The Oklahoma Land Rush

Decades after the event, cowboy Evan G. Barnard vividly
recalled the preparations made by settlers when Oklahoma
territorial officials announced the opening of No Man's Land
to the biggest "land rush" in American history. "Thousands
of people gathered along the border. . . . As the day for the
race drew near the settlers practiced running their horses
and driving carts." Finally the morning of April 22, 1889,
arrived. "At ten o'clock people lined up . . . ready for the
great race of their lives." Like many others, Barnard
displayed his guns prominently on his hips, determined to
discourage competitors from claiming the 160 acres of prime
land that he intended to grab for himself. The story he told
became part of a larger regional tale involving the continual
destruction and creation of communities in the
trans-Mississippi West. What was to become the state of
Oklahoma in 1907 had been reserved since the 1830s for
the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Chickasaws,
Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles), who had been forcibly
removed from their eastern lands. All five tribes had
reestablished themselves as sovereign republics in Indian
Territory. The Cherokees and Choctaws became
prosperous cotton growers. The Creeks managed large
herds of hogs and cattle, and the Chickasaws grazed not
only cattle but sheep and goats on their open fields. The
Five Tribes also ran sawmills, gristmills, and cotton gins.
Indian merchants were soon dealing with other tribes people
as well as licensed white traders and even contracting with
the federal government. The Civil War, however, took a
heavy toll on their success. Some tribes, slaveholders
themselves, sided with the Confederacy; others pledged
loyalty to the Union. But when the war ended, more than
10,000 people--nearly one-fifth of the total population of
Indian Territory--had died. To make matters worse, new
treaties required the Five Tribes to cede the entire western
half of the territory for the resettlement of tribes from other
regions, including the former northern Indian territory of
Nebraska and Kansas. Western Oklahoma thereby became
a new home for thousands more displaced peoples,
including the Pawnees, Peorias, Ottawas, Wyandots, and
Miamis. Many small tribes readily took to farming and
rebuilt their communities. But not all tribes agreed to settle
peacefully. Nomadic by tradition, the buffalo-hunting
Kiowas, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Arapahoes continued
to traverse the plains until the U.S. Army finally forced
them onto reservations. Eventually, more than 80,000
tribes people were living on twenty-one separate reservations
in western Oklahoma, all governed by agents appointed by
the federal government. The fate of both the tribal
reservations and Indian Territory to the east was tied to one
relatively small strip of unassigned land--No Man's Land.
To many non-Indians, this so-called Promised Land seemed
just perfect for dividing up into thousands of small farms.
African Americans, many former slaves of Indian planters,
appealed to the federal government for the right to stake
claims there. Another group of would-be homesteaders,
known as "Boomers," quickly tired of petitioning and
invaded the district in 1880, only to be booted out by the
Tenth Cavalry. Meanwhile, the railroads, seeing the
potential for lucrative commerce, put constant pressure on
the federal government to open No Man's Land for
settlement. In 1889 the U.S. Congress finally gave in.
Cowboy Barnard was just one of the thousands who would
mark the historic opening of almost 2 million acres of the far
western district of Oklahoma to homesteading. Many
homesteaders simply crossed the border from Kansas, but
southerners, dispossessed by warfare and economic ruin in
their own region, were also well represented. By nightfall of
April 22, 1889, tent cities had been set up along railroad
lines as market-minded settlers claimed the land located
nearest to transportation routes. In a little over two months,
after 6,000 homestead claims had been filed, the first
houses, built of blocks of grass and dirt and known as
"soddies," served to shelter growing communities of
non-Indian farmers, ranchers, and other entrepreneurs.
Dramatic as it was, the land rush of 1889 represented only
one in a series that opened all of Oklahoma, including Indian
Territory, to homesteaders. First, the reservations in western
Oklahoma disappeared. The federal government broke up
the estates held collectively by various tribes, assigning to
individuals the standard 160-acre allotment and allowing
non-Indian homesteaders to claim the rest. The Five Tribes
held on until 1898, when Congress passed the Curtis Act,
which formally dissolved Indian Territory. Members of the
former Indian nations were directed to dismantle their
governments, abandon their estates, and join the ranks of
other homesteaders. They nevertheless retained many of
their tribal customs and managed to regain sovereign status
in 1977. Later generations of Oklahomans often celebrated
their historic ties to the Indian nations. At formal ceremonies
marking statehood, just before the newly elected governor
took the oath of office, a mock wedding ceremony united
the symbolic tough and virile cowboy with the demure and
submissive Indian maiden. By this time, in 1907,
tribes people were outnumbered in Oklahoma by a ratio of
ten to one. By this time also, nearly one-quarter of the entire
population of the United States lived west of the Mississippi
River. The hundreds of new communities, supported
primarily by cattle ranching, agriculture, mining, or other
industries, had not only grown with the emerging national
economy but helped to shape it in the process. The new
residents of the region successfully displaced communities
that had formed centuries earlier. They also drastically
transformed the physical landscape. Through their activities
and the support of easterners, the United States realized an
ambition that John L. O'Sullivan had described in 1845 as
the nation's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent"
and remake it in a new image.