Indian Territory

• 1. Introduction

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  Indian Territory was born from a real estate transaction. In 1803, the United States paid $15 million for France's claim to a vast stretch of central North America. That price worked out to less than 3 cents per acre.

  President Thomas Jefferson saw those western lands as a place to resettle Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. White settlers wanted those eastern lands. Jefferson's answer was to move Native nations west, into territory European settlers had not yet claimed.

  That idea became law in 1830 with the Indian Removal Act. Over the following decades, it forced tens of thousands of people from their homelands. It also created a vast unorganized territory, neither a state nor a traditional homeland for the nations compelled to live within it.

  How did the government build the legal machinery that made this possible? Who were the nations drawn into the territory, and where had they come from? And when Oklahoma absorbed the territory in the early twentieth century, did that erasure hold?

• 2. A Territory in Retreat

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  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 drew the first formal boundary between European settlement and Native American lands in what would become the United States. Britain's Indian Reserve ran along the Appalachian crest, limiting colonists to lands east of that ridge.

  The reserve lasted until the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War, after which the land passed to the United States. American settlers ignored those borders and pushed steadily westward. Armed Native nations in the Ohio River valley resisted. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, American forces finally defeated the Indian Western Confederacy. The Treaty of Greenville that followed forced cessions of most of present-day Ohio and part of Indiana. It also surrendered the future sites of Chicago and Detroit to the United States.

  Congress gave Indian Territory legal definition in 1834 with the Indian Intercourse Act, which fixed its initial borders. The territory was the direct successor to Missouri Territory, shaped in 1812 from the former Louisiana lands. Arkansaw Territory, carved from the south in 1819, also contributed to what Indian Territory eventually became.

  An 1820 land cession during Choctaw treaty negotiations assigned more of Arkansas Territory than the government had intended. The mistake pushed the ceded zone from what is now Oklahoma into Arkansas, east of Fort Smith. A survey under the General Survey Act of 1824 tried to fix the line. A second survey in 1828 settled it just west of Fort Smith. After these adjustments, the territory's Indian zone covered the present states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and part of Iowa.

  Wisconsin Territory took a slice in 1836, Iowa in 1838, Minnesota in 1849, and Dakota Territory in 1861. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 drew perhaps the most consequential lines. It set the southern border of Kansas Territory at 37 degrees N, the same parallel that separates Kansas from Oklahoma today. Kansas entered the union in 1861 and Nebraska in 1867. By then, Indian Territory had been compressed to roughly the boundaries of present-day Oklahoma.

  In 1871, the Indian Appropriations Act changed the legal foundation of the entire relationship. From that year forward, the federal government would deal with tribes through legislation rather than treaties. No Indian nation would henceforth be recognized as an independent power with treaty-making rights. Existing treaties remained valid, but no new ones could be made. In 1886, the Supreme Court affirmed the government's sweeping authority in United States v. Kagama. The court ruled that the United States had the right to govern Native Americans by act of Congress. Tribes owed no allegiance to any state, the court added, and no state was required to protect them.

  Secretary of State William H. Seward vocally championed opening Indian Territory to white settlement while campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Historians have argued his advocacy helped steer the Cherokee and the Choctaw toward an alliance with the Confederate States.

• 3. Five Civilized Tribes

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  Between 1814 and 1840, the five nations known collectively as the Five Civilized Tribes surrendered most of their ancestral lands in the Southeast. Each cession came through formal treaties with the United States.

  Those nations were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole. The Choctaw were removed first. Their march west began in 1831 under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. That march gave the Trail of Tears its name. The trail ended in what is now Arkansas and Oklahoma, where other Native peoples, whites, and escaped slaves were already living.

  The Muscogee Creek Nation completed its removal through successive agreements. The 1832 Treaty of Cusseta surrendered all Creek claims east of the Mississippi River to the United States.

  The Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835, set the terms for the Cherokee Nation's removal from the Southeast. The Cherokee National Council never approved the treaty. The U.S. Senate ratified it anyway, and the removal followed. A smaller group of Cherokee from Arkansas had already moved to Indian Territory in 1828, ahead of the larger forced migration.

