Chapter 7 | Section 2
Native American Land
Jim Thorpe, by Charles Banks Wilson. Born on the Sac and Fox reservation near Prague, Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe is considered by many the greatest America athlete of the twentieth century. Thorpe enjoyed great success in baseball, football, and the Olympics, winning the 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon competitions.
Courtesy of the Capitol Art Collection, Oklahoma Arts Council.
On October 14, 1913, Jim Thorpe and Iva Miller married in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Thorpe attended college and played football for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This photo depicts their wedding party after the ceremony. In 1917, the couple purchased a home in Yale, Oklahoma—known today as the Jim Thorpe Home.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
While African Americans suffered a loss of opportunities and struggled to protect themselves from violence, Native Americans confronted a variety of challenges. On the heels of statehood, the status of Indigenous people in Oklahoma grew more precarious. Native Americans experienced both new and old forms of mistreatment, corruption, and assimilation efforts. One of the most important things to keep in mind about the loss of Native American land in what became the state of Oklahoma is that it was a process. How that land was taken varied over time and in the tactics that were used. The process did not stop with removal in the 1830s or with the Reconstruction Treaties at the end of the Civil War. And it did not stop with statehood. It happened through forced treaties, broken treaties, federal legislation, legal maneuvers, and outright fraud, theft, and murder. We have already observed in previous chapters some of the ways Indigenous land was taken, but we will now see that some of the most ruthless practices happened after statehood. The 1879 Supreme Court ruling in Standing Bear v. Crook recognized that Indigenous people were not simply wards of the government. The court maintained that Native Americans possessed “personhood,” which entitled them to inalienable rights and the protections provided by the US Constitution. Despite this ruling, there were many instances following statehood when Indigenous people in Oklahoma were in fact treated as wards or otherwise had their rights violated.
With all this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that as popular and powerful as Kate Barnard was when Oklahoma became a state, she quickly fell from grace when she began championing the rights of Indigenous orphans who faced neglect at the hands of government-appointed guardians who sought only to take control of their land.
Dawes Rolls
In 1898, the Dawes Rolls were created by the federal government to identify members of the Five Tribes (Cherokees, Muscogee Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles) living in Indian Territory. The registering of names took place between 1898 and 1914. The process was problematic and controversial from the very beginning. The government used the list of names to determine who was eligible to receive a land allotment after the Curtis Act extended the Dawes Severalty (individual ownership) Act to Oklahoma. Remember that a lot of land opened to settlement was the result of so-called surplus or extra land after Indigenous people received individual allotments. This meant that collectively Indigenous people lost a significant amount of their land. That was not the only problem though. Some Native Americans did not register their names on the Dawes Rolls because they did not trust the government or they did not think it necessary to have proof of individual land ownership. Some of their descendants today still struggle for recognition. Another problem was that some non-Indians schemed to get their names on the list in order to secure Indigenous land for themselves.
Oil well sites in early twentieth-century Oklahoma. Beginning with the completion of the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 near Bartlesville in 1897, oil wells followed rapidly in Glenn Pool, Cushing, Healdton, and Burbank.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Minor children and unmarried women were especially vulnerable to corrupt individuals who sought wardship as a way to claim Indigenous land. The discovery of oil on land owned by Indigenous people led to even greater exploitation. Charles Page, for example, built his fortune in oil and founded the town of Sand Springs, near Tulsa, the emerging “oil capital of the world.” Much of Page’s fortune was gained by having himself named as the guardian of more than a hundred Indigenous children. He characterized himself as a kind philanthropist who created a home for widows and children in Sand Springs. In reality, he used kidnapping, bribery, forgery, and other illegal tactics to gain ownership of Indigenous land.
While some of Page’s ruthless tactics were exposed by journalists in Tulsa, many grafters stole Indigenous land or benefited from lease agreements without ever facing exposure or prosecution. They got themselves appointed as guardians of Indigenous people and of their property, and they pocketed millions of dollars from this scheme. The impact on Indigenous communities proved devastating. And efforts to find varied ways to seize ownership of Native land continued long after statehood. The best-known example of this took place in the 1920s when dozens of Osage people were murdered by those who wanted control of their oil-rich land. We will learn more about the Osage murders in chapter 8.
