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The
History of Oklahoma refers to the history of the
state of Oklahoma and the
history of the land that the state now occupies.
Most of Oklahoma (all but the Panhandle) was
acquired in the
Louisiana Purchase of 1803, while the
Panhandle was not
acquired until the U.S. land acquisitions following
the Mexican-American
War.
There is
some question as to whether or not
Francisco Vásquez
de Coronado was the first European to set foot inside
Oklahoma.
Before Statehood
The Indian Relocation
Prior to
becoming a state in 1907, Oklahoma
was designated the Indian
Territory by the U.S. government. This was done in order
to provide a place for the
Native
Americans to relocate to as the
United States expanded westward towards the
Mississippi River in the
1800s.
The
Indian Removal Act of 1830
was signed by
President Andrew Jackson
within a year of taking office. This act gave the President
the power to negotiate treaties for removal with Indian
tribes living east of the
Mississippi River. The treaty called for the Indians to
give up their eastern land for land in the west. Those who
wished to stay behind were allowed to stay and become
citizens in their state. For the tribes that agreed to
Jackson's terms, the removal was peaceful; however, those
who resisted were eventually forced to leave.
The
northern Indian tribes included the
Shawnee, Ottawa,
Potawatomi,
Sauk, and Foxes. Because of
their size and fragmentation, relocation was easier than
that of the southern tribes, which were much larger and more
organized.
The
Choctaw,
Creek, Chickasaw,
Seminole, and
Cherokee tribes (the
Five Civilized Tribes) living in the
Southern United States
were considered civilized
because of their adoption of Western customs and in the case
of the Cherokee, the development of a
written language, as well
as having good relationships with their neighbors.
The
Choctaw signed relocation treaties in
September 1830, notably the
Treaty of Dancing
Rabbit Creek. Those Choctaws that decided to stay in
Mississippi were soon forced off
of their ancestral lands and moved west.
The
Creek also refused to relocate
and signed a treaty in March 1832 to open up a large portion
of their land in exchange for protection of ownership of
their remaining lands. The United States failed to protect
the Creeks, and in 1837, they were militarily removed
without ever signing a treaty.
The
Chickasaw saw the relocation as
inevitable and signed a treaty in 1832 which included
protection until their move. The Chickasaws were forced to
move early as a result of white settlers and the War
Department's refusal to protect the Indian's lands.
In 1833, a
small group of Seminoles signed a relocation treaty.
However, the treaty was declared illegitimate by a majority
of the tribe. The result was the
Second and
Third Seminole Wars. Those that
survived the wars eventually were paid to move west.
The
Cherokee were tricked with an illegitimate treaty, the
Treaty of New Echota of
1833. The Cherokee were given two years to move west or else
be forced to move. At the end of the two years only 2,000
Cherokees had migrated westward and 16,000 remained on their
lands. The U.S. sent 7,000 soldiers to force the Cherokee to
move without the time to gather their belongings. This march
westward is known as the Trail of
Tears in which 4,000 Cherokee died.
Post-Civil War Period
After the
American Civil War, in
1866, the federal government forced the tribes into new
treaties. Most of the land in central and western Indian
Territory was ceded to the government. Some of the land was
given to other tribes, but the central part, the so-called
Unassigned Lands, remained with the government.
Another concession allowed
railroads to cross Indian lands. In 1862
Stand Watie was elected principal
Chief of the "Southern Cherokee Nation". Furthermore the
practice of slavery was outlawed. Some nations were
integrated racially and otherwise with their slaves, but
other nations were extremely hostile to the former slaves
and wanted them exiled from their territory.
In the
1870s, a movement began by people wanting to settle the
government lands in the Indian Territory under the
Homestead Act of 1862. They
referred to the Unassigned Lands as Oklahoma and to
themselves as Boomers. After Watie's death in 1871
the Southern Cherokee Nation was moved to Kentucky. In the
1880s, early settlers of the state's very sparsely populated
Panhandle region tried to
form the Cimarron Territory
but lost a lawsuit against the federal government. This
prompted a judge in Paris, Texas,
to unintentionally create a moniker for the area. "That is
land that can be owned by no man," the judge said, and after
that the panhandle was referred to as
No Man's Land until
statehood arrived decades later.
