THE AMERICANIZATION
OF OKLAHOMA
chapter 16
The End of Indian Territory
Key Themes
Key Terms
Democracy and Civil Rights
•division in severalty
Congress abolishes Indian governments and divides each tribe’s collectively owned land into individual
parcels for each man, woman, and
child on the tribal rolls.
•treaties
Multicultural Heritage
After tribal citizens are assigned
ownership of land, control of the
remaining land and other resources
generally falls to new, non-Indian
residents.
Commerce and
Economic Development
As Indian economies become more
commercial, the federal government
takes more authority from the Indian
governments.
Objectives
•Describe how tribe-owned Indian
lands became fragmented into
individual parcels, and summarize
the problems that resulted
•Discuss how the relationship
between the Five Tribes and the
U.S. government kept changing—
with Indians having less and less
power
•Assess the consequences of the
U.S. government’s decision to
create one Indian agency to deal
with the Five Tribes as if they were
a single unified group and to dissolve Indian courts
258
•agreements
•referendum
•appraise
•grafters
•death claims
Overview
By 1900, the Five Tribes’ republics in Indian Territory
are carved up into allotments for each tribal member,
tribal governments are abolished, and tribal sovereignty
is no more. Non-Indians immediately set about cheating
Indians out of their land under cover of the law.
F
or most of the 1800s, nothing about Oklahoma’s Indian
Territory was unique. It was just one of many areas that
the federal government set aside as Indian lands. Even after
the Civil War, the five Indian nations of eastern Oklahoma occupied only a small part of the Indian lands. Some of the Indian
lands were the reservations in western Oklahoma, and many
more reservations dotted the entire American West.
By the end of the 1800s, most of the other reservations had
disappeared. A federal law, the Dawes Act of 1887, directed the
reservations’ division in severalty. This meant that large areas
set aside for those tribes and owned collectively by them were
divided into individual parcels of 160 acres or less. Individual
Indians then received the pieces as personal allotments. Because
the tribes had small populations and big reservations, what was
left over became part of the U.S. public lands and subject to settle­
ment under the Homestead Act of 1862. This process occurred in
western Oklahoma too.
Key People and Events
1870–1876
The Five Tribes’ intertribal council meets but fails to create a
single government for Indian Territory
1871
U.S. government begins making “agreements” with tribes,
rather than binding “treaties”
1874
U.S. government opens Union Agency at Muskogee
1887
Dawes Act is enacted to break tribal hold on lands;
the Five Tribes are excluded
1898
Curtis Act is passed, effectively including Five Tribes
in the division of lands mandated under the Dawes Act
1901
Crazy Snake Rebellion fails to stop the U.S. breakup
of the Five Tribes
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The Five Tribes
Eastern Oklahoma was changing more and more with
each passing year. The Five Tribes had always had a
special relationship with the federal government. Most
Americans still called them the “Five Civilized Tribes,”
unfortunately implying that no other Indians were civilized. That, of course, was not true, but it was true that
the civilizations of the Five Tribes were quite like that of
the whites of their time and place. For example, as outlined in chapter 9, the governments of these tribes were
recognized by the United States and had been modeled
on the U.S. federal and state governments. Their written
constitutions contained some provisions exactly like sections of the U.S. and state constitutions, especially concerning the three branches of government—executive,
legislative, and judicial. Another example of the special
status of Oklahoma’s Five Tribes was that the Dawes Act
exempted them from the forced breakup of Indian tribal
lands. With more Indian lands passing to whites every
year, Oklahoma’s five Indian republics remained a special
Indian Territory.
That did not mean that the Five Tribes were immune
from change. Their economies grew steadily more commercial, and their populations became much larger and
less Indian. As time passed, the white and black newcomers living on the tribes’ lands grew more dissatisfied with
the tribal governments, which gave them few services or
rights. The settlers grew more frustrated with the tribes’
collective ownership of land and resources. To them, the
Indian republics were not just special. They were unsatisfactory and unacceptable. They had to go.
