Chapter 5 | Overview Growth of All-Black Towns
Print ChapterKey Terms
Jump to a term…
Chapter Objectives
Learning Outcomes:
The learner will be able to…
- Identify the factors that led to increased Black emigration to Indian Territory after the Civil War.
- Describe the efforts of Edward McCabe to create an all-Black state.
- Identify the motivations of the Boomer movement.
- Explain how the idea of Manifest Destiny contributed to opening the Unassigned Lands and Cherokee Outlet to white settlement.
- Evaluate the impact of the Dawes and Curtis acts on tribal landownership and tribal sovereignty.
- Identify how and why Tribal nations resisted the allotment system.
Compelling Question:
- What were the consequences of Manifest Destiny in Indian Territory?
Chapter Overview
The Civil War had a lasting effect on tribal sovereignty, land, and citizenship in Indian Territory. The Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 granted Freedpeople access to land ownership through citizenship in Native nations. What took place in Oklahoma did not take place in other parts of the United States. The land distribution in Oklahoma following the Civil War invites us to think about the missed opportunities of landownership for formerly enslaved people outside of Indian Territory.
McAlester and Coalgate were the prominent coal-producing areas in southeastern Oklahoma. This photo shows the Old No. 9 Mine, which was established in the 1870s in McAlester, Indian Territory. James J. McAlester (also known as J. J. McAlester), who once served in the Confederate army, came to the Choctaw Nation at age twenty-four in search of coal. He married Rebecca Burney, a citizen of Chickasaw Nation, and McAlester as a result received citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Citizenship entitled him to stake a claim to coal deposits within a one-mile radius from point of discovery. With the arrival of the railroad, coal production grew and McAlester prospered in mining, banking, ranching, and other businesses.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In this chapter we examine the expanding population of Oklahoma in the decades following the Civil War. New questions arise during this period. Is Oklahoma a homeland for Native nations? A Black promised land? A white homesteading land? Within a short period of time lands held in common by Native nations or held in trust by the federal government were redistributed to individuals either as allotments to tribal citizens and homesteads to non-Native citizens. In addition, large parcels of land were distributed to railroad companies. In many ways, the federal government helped facilitate the peopling of Oklahoma, most notably by forcibly removing Native nations to Indian Territory, authorizing the Homestead Act, offering land as payment to railroad companies to facilitate the creation of railroad systems, organizing the allotment system, and coordinating the opening of “surplus lands” to Black and white people.
Pictured here are the teachers and students of Spring Creek Settlement School in Depew, Oklahoma, around 1920. Located in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the town of Depew was founded in 1901, and was a stop on the railway line between Sapulpa and Oklahoma City. When oil was discovered near the town in 1911, the Sapulpa and Oil Field Railroad constructed a line from Depew to Shamrock, Texas, connecting the oil-boom towns.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Timber was scarce on the Great Plains, so homesteaders in Oklahoma Territory often made their first homes out of thick sod blocks. The interior walls were finished with plaster. Here is a family outside their sod house in Oklahoma Territory around 1900. You can visit the Sod House Museum in Alfalfa County to learn more.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
From 1865 to 1915, Black people from the South emigrated, or moved, because they desired freedom and land ownership in new towns and new communities in free places. Some left the United States and went to Canada, Mexico, or West Africa. Others remained within the United States, moving to such places as Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, Indian Territory, and Oklahoma Territory. Beginning in 1879, about 40,000 Black migrants settled in Kansas and founded All-Black towns, including Nicodemus, the oldest Black settlement west of the Mississippi River. Black emigration from the South to Oklahoma was significantly larger, with more than 100,000 Black people moving to the future state.
When Federal Western District judge Isaac C. Parker was appointed to the court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1875, he hired two hundred deputy US marshals to enforce the law in Indian Territory. Amos Maytubby (far left) was a Choctaw lighthorseman. The lighthorsemen were a mounted police force who served and protected Choctaw citizens. Next to Maytubby are (left to right) Zeke Miller, Neely Factor, and Robert L. Fortune, who were three Black US deputy marshals in Indian Territory. Miller tracked outlaws in the Central District of Indian Territory and tried to encourage young outlaws to read, become educated, and improve their lives overall. Factor was known for his ability to observe outlaw gangs and wait patiently for hours before capturing them. Fortune kept law and order in the Oklahoma mining town of Wilburton and then became a lawyer in Chickasha.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.