Bureau of Indian Affairs

The Official Proceedings at the Council in the Walla Walla Valley and Lawrence Kip's Indian Council in the Walla Walla Valley, along with James Doty's Journal of Operations, are an exlent source of first hand information on the treaty proceedings. Also reprinted are the texts of the three treaties signed at the end of the council, and the text of three more conferences held by the military authorities with several of these tribesman after the battles of 1855 and 1856. These documents provide an insight, however imperfectly translated, into the way the Columbia basin Native Americans viewed what the land they lived on meant to them, and how different their views on land ownership was from the European views of ownership of defined tracts of land.