As the federal government steadily dissolved other
Indian reservations, it began to rethink the Five Tribes’
special status. If Washington’s Indian agents and military commanders were ending the authority of Sioux and
Comanche chiefs, why should federal power listen to a
bunch of Creeks and Cherokees? If the Omaha and the
Chippewa lands were divided up and given away, why not
those of the Choctaws and the Chickasaws? The pressures arising from these questions, and from the area’s
economic success and new population, created a steady
drive to end the Five Tribes’ special relationship with
Washington.
Washington’s New Authority
The first steps toward ending the Five Tribes’ special
situation had come even before the Dawes Act of 1887.
260 the story of oklahoma
The Reconstruction treaties after the Civil War had
required that the tribes create an intertribal council,
which Washington hoped would begin unifying the Indian
republics into a single territory under a single government.
Correctly sensing the threat to their individual nations,
the Indians ignored that provision at first. They took no
action until Congress began to write bills to destroy their
separate governments.
Between 1870 and 1876, delegations from each tribe
met annually at Okmulgee, but Washington’s officials
were hardly pleased with the meetings. About all that
came of them was a steady stream of resolutions protesting any change at all. But one lasting and important
contribution came from the meetings, even though it
was unintended. Resentful that one government should
even be considered in place of their beloved five republics, the Indians nonetheless debated what such a territory
would be called. Their answer came from Allen Wright,
a Choctaw delegate. He proposed a name that combined
Choctaw words for “red” and “people”—“Oklahoma.”
The other delegates wanted none of it.
Lacking cooperation from the tribes, the federal government gradually but steadily moved to end their special
status. Even though the Indians refused to unify their governments, the U.S. government united its dealings with
them by creating one central Indian agency to replace the
five separate ones. In 1874, the Union Agency opened at
Muskogee. After that, the government’s business with
each of the Five Tribes flowed through that one office and
its agents.
Another sign that the Indian republics were losing their
special status was the extension of federal judicial authority into their lands. Indian courts and Indian police forces
had been distinctive institutions of these nations. But those
law-enforcement bodies had no authority over nontribal
citizens, the growing majority of the territory’s population. Moreover, the federal government had no way of
prosecuting Indian citizens for violating U.S. laws except
to haul them to the nearest federal district court—in Fort
Smith, Arkansas.
There also were severe problems with business lawsuits.
As businesses in Indian Territory grew bigger and more
complex, business disputes became more common and more
difficult. Except for a few cases that involved only tribal
citizens, none of these matters could be presented in the
tribal courts. And there were no other courts.
For these reasons, Congress established the first U.S.
district court in Indian Territory in 1889, at Muskogee.
Other courts at Ardmore and McAlester soon followed.
By the late 1800s, many people were demanding the
most sweeping changes of all. Dividing lands and other
resources of the Five Tribes into individual allotments
would end Indian Territory’s special economic status. And
abolition of the five tribal governments would end Indian
authority in the territory completely.
It is no surprise that the loudest demands came from the
people new to Indian Territory. Tribal land ownership and
tribal government meant nothing to them—nothing, that
is, except barriers to what they believed were their rights
as American citizens. Every year their numbers grew.
Every year their frustrations increased. Every year their
demands did too.
Just as frustrated as non-Indians were tribal members
and their leaders. Every year the tribes grew more discontented with the failure of the federal government to honor
its obligations and “solemn treaties.”
Outside the territory, others supported allotments.
Railroad men and merchants believed that allotments
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Demands for Land
would open Indian Territory to new enterprise, new
investments, and new industries—as well as create new
opportunities for themselves. Many who considered
themselves friends of the Indians also agreed. They
argued that the time had come for the people of the
Five Tribes to put aside their traditions, take up private
property, and exchange tribal citizenship for American
citizenship. As they saw it, the Five Tribes thereby would
complete the process of becoming “civilized” in fact as
well as in name.
Responding to such arguments, every session of
Congress from 1888 onward took up bills that would have
extended the Dawes Act to Indian Territory. None passed.
In 1893, Congress instead passed a law creating a special
commission to negotiate with the Five Tribes. Hoping to
earn the Indians’ consent to an “agreement” to divide their
lands and destroy their governments, the commission traveled to Indian Territory the next year. Henry L. Dawes,
the author of the Dawes Act, headed the group, which
therefore was known as the Dawes Commission. It even
kept that name after Senator Dawes left the commission
and was replaced by Tams Bixby.