In 1884, in
United States v. Payne, the United States District
Court in Topeka, Kansas, ruled
that settling on the lands ceded to the government by the
Indians under the 1866 treaties was not a crime. The
government at first resisted, but
Congress soon enacted
laws authorizing settlement.
Congress
passed the Dawes Act, or General
Allotment Act, in 1887 requiring the government to negotiate
agreements with the tribes to divide Indian lands into
individual holdings. Under the allotment system, tribal
lands left over would be surveyed for settlement by
non-Indians. Following settlement, many whites accused
Republican
officials of giving preferential treatment to ex-slaves in
land disputes.
Oklahoma and Indian Territories
Land runs
The United
States entered into two new treaties with the Creeks and the
Seminoles. Under these treaties, tribes would sell at least
part of their land in Oklahoma to the U.S. to settle other
Indian tribes and
freemen. This land would be widely called the
Unassigned Lands or Oklahoma
Country in the 1880s due to it remaining uninhabited for
over a decade.
In 1879,
part-Cherokee Elias C. Boudinot
argued that these Unassigned Lands be open for settlement
because the title to these lands belonged to the United
States and "whatever may have been the desire or intention
of the United States Government in 1866 to locate Indians
and negroes upon these lands, it is certain that no such
desire or intention exists in 1879. The Negro since that
date, has become a citizen of the United States, and
Congress has recently enacted laws which practically forbid
the removal of any more Indians into the Territory".
On
March 23, 1889,
President Benjamin Harrison
signed legislation which opened up the two million acres
(8,000 km²) of the Unassigned
Lands for settlement on April 22,
1889. It was to be the first of many
land runs, but later land openings
were conducted by means of a lottery because of widespread
cheating—some of the settlers were called
Sooners because they had already staked their land
claims before the land was officially opened for settlement.
The
Organic Act of 1890 created the
Oklahoma Territory out of
the Unassigned Lands and the area known as No Man's Land.
In 1893,
the government purchased the rights to settle the
Cherokee Outlet, or
Cherokee Strip, from the
Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Outlet was part of the lands
ceded to the government in the 1866 treaty, but the
Cherokees retained access to the area and had leased it to
several Chicago meat-packing plants
for huge cattle ranches. The Cherokee Strip was opened to
settlement by land run in 1894. Also, in 1893, Congress set
up the Dawes Commission to
negotiate agreements with each of the Five Civilized Tribes
for the allotment of tribal lands to individual Indians.
Finally, the 1898 Curtis Act abolished tribal jurisdiction
over all of Indian Territory.
After Statehood
20th century
In the
early 20th century, the oil
business began to get underway. Huge pools of underground
oil were discovered in places like
Glenpool near
Tulsa. Many whites flooded into the
state to make money. Many of the "old money" elite families
of Oklahoma can date their rise to this time. The prosperity
of the 1920s can be seen in the surviving architecture from
the period, such as the Tulsa mansion which was converted
into the Philbrook Museum
of Art or the art deco
architecture of downtown Tulsa.
For
Oklahoma, the early quarter of the 20th century was
politically turbulent. Many different groups had flooded
into the state; "black towns", or towns made of groups of
African Americans choosing
to live separately from whites, sprouted all over the state,
while most of the state abided by the
Jim Crow laws within each
individual city, racially separating people with a bias
against any non-White race.
Greenwood, a
neighborhood in Northern Tulsa, was known as
Black Wall Street because
of the vibrant business, cultural, and religious community
there. The area was the site of the 1921
Tulsa Race War, one of the
United States' deadliest race riots.
The
Oklahoma Socialist
Party achieved a small degree of success in this era
(the small party had its highest per-capita membership in
Oklahoma at this time with 12,000 dues paying members in
1914), including the publication of dozens of party
newspapers and the election of several hundred local elected
officials. Much of their success came from their willingness
to reach out to Black and American Indian voters (they were
the only party to continue to resist Jim Crow laws), and
their willingness to alter traditional
Marxist ideology when it made sense to do so (the
biggest changes were the party's support of widespread
small-scale land ownership, and their willingness to use
religion positively to preach the "Socialist gospel"). The
state party also delivered presidential candidate
Eugene Debs some of his highest
vote counts in the nation.
