Introduction to Oklahoma
Just like Rising Moon, Falling Pants, Running Nose
Like those Indians, I’m an Indian too:
A Sioux.
Irving Berlin.
1540 – 1900
The 89ers Day Parade always began with the Shriners on their white horses – at least a dozen of them, prancing proudly down the cobblestone streets of Guthrie. Later would come Shriners on their white motorcycles and later still more Shriners in their white Cadillacs. Guthrie, then only incidentally the former capital city of Oklahoma, was more importantly the proud home of a Masonic Temple. All Oklahoma Masons made at least an annual pilgrimage to this sleepy little town on the Cimarron River.
We made at least a bi-weekly pilgrimage. Except on 89ers Day, Guthrie to us was the home of Grandma Collins: Daisy, formerly Dimick, nee Crick; daughter of Susie Crick, three-quarters Cherokee and whom I knew only as a tiny wrinkled woman, hardly five feet tall and bearing a funny (to a six-year-old) resemblance to an Egyptian mummy.
Susie passed for white. Being an Indian then was hard work. Ethnic pride had yet to be invented – or if it had, it was reserved only for Anglos.
On a Sunday afternoon, the whole Dimick “tribe” (not my word, but my Aunt Verna’s, and used only in such phrases as “I swear, I don’t know what’s the matter with this tribe”) gathered at Daisy’s house. Women cooked and did the dishes. Men smoked, watched television and churned ice cream. Children, whom everyone professed to love but nobody really wanted hanging around, were at least useful for sitting on the freezer container while the men cranked. After dark, the women drank coffee in the living room, the men smoked and played poker in the dining room and the kids caught fireflies on the lawn.
But on April 22, or the nearest weekend day to it, the town belonged to the 89ers.
Not far behind the white horses were the American Legion troops. Their horses were just horses. Nobody had money like the Shriners. Then came buckboards, horse-drawn carriages, the occasional sulky, clowns, flag carriers, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H-ers, floats, walkers, riders, bicyclists, stilt-walkers, penny-farthing riders, unicyclists, school children.
And then the 89ers themselves, survivors of the great Land Run of 1889. Usually in buckboards or carriages, but some in convertibles. Most in period costume: flowing dresses and large-billed sunbonnets that looked like upside-down coal scuttles. Most of them were interchangeable with Grandma Crick–small, toothless and shriveled–but beaming for the cheers and whistles of the crowd.
Every year, of course, there were fewer of them.
(Why do I only remember women? Because men’s costumes haven’t changed all that much since the 19th century or because, sixty-plus years after The Run, few but women were left?)
In the age of television and airplanes, these living relics linked us to our roots, to an age when folks were self-sufficient and didn’t answer to bosses, when people made their own destinies and the government was no more intrusive than the occasional mosquito, when comfortable cotton farms were wrested from rock-hard former buffalo grounds. They were our spirit. They were our inspiration. They were what we thought we were and longed to be but weren’t and wouldn’t.
They were the relics of one of the grandest High Adventures of all time: in audacity second only to the Crusades; in scope, third behind the Crusades and the California gold rush. But beyond the borders of Oklahoma, few people have even heard of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, and fewer still have more than a vague notion of what it was or what it meant.
What it was was the penultimate betrayal of the country’s original inhabitants by the conquering hordes. It was the beginning of the end of an age; the first rusty squeaks of the closing of the frontier; Manifest Destiny fulfilled. It was sea to shining sea and it signaled clearly that the frontier wars were over.
What it meant was that the white man had won.
**
Actually, there were no “frontier wars.” At least not west of the Mississippi. The big Indian wars occurred much farther east and a century before. By the Nineteenth Century, the struggle between whites and Indians had been reduced to the occasional skirmish or the occasional massacre (of whites by Indians; of Indians by whites), with seldom more than a very few hundred dead.
Custer’s doomed Seventh Cavalry numbered only slightly more than 200 men when it was wiped out at Little Big Horn in 1876. One hundred and fifty Indians were killed at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Not to make light of these tragedies, but the numbers pale by comparison with almost any battle of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, for instance, resulted in more than 51,000 casualties.