  The Chickasaw negotiated a different kind of arrangement. Rather than receiving land in exchange for their ancestral territory, they received $3 million in financial compensation. The United States was slow to pay; the full amount was not funded for thirty years. In 1836, the Chickasaw purchased land from the already-removed Choctaw for $530,000, securing the right to share the Choctaw's territory.

  The Seminole, originally from Florida, signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing in 1832. A delegation arrived in Indian Territory in October of that year and met with the Creek Nation, who had already been removed there. In 1833, an agreement was signed at Fort Gibson, on the Arkansas River just east of present-day Muskogee, Oklahoma, accepting lands in the western part of the Creek Nation. The chiefs back in Florida refused to agree. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty anyway in April 1834.

  The Cherokee capital was Tahlequah; the Chickasaw settled at Tishomingo, later Ada; the Choctaw at Tuskahoma, later Durant; and the Creek at Okmulgee. The Seminole built their capital at Wewoka. These nations founded towns that became some of the largest communities in the future state of Oklahoma, among them Tulsa, Ardmore, and Muskogee. They brought enslaved African Americans with them, adding to the territory's African American population.

  An estimate from 1838 put the population of Indian Territory at 94,860 Indians. By 1884, that figure had fallen to 82,334.

• 4. Stand Watie's War

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  In 1861, the United States abandoned Fort Washita, leaving the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations defenseless against Plains tribes to the west. The Confederate States of America moved quickly, signing a treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw the same year. Over the following months, all five of the major relocated nations signed treaties of friendship with the Confederacy.

  Their most prominent military leader was Brigadier General Stand Watie of the Cherokee Nation. Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender in the entire Civil War. He laid down his arms on the 23rd of June, 1865, near the community of Doaksville in Indian Territory.

  The Reconstruction Treaties that followed fundamentally restructured the relationship between the nations and the federal government. Congress created the Southern Treaty Commission to rewrite treaties with the nations that had sided with the Confederacy. The replacement treaties, signed in 1866, swept away the old arrangements and installed new ones.

  The 1866 replacement treaties mandated the abolition of slavery within tribal lands and granted amnesty for the Confederate alliance. Railroads were granted the right of way across Indian Territory. For every twenty miles of completed track with water stations, a railroad received land patents to alternate sections of land along the route. Each man, woman, and child was to receive 160 acres of land as an individual allotment. That policy was later extended nationally through the Dawes Act of 1887.

  The Medicine Lodge Treaty was the collective name for three agreements signed in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. The three treaties addressed the southern Plains tribes who would be settled in the western portion of Indian Territory. The first, signed on the 21st of October, 1867, was with the Kiowa and Comanche. The Plains Apache signed on the same day. A third agreement, with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, was signed on the 28th of October.

  The Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, underpinned the land distribution that followed. As communal tribal lands were converted to individual allotments, remaining unallotted acres were sold off on a first-come basis, typically by land run. The United States General Land Office distributed the proceeds from each land sale to the relevant tribal entities. The territory's communal land base contracted steadily, sale by sale, through the final years of the century.

• 5. Nations of Many Voices

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  The Southern Plains villagers, an archaeological culture, farmed maize and hunted buffalo across the western part of Indian Territory from 800 to 1500 AD. They are considered the likely ancestors of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. The Wichita's own forebears had lived in the eastern Great Plains for at least 2,000 years. Farming villages appeared on terraces above the Washita River and South Canadian River in Oklahoma by around 900 AD.

  The Caddo Confederacy occupied the eastern portion of the territory, their roots extending back to around 200 BC. A Caddoan-speaking people, the Caddo had traditionally inhabited much of East Texas, North Louisiana, portions of southern Arkansas, and Oklahoma. In an 1835 treaty signed at the Caddo agency-house in Louisiana, the Caddo Nation sold their tribal lands to the United States. By 1846, they had signed a second agreement making them a U.S. protectorate. Tribal headquarters are today in Binger, Oklahoma.

