In its 1903 decision in the case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the United States Supreme Court rejected the efforts of three Native American tribes to prevent the opening of tribal lands to non-Indian settlement without tribal consent. In his study of the Lone Wolf case, Blue Clark properly emphasizes the Court's assertion of a virtually unlimited unilateral power of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate) over Native American affairs. But he fails to note the decision's more far-reaching impact: shortly after Lone Wolf, the federal government totally abandoned negotiation and execution of formal written agreements with Indian tribes as a prerequisite for the implementation of federal Indian policy. Many commentators believe that this change had already occurred in 1871 when— following a dispute between the House and the Senate over which chamber should enjoy primacy in Indian affairs—Congress abolished the making of treaties with Native American tribes. But in reality the federal government continued to negotiate formal tribal agreements past the turn of the century, treating these documents not as treaties with sovereign nations requiring ratification by the Senate but simply as legislation to be passed by both houses of Congress. The Lone Wolf decision ended this era of formal negotiation and finally did away with what had increasingly become the empty formality of obtaining tribal consent.

(This passage was excerpted from material published in 1996.)

    When a large body strikes a planet or moon, material is ejected, thereby creating a hole in the planet and a local deficit of mass. This deficit shows up as a gravity anomaly: the removal of the material that has been ejected to make the hole results in an area of slightly lower gravity than surrounding areas. One would therefore expect that all of the large multi-ring impact basins on the surface of Earth's Moon would show such negative gravity anomalies, since they are, essentially, large holes in the lunar surface. Yet data collected in 1994 by the Clementine spacecraft show that many of these lunar basins have no anomalously low gravity and some even have anomalously high gravity. Scientists speculate that early in lunar history, when large impactors struck the Moon's surface, causing millions of cubic kilometers of crustal debris to be ejected, denser material from the Moon's mantle rose up beneath the impactors almost immediately, compensating for the ejected material and thus leaving no low gravity anomaly in the resulting basin. Later, however, as the Moon grew cooler and less elastic, rebound from large impactors would have been only partial and incomplete. Thus today such gravitational compensation probably would not occur: the outer layer of the Moon is too cold and stiff.