The End of Indian Territory

Transcription

1 THE AMERICANIZATION OF OKLAHOMA chapter 16 The End of Indian Territory Key Themes Democracy and Civil Rights 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. 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. Key Terms division in severalty treaties agreements referendum appraise grafters death claims 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

2 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. For 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 settlement under the Homestead Act of This process occurred in western Oklahoma too. Key People and Events 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 259

3 chapter 16 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 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. 260 the story of oklahoma

4 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 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. Demands for Land 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 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. The Allotment Process The Curtis Act had its intended effect. In order to influence what they could not prevent, the tribes hurried chapter 16 the end of indian territory 261

5 chapter 16 Charles Curtis ( ) 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 backward 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 262 the story of oklahoma

6 chapter 16 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

7 chapter 16 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 practiced 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 264 the story of oklahoma

8 chapter 16 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. 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. 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. Choctaw and Chickasaw citizens registering for their land allotments. the end of indian territory 265

9 chapter 16 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 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 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 266 the story of oklahoma

10 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, 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 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. chapter 16 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) 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 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) 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 the end of indian territory 267