Over the next three years, the commissioners met
with tribal leaders for rounds of talks, each round bogging down in exchanges of threats and protests. Only
one agreement was ever reached, the so-called Atoka
Agreement with the Choctaws and the Chickasaws. Even
that led nowhere. In a required referendum (submitting a
proposed law or action to voters for their approval), the
Chickasaw people solidly rejected what their tribal leaders had negotiated.
At that point, the federal government decided to proceed without the Five Tribes’ consent. In 1895, Congress
ordered that surveys of the tribal lands be made and, a
year later, that citizenship rolls be prepared. Both were
necessary steps toward breaking up the land into individual allotments. In 1898 came the most determined step
of all: the Curtis Act. The law was written by Charles
Curtis, a Kansas representative and a mixed-blood Kaw.
It established a very harsh process for dividing the tribes’
lands and abolishing their governments without their consent. It offered them only one alternative: its harsh terms
would be lifted if the tribes agreed to divide their property
and end their governments by other methods.
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Each brought relatively convenient legal authority to nontribal citizens. Each also brought federal jurisdiction to
the Indians. With federal judges, marshals, and deputies,
the Indian republics were becoming more like other Indian
lands and less like independent nations.
Perhaps the most significant change in the U.S. government’s dealings with the tribes came in 1871. Ever since
the first Europeans had reached North America, their governments had dealt with Indian tribes through treaties,
legal devices that bound two presumed sovereign governments to mutually negotiated and agreed-upon decisions.
Although they were often violated, treaties at least implied
that Indians and white governments were equal and that
any changes to treaties required the consent of both parties. Also, the U.S. Constitution states that treaties are
superior to both state and federal laws.
After 1871, the federal government refused to negotiate
treaties with Indian tribes. Instead, they negotiated agreements. The difference was more than just substituting one
word for another. Unlike treaties, agreements did not presume the equality of Indian governments. Agreements also
could be changed anytime by passing a federal law, with
or without Indian consent. The federal government did
usually try to get the Indians to consent to changes in
agreements. But everyone—both white and Indian—knew
that the white government ultimately would have its way,
no matter what Indians wanted.
The Allotment Process
The Curtis Act had its intended effect. In order to
­influence what they could not prevent, the tribes h
­ urried
the end of indian territory 261
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Charles Curtis (1860–1936)
to negotiate agreements with the federal government.
Details varied from one agreement to another, but all
provided essentially the same things: the allotment of
the national lands and the end of the tribal governments.
Federal officials were to register all tribal members and
produce complete lists of every citizen of every tribe.
Meanwhile, others officials would survey and roughly
appraise (assess the value of) every acre of every nation.
Some land (cemeteries, for example) would be left as tiny
pieces of tribal property. Other real estate (like town sites
and land valuable for its coal and asphalt deposits) was
set aside to be sold later at auction. The great bulk of the
land—an area as big as the entire state of Indiana—was
to be divided among the tribal citizens. At that point, the
tribal governments would end. Oklahoma’s five Indian
republics would disappear.
These agreements, once reached, provided some evidence that assimilation had succeeded. Although the Five
Tribes were free to choose that their nations’ subsurface
mineral rights stay theirs as collective property, the tribal
negotiators chose that both surface and subsurface rights
be bound together in each allotment. After all, that was
how whites did it. Only tribes that they dismissed as back-
262 the story of oklahoma
ward—the Osage in particular—would have it any other
way. Thus, assimilation had done its work. Later, it would
do its damage.
The actual division was a very complicated matter. With most tribes, each individual’s precise share
depended on what kind of citizen he or she was as well as
the quality of the land involved. Was this citizen a fullblood Indian, a mixed-blood, an intermarried white, or
a freed black assigned tribal citizenship? Was the land
covered with rocks and brush, or was it rich bottomland?
Such distinctions affected the size of the final allotment.