What the frontier had, and what the real Indian “wars” lacked was public relations. The tragic King Philip’s War (1675; long, cruel, crushingly expensive and resulting in at least 4,000 deaths) received scanty coverage, if at all, in colonial newspapers. But by the last half of the Nineteenth Century, the railroad, the telegraph, a growing sensationalist press and an increasingly literate populace made frontier exploits almost a national pastime. Heroic cavalry and ruthless, scalping Indians were daily fodder for the East Coast press.
A dumping ground for America’s unwanted savages, a lawless outpost in the middle of a “civilized” country and the next-to-last contiguous state admitted to the Union, Oklahoma became the archetype for the movie and television myth of the “Old West.”
*
The first European to explore Oklahoma was Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who passed through in 1540 on his fruitless search for the Seven Cities of Gold. In 1682, France claimed the province of Louisiana (which included the future Oklahoma) from Spain, but it was not until 1719 that Gaston du Rivage made a more extensive exploration of the future state. Du Rivage reported visiting an agricultural tribe, the Wichitas, and noted a fierce band of nomadic and warlike tribesmen, the Apaches.
The Wichitas, whose tribal structure was organized into what were essentially city-states, seemed to be born diplomats, enlisting other tribes to carry out their warfare for them. French traders and trappers began filtering into Northeastern Oklahoma and the Red River area farther south and the French did their best to establish trading treaties with the Oklahoma natives, particularly the Wichitas.
By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, ending the French and Indian War, Spain regained control of Louisiana, but lost it to the French again in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars. Not particularly interested in the swamps and deserts of the Louisiana Territory, France sold the province to the United States in 1803, in what has become known as the Louisiana Purchase.
As an opera lover, I used to be mildly amused when viewing or listening to Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in which the title character and her lover, Des Grieux, are “alone, lost and abandoned” in the Louisiana desert just before they die in the final scene.
I’ve been to New Orleans and to barren northern Louisiana, wherein is located Fort Polk, site of my Army basic training and of my greatest humiliations. “The armpit [or worse, even] of the planet,” we used to call it. But it still would not qualify as a desert.
At the time in which the opera was set, however, “Louisiana” stretched from New Orleans to the southern parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, and from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains – almost a fourth of the contiguous states’ land area, and definitely including such desert states as Oklahoma, North and South Dakota and Wyoming. So who knows which of the many available Louisiana deserts saw the end of Manon and Des Grieux?
*
After the Louisiana Purchase, American trappers and traders began replacing the French, dealing largely in beaver. When the beaver were all trapped out they turned to other fur-bearers and finally to buffalo.
Buffalo – an estimated 15 million of them ranging from Canada to Mexico – were the lifeblood of the plains. Much more than a source of meat, their hides made clothing and teepees, their hair made rope, their bones made tools and their sinews bowstrings. Plains Indian culture was more than dependent upon the buffalo; it was centered on the buffalo.
The buffalo and most of the traditional culture would disappear before the century was out.
*
The country’s northeastern Indians had been largely tamed or exterminated by the nineteenth century, and now the tribes in the southeast were beginning to feel the pressures of advancing European settlers. The Indians, the settlers and the government were all aware of the rising tensions.
Some government officials began promoting the idea of devoting land west of the Mississippi – well beyond anybody’s dreams of American expansion at the time – as a permanent homeland for the Indians. And some of them even believed it would be in the best interests of the tribes to be free from white encroachment. In negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, one of President Jefferson’s goals was to establish an Indian homeland.
In 1804, Congress authorized the executive branch to begin negotiating with the Indians for relocation to “Indian Country,” a vaguely defined area from the Red River (the present Oklahoma-Texas border) on the south, up through Kansas and part of Nebraska. Factions of some tribes voluntarily agreed to relocate, believing it desirable to escape the encroachment and vicious harassment of the white settlers.
Although the state was later home to more than 60 Indian tribes on more than 25 separate reservations, Oklahoma history from this period usually focuses on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles.
The Five Civilized Tribes occupied huge ancestral lands in the southeast United States. Unlike the Plains Indians, they were settled, largely agricultural people, with towns, permanent housing and organized governments. They adapted more easily to the white man’s ways than did the nomadic tribes, and intermarried easily. The mixed-bloods frequently became almost a separate caste and, in many cases, a superior one – although no caste was superior to the whites. My great-grandmother, Susan Thornberry Crick, was an example. Passing for white was superior even to being a mixed-blood Indian.