  In the 16th century, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado encountered a Pawnee chief. The Pawnee, originally from the area around Omaha, Nebraska, were decimated in the 1830s by measles, smallpox, and cholera. The 1857 Treaty with the Pawnee reduced their range to a territory around Nance County, Nebraska. In 1874, the tribe was relocated to land in the Cherokee Outlet in what is now Pawnee County, Oklahoma.

  The Comanche broke from the Shoshone people in the late 17th century while living near the upper Platte River in Wyoming. A nomadic people who organized as multiple autonomous bands, the Comanche signed their first treaty with the United States in 1835. In 1875, the last free band, led by Quanah Parker, surrendered and moved to the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma.

  The Second Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1829 obliged the Council of Three Fires to cede their lands in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Council was an alliance of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi tribes. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago compelled them to move first to Iowa, then to Kansas and Nebraska, and ultimately to Oklahoma. The Indiana Potawatomi's forced march from Indiana to Kansas became known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death.

  The Ponca had never been at war with the United States and signed their first peace treaty in 1817. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the U.S. government accidentally included Ponca lands in present-day Nebraska within the Great Sioux Reservation. Conflict with the Lakota, who now held legal claim to those lands, forced the Ponca's removal to Indian Territory in 1877. Their new home in what are now Kay and Noble counties in Oklahoma proved poor for agriculture. In 1881, the United States returned 26,236 acres in Knox County, Nebraska, to the tribe.

  The Osage, originally from present-day Kentucky, had been the dominant power across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas by the early 18th century. Treaties signed between 1818 and 1825 reduced their holdings to a strip in Kansas. Under the Drum Creek Treaty of 1870, the Osage sold their Kansas land at $1.25 per acre. The proceeds were used to purchase 1,470,000 acres in Indian Territory's Cherokee Outlet. When the allotment policy reached the Osage, they negotiated to retain communal mineral rights to their reservation lands. Those lands later proved to contain crude oil, and tribal members received royalty revenues from its development.

  The Nez Perce, from Washington and Idaho, arrived in Indian Territory as prisoners of war in 1878. Disease, drought, and famine cut their numbers severely. In 1885, survivors were permitted to return to their northwestern homelands.

  The Modoc War of 1872-1873 displaced the Modoc from their homelands in southern Oregon and northern California to the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory. The federal government's decision to permit some Modoc to return to Oregon in 1909 acknowledged that Oklahoma statehood had not fully resolved where displaced nations belonged.

• 6. Oklahoma

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  In 1866, during treaty negotiations over the future governance of Indian Territory, a Choctaw Nation chief named Kiliahote made a proposal. He suggested the territory be named Oklahoma, from the Choctaw words okla, meaning people, and humma, meaning red. He envisioned an all-American Indian state, controlled by the tribes and overseen by the United States Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

  Oklahoma became the de facto name for the organized portion of the territory, officially approved in 1890. That same year, the Oklahoma Organic Act created a formal Oklahoma Territory from the western portion of Indian Territory, leaving the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes and the Quapaw Indian Agency as the remaining Indian Territory to the east.

  In 1905, the residents of that Indian Territory made a final bid for recognition on their own terms. Delegates proposed the State of Sequoyah, to be carved from Indian Territory alone. Congress rejected the proposal. The administration did not want two new western states from the same region.

  President Theodore Roosevelt offered a compromise: join Indian Territory with Oklahoma Territory to form a single state. He signed the Oklahoma Enabling Act on the 16th of June, 1906, empowering residents of both territories to elect delegates to a state constitutional convention. With Oklahoma statehood in November 1907, Indian Territory was formally extinguished as a legal entity.

  In 2020, the Supreme Court's decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma prompted a sweeping review of tribal land status within the state. Subsequently, almost the entire eastern half of Oklahoma was found to have remained Indian country under federal law. The borders set in the 1830s and 1840s, compressed and finally dissolved in 1907, had never fully lost their legal force. Kiliahote's territory proved harder to erase than Congress had supposed.