OKOklahoma History

A territory created to hold other nations

Oklahoma is the only state whose outline was drawn to contain peoples the federal government had moved there from somewhere else. Between the 1830s and the 1880s more than sixty tribes were resettled inside what treaty language called Indian Territory, guaranteed to them for as long as the grass should grow. Within one lifetime the guarantee came apart: the western half was opened to settlers by a starting gun in 1889, Congress dissolved the tribal governments by statute, and in 1907 the two halves were welded into one state. Nearly every odd feature of Oklahoma's map and its courts traces back to that reversal.

Spiro, the grass lodges and the horse nations

The largest thing built here before Europeans arrived sits on the Arkansas River in Le Flore County. Spiro was a Mississippian ceremonial center occupied roughly between 800 and 1450, and its Craig Mound held one of the great deposits of engraved shell and copper in North America. Commercial diggers tunnelled in during the early 1930s and sold the contents by mail order, which is why Spiro artifacts now sit in museums on three continents. Wichita farmers lived in beehive-shaped grass lodges along the Arkansas and Canadian rivers. Caddo villages held the southeast, the Osage pushed in from Missouri, and once Spanish horses reached the southern plains the Comanche and Kiowa dominated the west. Coronado crossed the region in 1541 hunting for Quivira. France claimed the Mississippi drainage after La Salle in 1682, and the United States bought it in 1803. The Panhandle is the exception: that strip passed from Spain to Mexico to Texas, and when Texas sold its northern claims in 1850 the land above 36 degrees 30 minutes could not stay attached to a slave state. What was left was a rectangle 34 miles tall and 168 miles long belonging to no state or territory at all, called No Man's Land until it was tacked onto Oklahoma Territory in 1890.

Removal, five republics, and a war fought inside them

The Choctaw came first under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, then the Muscogee, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee under the Treaty of New Echota that a minority faction signed in 1835, and the Seminole after years of fighting in Florida. Thousands died on the removal routes. What the survivors built was not a reservation system but five constitutional republics with written codes, courts and capitals: Tahlequah for the Cherokee, Okmulgee for the Muscogee, Tuskahoma for the Choctaw, Tishomingo for the Chickasaw and Wewoka for the Seminole.

The Civil War split those republics against themselves. Confederate agent Albert Pike signed treaties with tribal leaders in 1861 while Opothleyahola led several thousand loyal Muscogee toward Kansas through three winter battles. Stand Watie became a Confederate brigadier and the last Confederate general to surrender, on June 23, 1865 at Doaksville. The largest engagement in the territory was Honey Springs on July 17, 1863, where Union regiments of Black and Native soldiers outnumbered the white troops on the field. The Reconstruction treaties of 1866 took the western half of the territory as punishment and required the nations to free and enrol their freedmen as citizens.

The runs, the allotments and statehood in 1907

Railroads crossed the territory from 1872, and agitators called Boomers argued that the Unassigned Lands in the center belonged to no tribe. At noon on April 22, 1889 roughly 50,000 people crossed the line; Guthrie and Oklahoma City each held thousands of residents by dark, in tents pitched on lots claimed hours earlier. Those who slipped over early were called sooners, which is how the state got its nickname. More openings followed, including the Cherokee Outlet run of September 16, 1893, the largest ever held, and a lottery for the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache lands in 1901.

Meanwhile the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898 cut communal title into individual allotments and abolished the tribal courts. In 1905 delegates met at Muskogee and drafted a constitution for a separate Indian state to be called Sequoyah; territorial voters approved it and Congress refused to look at it. The Enabling Act of 1906 required the twin territories to enter as one. Statehood came on November 16, 1907 with Charles N. Haskell as governor and Guthrie as capital, and a 1910 referendum moved the seat of government to Oklahoma City, the state seal carried there overnight.

Oil, Greenwood and the dust

Drillers hit the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 near Bartlesville in 1897, and the Glenn Pool strike of 1905 turned Tulsa into the self-declared oil capital of the world. Tom Slick's Cushing field, opened in 1912, poured out crude through the First World War and left the tank farm that still fixes the delivery price of West Texas Intermediate. The Oklahoma City field, found in 1928, marched derricks up to the capitol grounds, where a well was eventually drilled in a flower bed.

Osage allottees held their mineral rights in common through headrights, and in the 1920s at least two dozen Osage were murdered in a scheme to inherit those shares, a case that made the reputation of the young Bureau of Investigation. On May 31 and June 1, 1921 a white mob burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses, homes and churches, killing an unknown number of people; a state commission finally documented the destruction in 2001. Then the topsoil went. Cimarron, Texas and Beaver counties sat at the center of the Dust Bowl, and the storm of April 14, 1935 turned midday into night. Around 400,000 people left during the decade, carried west on Route 66, laid out in 1926 largely through the lobbying of Tulsa's Cyrus Avery.

Murrah, McGirt and the state today

On April 19, 1995 a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including nineteen children in the ground floor day care, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

Two later shifts define the present. Wastewater injection from oil and gas drilling set off a swarm of induced earthquakes after 2009, and for two years the state recorded more magnitude three tremors than California, including a 5.8 near Pawnee in 2016, until regulators cut injection volumes. Then on July 9, 2020 the Supreme Court held in McGirt v. Oklahoma that Congress had never disestablished the Muscogee reservation. Later rulings extended the reasoning to other nations, leaving much of eastern Oklahoma, most of Tulsa included, as Indian country for federal criminal law.

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