Chapter 4 | Section 3
Setting the Stage for Settlement
The Homestead Act of 1862 was signed into law during the Civil War, but it would have its greatest impact after the war. While lands in Oklahoma were not officially opened to non-Indigenous settlement until after 1889, the Homestead Act influenced the way that potential settlers thought about land prior to that time. The federal government wanted to increase settlement in western portions of the Louisiana Purchase territory that were still not highly populated. To achieve that purpose, they passed the Homestead Act, which offered free 160-acre tracts of land to anyone who would stay on that land and make improvements to it for at least five years. After that five-year period ended, the individual or family would have permanent ownership of the land. Nearly half a million tracts of land across the western United States were distributed by the government in the last four decades of the nineteenth century as a result of this law. However, numerous families who took advantage of the program found themselves in very difficult situations because of problems with droughts, floods, bug infestations, soil quality, and isolation. It is important to consider that the people most likely to seek out small tracts of free land were poor and did not have the resources to survive some of the economic and environmental challenges they encountered.
The Homestead Act was important in Oklahoma because it led many aspiring land owners to feel as if they had a right to the land that was occupied by Indigenous people. The Doctrine of Discovery continued to shape how newcomers thought about the land. Another important influence was something called Manifest Destiny, the idea or belief that it was the destiny (some believed it was even ordained by God) of the United States to expand from one coast to the other and to spread its religious, economic, and political convictions to all inhabitants of this domain, including Indigenous people. If it was the destiny or even the God-given right of the United States to expand, and the government was willing to give away free land to encourage settlement, it made sense to some that the occupied treaty lands in Indian Territory should also be made available to white settlement. This mindset is important to remember when we discuss tensions over settlement in the next few chapters. People who were in Oklahoma illegally and trying to lay claim to property that did not belong to them often saw their actions as justified because of ideas about the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and the provisions of the 1862 Homestead Act. Regardless of how we might feel about these ideas and beliefs today, it is important to understand how they led to the expansion of settlement in the nineteenth century.
Cattle Trails and Cattle Drives
One important new industry that emerged in the wake of the Civil War was cattle ranching. Multiple trails connected the grazing lands in Texas and Oklahoma to the cattle-ranching industries in Kansas and Missouri. As early as the 1840s, cattle were moved through portions of present-day Oklahoma, but during Reconstruction, the cattle-ranching industry increased substantially. As cattle ranching became a booming industry in the late 1860s and 1870s, the question of who could use these trails became complicated because of differing opinions about land access and ownership. Much of that land still belonged to various tribes, and they did not like having thousands of herds of cattle moved across their land. Among other things, cattle grazing created problems for the buffalo, a traditional food source for Native tribes, by decreasing the availability of grazing land.
Three main trails that went through Oklahoma were the Shawnee Trail, the Chisholm Trail, and the Great Western Trail (also called the Dodge City Trail). The Shawnee Trail closely followed the old Texas Road from Texas into eastern Indian Territory and then on to Baxter Springs in Kansas and Sedalia in Missouri. By 1866 the Chisholm Trail, named after Cherokee scout and trader Jesse Chisholm, had become a popular route to drive cattle north to Abilene and then by rail to northern and eastern markets.
Chickasaw rancher Monfort T. Johnson established his first ranch, Walnut Creek Ranch, in the Chickasaw Nation in today’s McClain County and hired Chickasaw Freedman Jack Brown to run it. And by the early 1870s the Great Western Trail became the most popular route to Dodge City, a station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. During the peak year of 1881, over 300,000 head of cattle traveled the Western Trail from Texas through Indian Territory to Kansas.
Photographed in the mid-1860s, Jesse Chisholm was a Cherokee trader and scout. The famous trail named after him, the Chisholm Trail, was used for many cattle drives. The present-day city of Duncan, Oklahoma, is located along the old trail and is home to the Chisholm Trail Museum.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Cattle trails going through Oklahoma. These often ended at railheads in Kansas where cattle drivers dropped the cows off to get shipped elsewhere. The trails began in Texas or other places where ranchers produced cattle.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
From the mid-1860s until the mid-1880s, more than seven million Texas Longhorn and other cattle breeds traveled north through Indian Territory on their way to railheads in Abilene, Dodge City, Baxter Springs, and Sedalia. The cattle were then loaded onto railroad livestock cars and transported to slaughterhouses in Kansas City and Chicago. Ranchers grazed their herds for modest fees in western and central Indian Territory. Major cattle drives through the territory mostly ended by 1890 due in large part to the expansion of the railroads southward into Texas.
Railroads
Indian Territory became central to the developing national economy with the growth of the railroad and industrialization (the process of creating lots of new technologies and industries). In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad was completed, followed by another three decades of rapid railroad expansion, the construction of factories, and the harvesting of natural resources in the American West, including what would become Oklahoma. A burst of railroad construction occurred in Indian Territory after the Civil War. Before the war, transportation had been limited to horse-drawn wagons and steamboats.
Railroads in Oklahoma until 1890. Many tribes had to agree to allow railroads to cross through their lands as a part of treaty requirements after the Civil War.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
Although many leaders of the Five Tribes had blocked railroad construction in their nations before the Civil War, the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 required them to permit construction of a north-south and an east-west railroad through Indian Territory. The federal government had planned to provide land grants to the railroad companies, but the Five Tribes successfully resisted that plan.
At first railroad companies sought right-of-way in Indian Territory only to create a route to Texas. Except for wanting to mine coal east of McAlester, they expected to ship few products in or out of Indian Territory. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas (MK&T) Railway Company, popularly known as the Katy, was the first railroad company to build across Indian Territory from north to south.
A mid-twentieth-century photo of the MK&T Railroad depot in Hominy, Oklahoma. Hominy is located in present-day northeastern Oklahoma. The MK&T (commonly known as the “Katy”) was a north-to-south railroad in Indian Territory.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
It surveyed a roadbed along the old Texas Road in 1870, and by February 1871, trains were running to Muskogee. The St. Louis–San Francisco Railway (formerly the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad), popularly known as the Frisco, built an east-west line across Indian Territory to Tulsa. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe railroad company constructed a northward line from Texas to Purcell, in Indian Territory, the 1870s. The railroad owners focused on business-building opportunities. Competition increased among railroad corporations to control what were sure to be lucrative markets, especially in the agriculture and livestock industries.
By the mid-1880s, Congress approved more north-south railroad construction in the West, including in the region that would become Oklahoma Territory. In 1887, for example, the Southern Kansas Railway (an affiliate of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe) constructed a line from Arkansas City, Kansas, to Purcell. The rails crossed the Cherokee Outlet and Ponca and Otoe-Missouria lands before entering the Unassigned Lands (land not assigned to any tribe in the late nineteenth century). The Cherokees protested, but the federal government ruled that it held the power of eminent domain (which gave the government the right to take the land for public use) in the Cherokee Outlet. During the railroad construction boom in Indian Territory during the 1870s and 1880s, restless land speculators would plat and sell land near the station sites, and new towns grew up quickly. Railroads crisscrossed Indian Territory and the hunger for land was pervasive.
Railroad in Guthrie, Indian Territory. This photo was taken in 1889, the year of the first land run.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.