senate’s secrecy action was the standard operating procedure for these treaties in 1852. It’s in the index to the Congressional Record for 1905, the year the injunction of secrecy was removed by the Senate. The excerpt from the “treaties” entry (image above) shows that the California treaties were one of thirteen treaties from which the Senate removed its injunction of secrecy during the 58th Congress, 3d Session. Each of the thirteen entries begins with “Injunction of secrecy removed in Senate from….” The congressional session ran from December 5, 1904, to March 4, 1905. In just three months the Senate removed injunctions of secrecy from thirteen treaties. That’s roughly one per week. Could all thirteen–and undoubtedly many others that had injunctions of secrecy removed in previous and subsequent congressional sessions–have been purposefully hidden away by a conspiratorial Senate?