Was the land the actual site of the person’s home? If so,
it was that person’s homestead allotment, usually equal
to 40 acres of average land. Each person also received
additional land, known as the “surplus.” Except for the
few small pieces noted above, every square inch of the
lands designated for each tribe’s allotments would pass,
one way or another, to that tribe’s citizens. None was
left for anyone else.
Another complication was that the agreements included
various restrictions on the allotments. Designed to protect
Indians from losing their allotments outright, very complex restrictions were to govern the sale of allotments for a
period of time. The details varied with each agreement and
also depended on the allottee’s bloodline (“quantum” of
Indian blood) as well as the type of allotment. Generally,
the most-restricted allotments were those issued to fullbloods as their homesteads.
Towering above all those complications was one plain
truth: Oklahoma’s Five Tribes were losing the sovereignty
that had been promised to them for as long as the grass
grew and the waters ran. The unending babble about
the newcomers’ “rights,” business “opportunities,” and
economic “progress” allowed no one—or not many, anyway—to hear and remember those old promises. Among
the few who did were the most traditional, especially the
full-blood Indians, who had stubbornly refused to learn
the whites’ tongue or walk the white road. Living in the
hills and valleys far from the new towns and cities, they
had been content with a few acres of corn and nearby
woods for foraging their free-ranging livestock.
Native Resistance
For many traditional Indians, all this was just one more
thing to ignore. They hid from government census takers,
refusing to see their names added to the whites’ rolls. They
refused to go to the government’s land offices and designate their own allotments. Federal officials went right
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To guide census takers, federal officials provided sample forms like this one for recording the Creek Nation’s freedmen.
ahead, choosing allotments for them and mailing letters
to inform them of what they now owned. They returned
the letters, unopened.
Outright, open resistance came from the Four Mothers
Society. Active in every tribe except the Seminole, it
claimed to have as many as 24,000 members, every one a
person resolved not to let go of the old promises. Among
the Creeks, resistance briefly flared into violence. In 1901,
an elderly full-blood named Chitto Harjo organized a
shadow government with its own council and its own
laws—laws that forbade fellow Creeks to accept allotments, to rent land to non-Creeks, or to employ white
labor in any form. On occasion, Harjo’s government even
tried to enforce its laws by arresting and whipping some
who broke them. Because Chitto Harjo’s name could be
literally translated into English as “Crazy Snake,” white
folks dismissed the whole episode as the Crazy Snake
Rebellion. They meant no humor by the name. In fact, they
called for federal forces to crush the insurrection. Soldiers
and armed federal officers rounded up 94 Creeks—most
of them elderly, and nearly all full-bloods—and sent them
off to prison.
The Crazy Snake Rebellion represented one way that
Indian Territory confronted change. But much more
important—and with far more consequences—was that
change gave rise to an altogether new industry, one that
almost overnight became the territory’s largest and most
profitable business. Those who witnessed it, those who
suffered at its hands, and even those who practiced it
called it by one name: grafting. Those who practiced it
proudly identified themselves grafters. Grafting, grafters
—what it got down to was the business of taking Indian
allotments by any means.
The Business of Grafting
Ironically, the very restrictions intended to protect the
Indians and their property may have made grafting possible, perhaps inevitable. What could be sold? When? By
whom? How? To whom? Answers to all such questions
lay hidden within a maze of agreements, degrees of Indian
blood, and forms of allotments. Only the most sophisticated could make their way through that maze. Rare was
the Indian who could do it alone.
It was certain, however, that someone would cut through
the maze of restrictions. The land was too valuable for
anything else. Newcomers wanted it, they were willing
to pay money for it, and many Indians needed money. No
longer able to use whatever land they wanted to produce
everything they needed, they had to have money to buy
what the whites sold.
The situation opened the door for grafting. That is not
the end of indian territory 263
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Once allotment was complete, land officials recorded the results. In this case, the town site of Tahlequah was reserved, with its lots sold at
auction. The surrounding area went to individual Cherokee citizens, and their allotments were carefully recorded.
to excuse it; its methods were selfish at best, evil at worst.
But perhaps the circumstances at least partly explain why
some people were willing to set aside their most basic principles of fair dealing when it came to Indians and what
they owned.