*
The removal of the Indians from the southeast is usually illustrated by the story of the Cherokees. This tribe was not the most numerous, did not receive the largest slice of Indian Territory, nor did it endure the greatest hardships of any tribe. But it was, in the eyes of the whites, the most “civilized.” It intermarried more than the other tribes with the Scotch and Irish settlers of the South, it had an advanced system of government and its people lived (for the most part) in houses.
In addition, from about 1821, it was literate. Sequoyah, a half-blood Cherokee, spent twelve years developing a Cherokee alphabet, which he called “talking leaves.” It was so simple and effective that anyone who spoke Cherokee could learn to read and write in two weeks and the Cherokee Nation became literate almost overnight.
The Cherokee thus became the Noble Indian – in a sense the white man’s pet – its removal from its ancestral lands to the hills of Oklahoma all the more tragic because its people were almost like civilized folks. The annual “Trail of Tears” pageant at Tahlequah, Oklahoma, wouldn’t draw nearly so many tourists if it featured the nomadic and warlike Comanches or Apaches.
*
And who am I, condensing 350 years of history into a single chapter, to take issue with this viewpoint? After all, I’m an Indian, too. A Cherokee.
*
In the early nineteenth century, about 20,000 Cherokees occupied ancestral lands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama. They have been divided by historians into those more European-oriented, the “Upper Cherokees,” and those more tied to the land and the ways of their ancestors, the “Lower Cherokees.” The Lower Cherokees met with President Jefferson’s representatives in 1808 and voluntarily agreed to move to Arkansas, believing they would then be free to continue their ancient lifestyle.
In 1817, the Upper and Lower Cherokees met with U.S. representatives (including future president Andrew Jackson) and negotiated an exchange: the tribe would cede approximately one-third of its holdings in the east in exchange for title to the Arkansas lands where their relatives were already settled, free transportation to the west for the rest of the tribe and other minor considerations. Three years later, almost a third of the Cherokees had voluntarily moved west. But by 1828, white settlers were already encroaching on the Arkansas lands and white hunters were poaching its game. Another treaty – and another move – was in order.
The government then granted the Cherokees a large tract of Indian Territory (Oklahoma) land, payment for improvements made on their Arkansas land, an annual stipend, further payment for the eastern Cherokees who agreed to move to Oklahoma and free access to any hunting grounds west of their Oklahoma lands, an area which became known as the Cherokee Outlet.
The treaty, as solemn and binding as any other treaty negotiated with an Indian tribe, recited that
it being the anxious desire of the Government of the United States to secure to the Cherokee nation of Indians…a permanent home, and which shall, under the most solemn guarantee of the United States, be, and remain, theirs forever— a home that shall never, in all future time, be embarrassed by having extended around it the lines, or placed over it the jurisdiction of a Territory or State, nor be pressed upon by the extension, in any way, of any of the limits of any existing Territory or State…
[Therefore]…The United States agree to possess the Cherokees, and to guarantee it to them forever, and that guarantee is hereby solemnly pledged, of seven millions of acres of land…
In addition to the seven millions of acres thus provided for…the United States further guarantee to the Cherokee Nation a perpetual outlet, West, and a free and unmolested use of all the Country lying West of the Western boundary of the above described limits, and as far West as the sovereignty of the United States, and their right of soil extend.
All the way to the Pacific Ocean, if you read it literally. But the guarantee wouldn’t last.
*
Also in 1828 the skilled Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, was elected president. Jackson was not unsympathetic to the plight of the Indians; he simply felt they were in the way of progress and that they had only three choices: relocation, assimilation or annihilation. In his first State of the Union Address, he noted that while they had once been “uncontrolled possessors” of “vast regions,”
By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt.
Jackson promised that the tribes’ southern land should be purchased from them, rather than simply taken, and suggested that the “emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land.”
Congress adopted Jackson’s removal plan for the Indians in 1830, but in his second State of the Union Address in December of that year, he was already waffling on his lofty assurances of the year before. “Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers,” he said, “but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing?”
While again expressing sorrow over the extinction of many northeastern tribes, Jackson this time likened it to the perpetual “extinction of one generation to make room for another” and commented that in the larger context, there was not “any thing in this which…is to be regretted.”
Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?
*
There should be a very lengthy pause here to give President Jackson’s question the weight and consideration it deserves.
