Example 7: Common Lands v. Lands in Severalty

Native people holding their lands in Indian Territory in common was seen as detrimental by white Americans like Major Randolph B. Marcy, the man who established Fort Arbuckle in 1850 and who recounted his impressions of Indian Territory in a memoir published in 1854 by a soldier : "The policy of our government has been practically to deny the capacity of the Indians for civilization, by compelling them to hold their lands in common, and not in severalty, depriving them of the power of alienation [selling land], thereby creating not necessity for self-reliance and individual effort (5)." The soldier echoed the push to privatize lands in the territory, a movement gaining steam in Congress.

Within the same chapter, the soldier, W.B. Parker, recorded the reactions by native men of the impending actions by Congress: “I was not surprised in conversing with many of the old men of the tribes, on the subject of this bill, to find them all of one opinion. They are strongly opposed to it, and wind up all their conversations with the same conclusion, viz., that it is a scheme of the white man to dispossess them of their lands. They say, ‘We got land now, we keep him; white man come, all is gone’.”

By 1880 the U.S. government considered that Indians who reside on common lands “make but little advancement in civilization… still dressing blankets and using the bow and arrow to hunt the buffalo, without whose flesh and tallow they cannot subsist” (6).  Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887, which privatized the "common land" into several homesteading tracts to ultimately carve “Indian-owned lands from 155 million acres in 1881 to 77 million in 1900 and just 48 million in 1934” (University of Houston).

Opponents to this bill recognized the ultimate goal: “The real aim of this bill is to get the Indian lands and open them up to settlement… With that accomplished, we have securely paved the way for the extermination of the Indian races upon his part of the continent” (6).

The Dawes Act introduced the Dawes Rolls, a concept in which people were counted by "blood quantum" to prove their tribal affiliation and then placed on the census to claim the allotments. The lands were allotted not via typical homesteading tracts of 640 acres or even 320 acres, but by quarters. This meant that the land was useless for someone wanting to make a living from farming in this increasingly industrialized practice. Coupled with high taxation onto people who were mainly cashless, and debts incurred by individuals to unscrupulous men within their midst, the majority of allotments had to be sold.

The allotments provided land to every native person — every man, woman, and child — within Indian Territory. Land-hungry white men began aggressively seeking Indian women to marry and thus, gaining access to their land. This land grab extended to children, as not every child receiving an allotment had parents looking out for their interests, or even understanding what was happening to them. White families, mainly from Texas, adopted children to gain the land titles. A newspaper editorial from Lawton, Oklahoma in 1907 described it as being “born with a fortune in their hands.”

The lands that were not allotted were opened to land rushes (1889), and then later via lottery. Many of the tracts were not taken by traditional homesteaders (a family) but by railroad corporations, which then leased or sold parcels. The railroads also bypassed towns set aside by the government in favor of settlements platted by their town-building divisions.

Example 8: The Big Pasture

The last common land in the Red River Valley, known as the Big Pasture in the southwestern part of the Kiowa-Apache-Comanche nation (established in 1868), was to become the final victim of land theft in the Red River Valley.

The nation had figured out that rents could sustain them. They leased their land to Texas ranchers, brick makers, and mining operations. They also launched their own ranches. White populists of the early 20th century pushed for the division of the reservation lands instead, desiring the 532,500 acres that comprised the “Big Pasture,” be opened to farming. Their argument was that farming was the common man’s occupation that brought prosperity to everyone.  

The People’s Party that initiated this “Farmers Movement” was politically very persuasive. Congress agreed with the small farmers as quoted in the 1890 census: these Indians “had no home on the face of the earth” but their land “is tillable and favorable to the production of corn, oats, rye, and other cereals, also of cotton, vegetables, and fruit” (7). After filing a petition in 1901, the “Big Pasture” was to be opened to a government auction in 1903.  

Lone Wolf, the Chief of the Kiowas, attempted to halt auction. He sued the United States, explaining that that the auction was in violation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), the Supreme Court sided with Congress, stating that the United States is free to abrogate all treaties made with dependent people due to its plenary powers: any and all tribal land is ultimately controlled by the United States. In the majority opinion, Justice White wrote that “the right which the Indians held was only that of occupancy. The fee was in the United States, subject to that right, and could be transferred by them whenever they chose.”

Interestingly, Secretary Hitchcock, who as the Secretary of the Interior was named the defendant in the Supreme Court case, recommended not opening up the Big Pasture to outsider settlement. In a letter to Senator Platt (CT) who sponsored a bill for a land lottery in 1904, Hitchcock argued that “the pasture lands were reserved exclusively for the use and benefit of the Indians and that the government has no right to sell the land unless a new treaty is made.”

With the break-up of the reservation, the land was practically invaded by non-native people through land lotteries in 1906. Some of the lottery winners took their homestead claims to establish farms, businesses, and settlements. Others held the claim and leased it to others. These non-native farmers and speculators fenced their lands to keep their own livestock and to prevent the ranchers from accessing their fields. This practice led to many confrontations, not unlike the range-wars in Texas that occurred a few decades earlier.

Example 9: Mineral Rights

The soil was not the only theft; it was also the minerals beneath the soil. With the tacit agreement by the Choctaw and Chickasaw governors, the “sale of segregated coal and asphalt lands” was approved by congressional action in 1906 (8). This meant that the wealth the nations could have had was sold to private interests (in this particular case, the railroad) and the nationals were left to work, and die, in the resulting mines.

These actions echoed events in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, in which common lands were immediately rendered extinct upon the founding to the United States: coal (and later, oil) belonged to the state, which then granted the right of extraction to corporations. The history of this bears out in coal mining towns like Lehigh (Coal County), which was named after the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania.  

Example 10: The Mass-Murders of the Fauna

The influx of white settlement led to mass extinction attempts all throughout the Red River Valley. The bison were the first causalities, as killing them assured that the Plains People would have to stay on their reservations and depend on governmental assistance or be forced to become farmers. Large wolf and coyote hunts, at times attended by over a thousand men, were staged throughout Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century in attempts to protect livestock. Bear trapping and other destruction of animals resulted in a landscape devoid of life; even the ubiquitous “horny toad” (horned lizard) became less visible. In Texas, the town of Sweetwater still conducts an annual “Rattlesnake Roundup” to dispose of these native inhabitants.