Salt Lick Reservation controversy
The Salt Lick Reservation controversy was a land speculation and corruption scandal involving Andrew Jackson, who was the seventh U.S. president, serving from 1828 to 1836.
The two men who made the deal for the "salt lick" lands, which would have been legitimized had Congress ratified that draft of the treaty, were a future member of Jackson's presidential Kitchen Cabinet, and a merchant and banker from Franklin, Tennessee.
The Salt Lick Reservation controversy was a political scandal resulting from a section of the 1818 land cession treaty negotiated between the Chickasaw people and the United States by Indian commissioners Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby.
[1] The special arrangements for the so-called Salt Lick Reservation, four by four miles square, were described in "a strange and cumbersomely worded clause in the treaty.
[4] There were two partners signed on to a 199-year lease for the salt lick that was to be included in the treaty: one was William Berkeley Lewis, husband of one of Andrew Jackson's wards, and later a key figure in his presidential kitchen cabinet, and one was Robert P. Currin (1789–1857), a Tennessee businessman who was still seeking Congressional relief for his investment as of 1838.
James Trimble, Ephraim Foster, Charles G. Olmstead, and William Banks, Esqs., went off, post haste...[to] purchase the land.
No words can express their astonishment in finding that the day after the treaty was ratified in Washington City, though one thousand miles off, that the agent, Donnelly, had confirmed the lick and land contracts for Lewis, Jackson, and others.
The treaty-making power is vested in the President and Senate, the House of Representatives being considered too numerous to be trusted with business that requires great secrecy.
Currin was apparently the "the business partner of another brother-in-law," all three of the brothers-in-law having married daughters of North Carolina–Nashville land speculator William Terrell Lewis.
According to Veritas in the Louisville paper, having failed to get the Senate to accept a new clause about this land in one treaty, during a round of talks with the Chickasaw in Washington "conducted by the President himself...strange as it may seem to ordinary men, the article which was unanimously stricken out of the former treaty, was re-inserted by the order of President Jackson, and submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent!!
According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, "Henry County's first tourist attraction, Sulphur Well, was created by accident in 1821, when an artesian well of sulphur water was struck in an attempt to locate a large salt bed...Eventually a summer resort was erected at the site to accommodate the large numbers of people who came to drink the water, which was believed to have health benefits.
