Socialist Party of Oklahoma - Organizational History - Background

Background

The "Oklahoma lands" — the entire future state of Oklahoma with the exception of the narrow western panhandle — were first set aside as a site to which Native American populations were to be deported from their ancestral homelands in the 1830s. It was there that the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" — the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee (Creek) peoples — were relocated at that time, clearing the way for European-American colonization of their previous lands. Following the conclusion of the American Civil War the Federal government used the fact of these five Native American peoples' support of the Confederate States of America as a pretext for retaking approximately half of these "Oklahoma lands." This freed new area for additional forced relocations of other Native American peoples.

In the years after the civil war the "Oklahoma lands" were administratively divided, with the Eastern territory remaining in the possession of the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee designated the Indian Territory and the Western area given the official designation Oklahoma Territory. It was originally envisioned that part of this land ceded back to the Federal government after the conclusion of the Civil War would be used for the settlement of freed African-American slaves, but no such systematic relocation campaign was conducted.

At the end of the 1880s, nearly two million acres (810,000 hectares) of unused land remained in the Federal inventory at the center of the present state. With little other free land available on the American frontier, public pressure grew for this land to be made available for settlement. Expectant settlers known as "Boomers" began to organize in neighboring Kansas, agitating the government to open the Unassigned Lands for settlement and promising the mutual support of their members for the establishment of their individual claims. Attempts were made by some of these Boomers to squat claims, which were met by ineffectual government dispersals of illegal settlers and their subsequent re-invasion of illegally claimed lands.

Public pressure and the ongoing pattern of illegal occupation began to move the wheels of government towards a fundamental transformation of its Indian policy. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the dismantling of collectively held tribal lands into individual allotments and signaled an intention to open the whole of the Unassigned Lands to parcelization and allocation to private landholders. Whereas commonly held tribal lands were unlikely to be leased out to white settlers, the Dawes Act with its individually owned parcels ranging from 60 to 320 acres created a situation in which individuals could be persuaded to make transactions that tribal governments would not.

The fragmentation of the collectively owned tribal lands was followed in April 1889 by the first and largest of a series of officially sanctioned Oklahoma land runs, in which prospective settlers rushed to stake claims to parcels previously part of the Unassigned Lands. Oklahoma became the new Kansas — a bustling, hardscrabble, agrarian frontier economy emerged, with Oklahoma City the nexus of the Oklahoma Colony.

White settlers flocked to the state in search of nominally priced virgin agricultural land. By August 1889 nearly 6,000 claims were filed on over 900,000 acres of land. The next year would see another 7,000 claims putting a million more acres behind fences. By 1901 virtually all the Oklahoma Territory — the western half of today's Oklahoma, land previously set-aside for displaced Native American populations — was in the hands of European-American homesteaders.