The springs that gave Peach Springs its name, some three miles north of the town, started one of the most important cases in American Indian law. In 1866 Congress granted the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, later the Santa Fe, a right of way along the 35th parallel and every odd-numbered section of public land beside it, while promising that Indian title would be extinguished only by voluntary cession. When the railroad reached Peach Springs in the early 1880s it claimed land inside what became the Hualapai Reservation, including the springs. By the early 1900s the railroad was charging the Hualapai for that water, while the Hualapai held that the springs were theirs.
In the 1920s the Hualapai veteran Fred Mahone, who had fought in the First World War, gathered testimony from elders about how the tribe had used the land before the Army came. The federal government sued the railroad on the tribe's behalf in August 1937. The trial court dismissed it in 1939 and the Ninth Circuit agreed in 1940.
The Supreme Court decided United States v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. In a unanimous opinion by Justice William O. Douglas, it held that aboriginal title is a question of fact, and that only a clear act of Congress extinguishes it. The case settled in 1947, with the Hualapai gaining control of most of the land they claimed within the reservation.
Getting there
35.5788, -113.4311
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