The government’s Indian policy in the late nineteenth
century stressed assimilation—turning Indians into regular, property-owning Americans. That policy, as prac-
264 the story of oklahoma
ticed by so-called humanitarians or religious reformers
and their government allies, also helped set the stage for
grafting.
Grafters were involved at every point in the allotment process. After the federal government placed some
Indians on tribal rolls and surveyed all the tribe’s lands,
there had to be some way for individual Indians to identify and take title to their personal allotments. Often it
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Many Indian full-bloods wanted no part of the forced allotments that divided their lands
and destroyed the material basis of their cultures. In this case a Cherokee full-blood
returned his allotment document with a note inscribed in his native language through
Sequoyah’s famous alphabet: “I don’t want this paper or the land. I return the paper and
don’t want any more.”
was a grafter who found the Indian, took him or her to
the nearest land office, and completed the government’s
forms, identifying exactly what land this particular
Indian wanted, both as a homestead and as surplus.
Rarely was this activity born of desire to help the
unfortunate. On the contrary: this was simply the first
stage in the grafters’ systematic exploitation of the less
fortunate. There might still be restrictions to block their
purchase of the land, but grafters had plenty of other
ways to get it. Once they had it, they might use it themselves, but grafters were far more likely to rent it to some
of the tens of thousands of newcomers streaming into
the collapsing Indian republics. Those newcomers were
desperate for land—any land.
Among the grafters’ most useful tools were formal
leases. Restricted land could not be sold, but it could
be leased, and leases often were signed moments after
allotments were assigned. Some leases ran for as long
as 99 years; for those, grafters might pay no more than
$10 to $15 a year. Grafters could get several leases, even
hundreds, that way. In fact, that was how one group in
the Creek Nation gained control of more than 80,000
acres of allotted lands. That particular organization
was hardly the only one, however. In 1902, Creek chief
Pleasant Porter estimated that grafters already had
acquired more than a million acres of Creek allotments
under such leases.
Chitto Harjo (or Crazy Snake) was so
opposed to the allotment process that he
organized and led a separate government
that punished those who accepted the
land division.
Choctaw and Chickasaw citizens registering for their land
­allotments.
the end of indian territory 265
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A more specialized form of grafting involved land
assigned to Indian children. As tribal citizens, children
shared in the division along with the adults, all receiving
their own personal allotments. For grafters, these particular allotments became a natural resource, something to
be mined and exploited. Especially vulnerable were allotments assigned full-blood and orphaned children. The
law gave control over every such allotment to the child’s
guardian. Guardians and grafters were often one and the
same. Some grafters were, in fact, professional guardians,
controlling the birthrights of hundreds of children. They
leased most of the allotments, earning handsome profits
for themselves but providing little or nothing for their
helpless wards.
No less lucrative was land given the elderly. Although
restrictions generally forbade sale of the land, it could
always be willed to someone who inherited it when its
Indian owner died. Grafters, fully aware of this, looked
for the very sick and the very old—the sicker and older,
the better. For a little cash, Indians signed wills that were
called death claims—they transferred title the moment the
Indian died. In 1906, one federal official estimated that at
least 2,300 death claims were in place.
Even restricted allotments could be sold if an individual petitioned Congress to enact a special law allowing
him or her to sell the land. Several thousand did so, and
Congress routinely lifted individual restrictions one by
one. Surely some petitioners were financially astute and
profited from the sale. Others, however, never knew what
was happening. For a few dollars, they had signed—often
with their X—papers in a language they did not know,
papers that meant nothing to them but everything to
grafters: petitions begging Congress to lift restrictions
on the specific allotments. Once the petitions were in
Voices of Indian Territory
The complicated dispersal of the Five Tribes’ lands generated wealth for some, poverty for others, and confusion for most. Attempting to understand the situation, the
U.S. Senate formed the Select Committee to Investigate
Matters Connected with Affairs in the Indian Territory in
1906. In public hearings in several cities, the senators
heard from politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople,
journalists—and grafters. They also heard from the simple citizens whose lives had been most affected.