*
While the government was negotiating with the Indians, white settlers were doing their part to make removal more desirable – or at least to make it less desirable for Indians to stay on their own lands. Whites squatted on Indian lands, stole Indian livestock and shot Indian farmers down in their fields for sport or for spite. Individual resistance was met with arrest; group resistance was seen as savage Indian attacks. Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi abolished tribal governments and made the tribes subject to an unequal system of state laws.
At the same time, the federal government kept increasing its offers to purchase the Cherokee lands. Despite this carrot-and-stick approach, the majority tribal faction held fast, demanding a sum of money far beyond the means of the government. In frustration, federal agents simply turned to the minority faction, negotiating an 1835 treaty which purported to sell all remaining Cherokee lands for $5 million and allowed the tribe two years in which to move to Indian Territory.
By the end of the two-year grace period, relatively few Cherokees had moved, and federal troops and the Georgia militia were ordered to round them up and march them to their new “home.” While they were being gathered up and placed in stockade forts before the march, white settlers were frequently burning their homes and pillaging their livestock.
The Cherokees were herded almost 1,000 miles, with only such possessions as they could carry, and with little or no provision made for protection from the blistering summer or the freezing winter. Finally, John Ross, the leader of the majority band of Cherokees, gave in to the inevitable and begged Gen. Winfield Scott to allow him to supervise the removal of the rest of the tribe.
Under Ross’ supervision, the rest of the “removal” was not quite as harsh. Still, approximately 25 percent of the Eastern Cherokees died on the “Trail of Tears,” mostly the young, the elderly and the infirm.
*
The story of the other four “civilized tribes” is but a variation on a theme, with the Creeks suffering the most. A faction of the Creeks, known as the “Baton Rouges,” or “Red Sticks,” allied with the British in the War of 1812, and a later group of Creeks staged an uprising against their treatment by the whites in the 1836 “Creek Rebellion.” For these acts of insubordination, they paid dearly, being treated more harshly during their “removal” than any of the other tribes.
The Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles each also had their own “Trail of Tears.” In 1855, the Chickasaws were moved from Kansas and Nebraska into Oklahoma, the northern portion of the former Indian Territory was opened for homesteading and the borders of Indian Territory became the present Oklahoma borders. All of Oklahoma except the Panhandle was divided among the five tribes, where they were expected to live “free and undisturbed forever.”
*
For a very few years, life in Oklahoma was probably better than it had been at any time since the white man arrived in the country. Largely protected from encroaching settlers, the tribes settled in to establish towns, governments and educational systems, to write constitutions and, in some cases, to build prosperous plantations.
But a movement was afoot in Washington as early as 1854 to assign each tribe member a plot of farmland and to open the remaining land for white settlement. After all, if a white settler could only homestead 160 acres, why should the Indians be allowed more? Unsuccessful at first, this plan needed only an excuse for implementation, and that excuse arrived with the Civil War.
The Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Cherokees were not nomadic tribes like their cousins on the plains, but were a settled people, who for more than 200 years had lived adjacent to the southern whites, had intermarried with them easily and had adopted many of their ways, not the least of which was the practice of slavery.
The tribes not only identified strongly with the South, but festered with years-long resentment against the federal government for their resettlement and for the union’s general laissez-faire attitude toward treaty obligations. It didn’t help matters that many of Abraham Lincoln’s campaign staff (including later Secretary of State William H. Seward) recommended, during the 1860 presidential campaign, that the Indian lands be taken and opened up for settlement.
Indian Territory was considered strategically important by both the North and the South, as it controlled access to the western states and territories, which both sides hoped to sway to their own cause. The Creeks, Seminoles and Cherokees were at first reluctant to align themselves with the Confederacy, but a significant Confederate victory in 1861 in Missouri seemed to indicate that the South would control the West. Although far from unanimously, the tribes allied themselves with the South and began supplying regiments to the Confederacy.
The Oklahoma campaigns, like most Civil War battle theaters, were brutal, confusing and ever-shifting. The state received but one positive thing from the Civil War: a new hero. Stand Watie, a Cherokee and something of a military genius, rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army, becoming the only Indian general on either side of the conflict. He was also the last Confederate general to surrender.