The party
was later crushed into virtual non-existence during the
"white terror" that followed the ultra-repressive
environment following the
Green Corn Rebellion and the
World War I era paranoia against anyone who spoke
against the war or capitalism.
The
Industrial
Workers of the World tried to gain headway during this
period but achieved little success. The
Ku Klux Klan was also
particularly active but was virtually eliminated following a
major campaign by the state government in the 1950s.
Dust Bowl Era
During the
height of the Great Depression,
drought and poor agricultural practices led to the
Dust Bowl, when massive dust storms
blew away the soil from large tracts of
arable land and deposited it on
nearby farms and ranches, distant states, the
Atlantic Ocean, and even
occasionally Great Britain. The
resulting crop failures forced many small farmers to flee
the state altogether. Although the most persistent dust
storms primarily affected the Panhandle, much of the state
experienced occasional dusters, intermittent severe drought,
and occasional searing heat. Towns such as
Alva,
Altus, and
Poteau each recorded
temperatures of 120°F (49°C) during the epic summer of 1936.
Advances in
agro-mechanical technology simultaneously enabled less
labor-intensive crop production. Many large landowners and
planters had more labor than they needed with the new
technology, and the federal
Agricultural
Adjustment Act paid them to reduce production.
Plantation owners throughout the American South and much of
eastern and southern Oklahoma released their
sharecroppers of their debts
and evicted them. With few or no local opportunities
available for them, many emancipated, but destitute blacks
and whites fled to the relative prosperity of
California to work as migrant farm
workers and, after the onset of
World War II, in factories.
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck, photographs
by Dorothea Lange, and songs
of Woody Guthrie tales of woe
from the era. The negative images of the "Okie"
as a sort of rootless migrant laborer living in a
near-animal state of scrounging for food greatly offended
many Oklahomans. These works often mix the experiences of
former sharecroppers of the western American South with
those of the exodusters fleeing the fierce dust storms of
the High Plains. Although they primarily feature the
extremely destitute, the vast majority of the people, both
staying in and fleeing from Oklahoma, suffered great poverty
in the Depression years. Some Oklahoma politicians denounced
The Grapes of Wrath (often without reading it) as an
attempt to impugn the morals and character of Oklahomans.
After World War II
The term "Okie"
in recent years has taken on a new meaning in the past few
decades, with many Oklahomans (both former and present)
wearing the label as a badge of honor (as a symbol of the
Okie survivor attitude). Others (mostly alive during the
Dust Bowl era) still see the term negatively because they
see the "Okie" migrants as quitters and transplants to the
West Coast.
Major
trends in Oklahoma history after the Depression era included
the rise again of tribal sovereignty (including the issuance
of tribal automobile license plates, and the opening of
tribal smoke shops, casinos, grocery stores, and other
commercial enterprises), the building of
Tinker Air Force Base,
the rapid growth of suburban Oklahoma City and Tulsa, the
drop in population in Western Oklahoma, the oil boom of the
1980s and the oil bust of the 1990s.
As
Oklahoma's Centennial celebrations draw closer, major
efforts are being undertaken by state and local leaders to
revive Oklahoma's small towns and population centers, which
had seen major decline following the oil bust.
Oklahoma City Bombing
In 1995
Oklahoma became the scene of one of the worst acts of
terrorism ever committed in U.S. History. On April 19, 1995,
in the Oklahoma City
bombing, Gulf War veteran
Timothy McVeigh bombed the
Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including
19 children. Timothy McVeigh
and Terry Nichols were the
convicted perpetrators of the attack, although many believe
others were involved. Timothy
McVeigh was later sentenced to death by lethal
injection, while his partner, Terry
Nichols, who was convicted of 161 counts of
first degree murder
received life in prison without the possibility of
parole.
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