When the committee finished its work, the senators
filed an official report and went about their business. That
report, two massive volumes of verbatim testimony, can
now be found in only a few libraries. The reader who
opens their brittle pages can hear even now the cries
of the wounded whose pitiable confusion grew out of a
sense of the greatest betrayal.
We are pushed out of all that we had. The fullblood Indian people are pushed out today, and
they have left their homes and taken what they
have, and everything, and are camped out in
266 the story of oklahoma
the woods today. . . . It is going to be cold
weather after a while, and there is the women
and the little children and the old people, and
we don’t know what to do with them or where
to get a house to put them in. All the property
such as cattle and hogs and horses—it is all
gone, we have not got anything left. We used to
have plenty and more than we wanted and now
we haven’t got anything. (Eufaula Harjo, Creek)
I say that I will never change; before our God, I
won’t. It extends to heaven, and the great treaty
that has been made with the Government of the
United States. Our treaty wherever it extends is
respected by the Creator, God. . . . I can’t stand
and live and breathe if I take this allotment. Under
the allotment rules I would see all around me
. . . people who are ready to grab from us my living and my home. If I would accept such a plan
I would be going into starvation. To take and put
the Indians on the land in severalty would be just
the same as burying them, for they could not live.
(Redbird Smith, Cherokee; he showed the senators a copy of his tribe’s original removal treaty
along with the eagle feather that had been given
his great-grandfather on its negotiation)
are poor and ignorant, but we know that we love
our country, and have confidence in our father’s
protection. I am faithful and my people are faithful, and we trust that our original rights will be
restored. (Osway Porter, Chickasaw)
They took all our children from their father and
mother and made a guardian for them in the
United States court, and we don’t want it that
way. I am still faithful to the Great Father of the
United States, who made this treaty with the
Indians, and I am faithful to that treaty, and the
Almighty God that rules the world. (Willis Toby,
Choctaw)
In the agreement made between me and my
government and the Government of the United
States there was a misunderstanding, and . . .
I think I have the privilege of appealing to the
other tribes and notifying them. . . . I do not
mean the other four civilized tribes, but I call
upon the Spanish Government and the British
Government and the French Government—I call
on four of the civilized Governments across the
mother of waters to come and see that this is
right. That is all I have to say. (Chitto Harjo)
I love this country as I love my mother, for it is
my mother. I love it as I love my own father. I
love its hills and mountains, and its valleys and
trees and rivers and everything else that is in this
country. I am here before you my father, humbly
asking you to protect me and my people. We
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the most inspiring story in Oklahoma’s history.
It is, nonetheless, the story of how Indian Territory
ceased to exist. It is what Chitto Harjo saw, and it is
why, in 1906, he carried to the U.S. Capitol a copy of
the treaty that the federal government had made with his
Creek ancestors. He wanted to ask President Theodore
Roosevelt if his treaty’s promises of a permanent Creek
nation in a permanent Indian Territory were no more.
Chitto Harjo did manage to meet President Roosevelt,
who firmly shook his hand, then turned and quickly
walked away.
Chitto Harjo returned not to the Creek nation that he
and his people had been promised but to a territory full of
growing cities, towns, and farms. Chitto Harjo had traveled a hard and strange road, just as Indian Territory had
taken a hard and strange road to become like the rest of
America.
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place, grafters could then buy the land directly, maybe
for $20 or so.
In certain circumstances, grafters had no need for even
that degree of duplicity. Under the Creek agreement,
all restrictions on surplus lands (except those allotted
to full-bloods) expired at 12:01 a.m. on August 8, 1907.
Throughout the previous day and all evening long, carloads
of mixed-bloods and freed persons poured into Muskogee,
on trains specially chartered by local grafters. Business
opened promptly at one minute past midnight, and one territorial newspaper estimated that half of the 437,790 acres
involved was sold in the next 30 minutes.
No one has been able to calculate how many Indians
lost how much land by such means. This much is certain,
though: The prime beneficiaries of the allotment process
were not the people of the Five Tribes. They were the grafters who exploited those people and their property. It is not
Source: U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Matters Connected with Affairs in the Indian
Territory, 59th Cong., 2d sess., 1908, no. 5013
the end of indian territory 267