Land Rush of 1889
The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was the first land run into the Unassigned Lands of former Indian Territory, which had earlier been assigned to the Creek and Seminole peoples. The area that was opened to settlement included all or part of the Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties of the present-day US state of Oklahoma.[1]
The land run started at high noon on April 22, 1889. An estimated 50,000 people were lined up at the start, seeking to gain a piece of the available two million acres (8,100 km2).[2]
The Unassigned Lands were considered some of the best unoccupied public land in the United States. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 was passed and signed into law with an amendment by Representative William McKendree Springer (R-IL) that authorized President Benjamin Harrison to open the two million acres (8,100 km2) for settlement. President Abraham Lincoln had earlier signed the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed settlers to claim lots of up to 160 acres (0.65 km2), provided that they lived on the land and improved it.[2]
Date
Overview[edit]
During the mid-19th century, the time when the American Civil War was at its peak, President Abraham Lincoln developed a strategy to increase land ownership and development by signing the Homestead Act into law. It was intended to open western lands to allow people to settle on what the government considered to be "idle" tracts of land.[3] The majority of occupants in Indian Territory (which became most of present-day Oklahoma) belonged to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, who had been forcibly removed in the 1830s from their traditional territories in the Southeast.[4]
The government passed an Act called the Dawes Severality (or Dawes Act) in 1887 that aimed to extinguish communal tribal holdings. It proposed that the tribes' communal lands be allocated to heads of households by 160-acre plots, to encourage them to adopt subsistence farming.[5] A stated aim of the Act was to enhance assimilation of tribal members to mainstream European-American practices. It markedly reduced the amount of land owned by the tribes, because the government declared as 'surplus' any lands left over after distribution, and made them available for sale to non-Native Americans. The settlers were also allowed to take up the subdivided land in many places. However, the Dawes Act was not enforced on the five tribes that were considered civilized since they were later exempted. The exemption was to take effect until the year 1902, when the household heads of the five “civilized” tribes were to take 160-acre plots.[4]
After the Civil War, the other Indian tribes that had been relocated to the Territory had been assigned approximately one half of the total landmass occupied by the five tribes. The five tribes had allied with the Confederacy and were forced to give up some of the Indian lands.[3] On April 22, 1889, the day that the government had set aside for the settlement, the crowd in the Oklahoma settlement land was overwhelming. When the signal for the process of land registration was raised, thousands of people rushed across the border as the Oklahoma land rush began. Approximately fifty thousand people; young and old, men and women rushed to try their luck in acquiring the 12,000 land tracts that were available.[6]
Start of the Boomer Movement[edit]
With the end of the Civil War, land hungry people sought land in the West. European Americans pressed their legislators to open the Indian Territory. Certain Native Americans like Elias C. Boudinot encouraged other Native Americans to participate in the effort to welcome westward expansion.[14] From 1870 to 1879, thirty-three bills were introduced in Congress to open the territory for settlement.[15]
Legislation was passed by Congress in 1866 that permitted railroads to be laid in sections of 40 miles (64 km) on either sides of the Indian Territory. The two companies in charge of creating these railroads were the Atlantic and Pacific (A&P). Their contracts were eventually rescinded due to not finishing the projects in the agreed time. Railroad companies that came after them took it as their responsibility to finish the project, and saw a way to strengthen their contracts by introducing the movement of settlement in the Indian Territory.[16] The railroads employed people such as C. C. Carpenter to spread false information in newspapers of the Indian Territory being open to settlement through Congress's Homestead Acts. Both black and white migrants began to move to the Oklahoma Territory. President Rutherford B. Hayes warned these early agitators for settlement (who came to be known as "boomers" in figurative reference to the loudness of their demands) against moving into the Indian lands. He ordered the military to use force to ensure this.[16]