In 1832, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was pondering the fate of Baptist missionary Samuel Worcester, who’d been jailed by Georgia state militia for preaching the Christian gospel to Cherokee Indians, little did Marshall know that his ruling would one day reroute rivers, legalize hundreds of Indian casinos from coast to coast and derail a $242 million coal-to-China project on the Columbia River in the 21st century.

This September, when the Oregon Department of State Lands denied a dock permit to Ambre Energy, an Australian company, Marshall’s federalism patch not only stretched in every direction, it held firm. Ambre had been hoping to build a new coal port near the town of Umatilla to export 8.8 million tons of coal annually to China. But its ambitious plans posed a clear and present threat to recovery efforts for endangered salmon in critical Columbia River habitat protected by treaties with Columbia River tribes. Therein lay the reeds of contention.

“Salmon tribes” in the Pacific Northwest were united in opposition to the deal, and that trumped all of Ambre Energy’s rhetoric about creating jobs and future profits. What John Marshall made inviolate in Worcester v. Georgia was this: In any contest between treaty rights and states’ rights, treaty rights must prevail.

The Oregon Department of Lands did not cite Worcester v. Georgia in rejecting the coal-port proposal, but Marshall’s ghost was present in the room when the decision was announced. As Marshall told the Georgia governor who ordered Samuel Worcester’s arrest 182 years ago for preaching to the Indians, sovereign-to-sovereign negotiations are protected by Article VI, Clause 2, of the Constitution, as “the supreme law of the land.” Therefore, no state or corporate power has the legal authority to violate provisions of treaty agreements once the agreements have been ratified by the federal government.