Freedpeople of the Five Tribes and their children also received land allotments and also faced the same kind of struggle with corrupt guardians. There were numerous instances of Freedpeople children having their money stolen or becoming the victims of violence, especially when oil was found on their land. For example, when twins Edith and Edna Durant, Muscogee (Creek) Freedpeople were 12 years old, $40,000 of their oil money went missing, even though their court-appointed guardian was supposed to hold their money in trust for them. In another instance, two Creek Freedpeople, 12-year-old Herbert Sells and his 10-year-old sister Stella Sells, were murdered by white men eager to get their hands on the children’s allotments.
In another striking example, fears arose over the safety of Muscogee (Creek) Freedperson Sarah Rector, age eleven, when her land proved rich in oil. She began to make national headlines in 1913 when her allotment land produced a “gusher” of 2,500 barrels of oil per day. Rector’s allotment then became part of the famed Cushing-Drumright Field in Oklahoma. In 1914, W. E. B. DuBois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) demanded information when stories arose that Sarah had gone missing, not long after being described as “the richest Black girl in America” or even in the world. Sarah’s wealth was often exaggerated, but she was in truth a millionaire by 1920 when she turned eighteen. However, in her case, her parents were able to choose a guardian who looked out for her best interests and who made certain that the money she made from the oil on her land was invested well and used to ensure her comfort for the rest of her life. Her guardian, T. J. Porter, consistently acted honorably as did Judge Thomas Leahy who oversaw her case. The same was not true for scores of other children. Nor were children the only victims of graft and corruption.
Jackson Barnett (Muscogee) received his allotment in 1903. Nearly a decade later, Tom Slick discovered the Cushing Oil Field, which included all of Barnett’s 160-acre parcel of land. Barnett signed an oil lease allowing Slick’s employees to drill on his property. A month later, in April 1912, Barnett was declared incompetent and assigned a court-appointed guardian. By 1917, oil profits from Barnett’s land yielded $45,000 a month, which led to Barnett being called the “world’s richest Indian.” His land eventually produced more than $24 million worth of oil. The discovery of oil on Indigenous land followed by the owners of that land being deemed incompetent became an all-too-commonplace pattern in the early twentieth century.
Growing Importance of Oil
Before the 1850s, oil seeps or “medicine springs,” resulting from natural leaks of crude oil or gas, were identified in Indian Territory. In 1897, the first commercial oil well, the Nellie Johnstone No. 1, was completed near Bartlesville.
This well was drilled on allotment land belonging to Nellie Johnstone, a six-year-old member of the Delaware Tribe. The Nellie Johnstone No. 1 was the first of thirteen wells drilled on her land. Oil was then found at Red Fork, just southwest of Tulsa. This was the first oil discovery of the twentieth century. It did not take long for Tulsa to be nicknamed “the oil capital of the world,” and within two decades there were over four hundred oil companies in Tulsa alone.
On April 15, 1897, the first commercial oil well, the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 (pictured here), was drilled in Bartlesville. The oil well produced more than 100,000 barrels of crude oil before it was plugged in 1948. Oil fields like the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 established Bartlesville as Oklahoma’s first oil boomtown.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Beginning in 1897, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway tank cars first carried oil from Bartlesville to a refinery in Kansas. This photo depicts the very first oil train on its way out of Bartlesville.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Demand for oil increased as new technologies expanded. Oil production in Indian Territory rose rapidly after the turn of the century and provided one of the incentives for statehood in 1907. After that, annual production in Oklahoma peaked at 278 million barrels in 1927 and played a growing role in the state’s economy. In fact, much of the economic development in the first few decades after statehood was due to this oil boom. Oklahoma quickly became one of the top oil producers in the country. However, the Oklahoma oil boom was only half of a “boom-bust” cycle. When demand for oil was high, Oklahoma’s economy “boomed,” or flourished, but when demand dropped (often the result of too much oil being available), the state’s economy declined rapidly or went “bust.” This meant that Oklahoma’s economy was vulnerable and capable of sudden downturns, as we will see in the discussion of the Great Depression in chapter 9.