How Indian Territory Became Oklahoma

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 123-127:

In ongoing research we have been able to find comparable data for six other states. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to follow the Nebraska pattern; in southwestern Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862, with its tragic aftermath of the Mankato hangings, extinguished Indian land titles before the Homestead law became effective. New Mexico and Wyoming follow the Colorado pattern. Thus of the eleven states analyzed (counting North and South Dakota), in eight of them homesteading appears to have played little role in dispossession.

By contrast Indian Territory (Oklahoma) generally followed the Dakota pattern. Its particular history as the depository for Indian tribes from elsewhere, including the Five Civilized Tribes, imparted peculiar circumstances to the dispossession process, but clearly would-be homesteaders played a central role in dispossession.

The original inhabitants of what became Indian Territory were the Osage, Plains Apache, and to some extent the Comanche. Early in the nineteenth century their land titles were effectively extinguished to make way for other Indians, that is, to create Indian Territory (fig. 5.15). This original dispossession was unrelated to homesteading and predated it by several decades. There was, however, a second dispossession in Indian Territory that occurred when homesteaders and other whites desired the land of the resettled Indians.

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As Rennard Strickland observed, “Oklahoma Indian tribes in a real sense were still sovereign—‘domestic dependent nations,’ in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall. Until that fateful year [1889], although subject to many federal regulations, Indians owned all the land that was to become Oklahoma. Whites within their domain were there on Indian sufferance or were government or military officials. Illegal intruders were subject to expulsion.”

Between 1870 and 1890 the population of Texas nearly tripled and the population of Kansas nearly quadrupled, and the land lying between them became increasingly alluring to whites. Cattle drives north through Indian Territory brought whites into the region. Railroads, land agents, and others, including Elias Boudinot, member of a distinguished Cherokee family, agitated for opening unoccupied Indian Territory lands. C. C. Carpenter, a “Boomer” (homesteader) leader, assembled a group of farmers in 1879 on the Kansas border with the intention of settling in the so-called Unassigned Lands in the middle of the territory (fig. 5.15); only the stationing of federal troops in nearby Kansas towns prevented the threatened invasion. Other expeditions of settlers organized and entered the territory with varying success. Meanwhile advocates for opening parts of Indian Territory organized a national publicity campaign to change federal policy, and it soon had success. By 1885 President Chester A. Arthur had declared in favor of opening Indian lands, and on March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison, during his third week in office, issued a proclamation authorizing eligible persons to enter identified lands for the purpose of making homestead claims.

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In a relatively brief span from late 1889 to roughly 1906, these by-then-well-established resident tribes were given allotments or otherwise moved to small reservations and their “surplus” lands opened to white settlement (fig. 5.16). The most common method of opening Indian Territory lands was by “runs”: homesteaders were excluded from the opened tracts until a specific date and time, at which point the settlers literally raced to their desired plots, with the first to arrive winning the claim [hence "Sooners"]. Figure 5.17 shows the great increase in homesteaded acreage that was unleashed by the second dispossession, represented (approximately) in the figure by the dashed line.

Would-be homesteaders had repeatedly organized illegal and provocative white intrusions onto Indian lands and lobbied Congress and the national executive to extinguish Indian land titles. They succeeded.