**
If relocation was the first major blow against the tribes, Reconstruction was the second. The Oklahoma tribes had committed treason against the United States and had, themselves, broken all of the treaties. The government informed them that the treaties were nullified and that the Indians, in future, would have only such rights as the United States chose to grant them. While once they had negotiated from a position of strength, the Indians were now no match for the post-war military might of the United States. They had no choice but to agree.
First, their governments were dissolved. Next, their lands were reallocated to make room for another dozen or so tribes being relocated from Kansas.
Later, more plains and western tribes were forcibly removed to Oklahoma. The Osage, the Kaws, the Sac and Fox, Potawatomies and Iowas.
The Kickapoos, the Poncas, the Pawnees, Otoes, Missouris, Shawnees and Nez Perces.
The Tonkawas, Quapaws, Senecas, Wyandots, Peorias, Miamis, Ottawas, Modocs.
To mention a few.
*
Pacification and relocation of the plains and western tribes was brutal and ruthless.
And, as Jackson had pointed out, inevitable.
*
By the time of the first land run whose anniversary parade I attended in Guthrie for years, the Five Civilized Tribes now occupied only the eastern half of the state, 21 reservations occupied the western half, some tribes now lived in Oklahoma without a reservation and a two-million-acre parcel of land in central Oklahoma, the “Unassigned Lands” was still left over.
Most of the usable public land in the country having long since been homesteaded, the Unassigned Lands were the last and best free land believed to be available to settlers. A faction which came to be known as the “Boomers” worked for ten years to promote the opening of the lands, and frequently sneaked in to establish overnight settlements before being chased out again by federal marshals.
In 1889, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill authorizing the opening of the territory to settlement. Because of the huge interest (only about one in three would-be settlers would successfully stake a claim), the civil servants in charge of the opening decided on an approach which had been used a few times years before in Iowa: the land run. The date was set for a scant thirty days after the president signed the enabling legislation.
On April 22, 1889, an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 people – farmers, tradesmen and merchants, and including an estimated 10,000 blacks, many part of a movement which hoped to found an all-black state – lined the starting points arranged around the borders of the territory. Although the territory was patrolled by U.S. marshals, people of course tried to sneak in ahead of the starting time to claim a prime spot. They became known as “Sooners,” and the state later honored this band of cheats and scofflaws by adopting their nickname as its own.
*
The starting guns were fired at noon and the crowd set off, by buggy or wagon, on horseback and by train: the Santa Fe Railroad already crossed through the territory. Each eligible family could claim either a 160-acre parcel or a lot in one of the designated town sites, such as Guthrie or Norman.
By nightfall, the population of Guthrie was estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Oklahoma Station, a whistle-stop on the Santa Fe line which would later become Oklahoma City, had 10,000 new citizens.
Many children, and even young adults, who made The Run were still alive in the 1950’s. As they rode the streets of Guthrie in the annual 89ers Day Parade, they were honored as living links between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Or, as the official slogan of the state’s semi-centennial celebration in 1957 put it: “Arrows to Atoms.”
*
Even as the Run of ‘89 was happening, government agents were negotiating with the tribes to carry out the plan first proposed 15 years earlier: the tribes would be allowed to keep 160 acres of land for every adult member on their official rolls (lesser acreage for minors) and the government would buy the rest of each tribe’s land – land that had been promised to “be, and remain, theirs forever” – and open it up for settlement. Along with this plan came even further resettlement of many of the tribes.
After long and acrimonious negotiations between the Cherokees and the U.S. government over slave rights, the Cherokee government was dissolved and the Cherokees forced to give their former slaves the same rights as Indian tribal members – land and a share of the money from the feds, including the $6 million paid for the Cherokee Strip. Today, descendants of these freedmen are working to achieve full tribal membership.
Thus, in 1891, 900,000 acres of “surplus” land in the Sac and Fox, Potawatomi, Shawnee and Iowa areas were opened by another run.
In 1892, 3.5 million acres of the former Cheyenne-Arapaho lands were opened.
In 1893, the six-million acre Cherokee Outlet (“a perpetual outlet, West, and a free and unmolested use of all the Country lying…as far West as the sovereignty of the United States…extend[s]”) was the site of a run by nearly 100,000 settlers.
Other Indian areas were settled by runs, lotteries and auctions. By 1900, the present Oklahoma was divided roughly in half diagonally: Oklahoma Territory in the northwest and Indian Territory in the southeast.