On July 1, 1957, five years after Soldier Wolf returned from Korea, a representative of Fremont Minerals, Inc., sent a letter to Wind River superintendent Arthur N. Arntson.

“Our company, Fremont Minerals, Inc. is interested in purchasing Indian land for the purpose of erecting a uranium concentrating mill,” the letter said. “Scott Dewey is the owner of a portion of our contemplated site and on our behalf has approached other owners,” it continued. “They have indicated their desire to sell their land.”

According to heir lists and legal documents, Scott Dewey, Mark Soldier Wolf’s father, owned 40 of 200 acres on Indian allotments wanted by Fremont Minerals. The other 160 acres were owned by relatives such as Soldier Wolf, who inherited his acreage when his mother died. The extended family had been there for generations, raising horses, cattle, grains and oats.

By the end of August 1957, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had effectively approved the sale of the Indian acreage to Fremont Minerals. By September, documents show, all heirs to the land, including Soldier Wolf and his wife, had signed their names to consent to sale forms. Their share: $580. Almost all the deeds were notarized by a BIA realty officer and witnessed by Scott Dewey.

But the veracity of those documents is still disputed by Soldier Wolf to this day. He has no memory of signing them. And the sales were made with incredible haste. Nearly every landowner involved lacked the education or legal representation to make an informed decision on the sale. Soldier Wolf, for instance, despite his years in the Army, couldn’t read well enough to understand the papers, he said, recalling that he was told to vacate his property or face jail time by local law enforcement in the winter of 1957. Other family members were forced to quickly find new homes either on the reservation or somewhere else so the new mill could be built.

A review and reconstruction of hundreds of records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives, United States Geological Survey, Department of Interior and Fremont County show that from July to December 1957, 200 acres of land were transferred from Native American ownership to non-Native, corporate hands on the Wind River Reservation for the purpose of building a uranium milling plant.

And while Fremont Minerals paid a total of $17,186 for the land and the BIA documented that the check had been deposited, no record of payment to land owners has ever been located despite several Freedom of Information Act requests for documentation.

This is not uncommon in Indian country.

“In some cases the records were never created, in some cases they were created and destroyed, in some cases they were simply lost,” said Donald Wharton, a senior attorney for the Native American Rights Fund in Denver. “The United States did nothing to keep the records they were obliged to keep.”

The lack of records can make any assertion hard to prove or disprove, leaving many legal cases for Native Americans to languish in court.

In 2009, for instance, the federal government settled the largest class-action lawsuit in the nation’s history over missing records of Indian people. In Cobell v. Salazar, defendants asked the federal government to account for assets dating back to the late 1800s. It estimated that the government mismanaged nearly $150 billion in Indian money and eventually paid out $3.4 billion in damages.

Soldier Wolf is in a similar situation, said Matthew Kelley, an attorney with Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz, in Washington D.C.

In the case of Mark Soldier Wolf’s trust accounts, Kelley said, as well as his family’s, they may actually exist someplace that the federal government couldn’t find.

“Experience has taught people that record keeping in Indian country has been rather haphazard,” he said. “Particularly in the 20th century and particularly dealing with land issues.”