Rooted in the Plains

A Line in the Sod: Oklahoma Land Runs

• Season 2 • Episode 6

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0:00 | 15:17

Note: This episode opens with a gunshot sound effect. 

On September 16, 1893, a gun was fired at noon, and 100,000 people surged across the Oklahoma plains in the largest land run in American history. Within 2 hours, 6.5 million acres were claimed. Cities appeared overnight. The frontier, they said, was finally settled.

But a young Tonkawa woman was already there, lying flat in the grass at the edge of her family's field, feeling the hoofbeats in her teeth.

In this episode, we follow the process that made the Oklahoma Land Runs possible, the Dawes Act of 1887, the Jerome Commission's hard bargaining and deception, and the quiet arithmetic of tribal land ceded for cents on the dollar. We hear from Oklahoma's first territorial governor, who wrote frankly about the chaos and the cost. And we sit with the Tonkawa, who kept their allotments, watched a town spring up on their former land, and watched it be named after them.

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

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SPEAKER_00

Before we begin, about thirty seconds in, there is a loud gunshot sound effect. It was midday. I was in the fields. Late summer. The sun was straight overhead. I'd been working since morning. I knew something was happening. I had heard the men talking, seen the way things had been changing, but knowing something was coming is not the same as understanding what it means. The ground moved before I heard anything. I thought it was an animal, a storm, something in the earth itself, and then the sound hit. I ran. I don't know where I thought I was going. And then I dropped into the grass at the edge of the field, flat and low. The way you go when you don't know what's coming. And through the grass I watched them. Horses first. And then wagons. Then people on foot. More people than I thought I'd ever seen in one place before. More people than I knew existed. Pouring across the land like water through a broken beaver dam. I pressed my face against the cool ground. I could feel each hoof beat in my teeth. And then, as fast as it came, it stopped. I lifted my face from the ground. The dust was still settling. The men were already driving stakes, shouting at each other like they'd known this place their whole lives. I was still here. No one was coming to take my land. And yet, I don't remember getting up. It was like I was moving through water. Sounds muffled, the light wrong. My own hands felt strained to the end of my arms. Then there were arms around me. My father. He didn't say anything at first. He just held on. I could feel him checking that I was whole, that I was real, that I was still his. The dust was still in the air around us. The shouting was still carrying across the flats. Somewhere out there, men were already building something on the land that used to have nothing but sky. He held a little longer than he needed to. And I let him. Welcome to Rooted in the Plains. I'm Nicole. And in this episode, we're talking about the Oklahoma landruns. And we're going to tell the story from the beginning, the real beginning. April 22nd, 1889, high noon. More than 60,000 people were lined up along the borders of a 2 million acre tract of land in the middle of Indian Territory. They'd come from across the country, Kansas, Texas, as far as New York and California. Some came on horseback, some loaded everything they owned into wagons. Others rode the Santa Fe Railroad, a 15-passenger train packed full, waiting for the signal. All of them were chasing the same thing. Land. 160 acres free under the Homestead Act. All you had to do was get there first. At noon, the Army fired the signal, and the world came apart at the seams. By dusk, every quarter section had a wooden stake in it. And by the following morning, Oklahoma City, Norman, Guthrie, Edmund, and Kingfisher. All of them existed. Not as plans or promises, as cities. Shops opened, banks operated out of tents, the sound of hammers already going. They called them Born Grown. It was, by almost any measure, one of the most extraordinary spectacles in American history. But here's the question that spectacle tends to crowd out. What was this land before that starting line? To answer that, we have to go back. Not far, just two years. And we have to go to Washington. In 1877, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act. On paper, it was a reform measure. Its supporters believed it would help indigenous people by granting each head of the family 160 acres of land, held in a trust by the federal government for 25 years. Assimilation through private property. The idea was that if Indigenous people owned land the way that white Americans owned land, the so-called Indian question would simply solve itself. What the Dawes Act actually did was something else entirely. It took reservation land, broke it into individual allotments, and then opened everything else left over, every acre that wasn't assigned to a specific person, to a white settlement. The surplus. That word did a lot of work. What it meant in practice was this. Tribes that had been assigned reservations were about to lose most of them. Legally, permanently. Laura Da, a poet who spent years working through these documents, puts it plainly. In America, she writes, the symbolic word for erasure is first. The land runs or a story about first. First settlers, first towns, first farms. But the story only holds if you start the clock at noon on April 22nd, 1889. If you started any earlier, the land isn't empty. It wasn't waiting. It was already someone's home. The mechanism for all of this was a three-man body called the Jerome Commission, named after its chair, David H. Jerome. Beginning in 1889, the Commission fanned out across Indian territory with a straightforward mandate. Negotiate with each tribe for its surplus land, get agreements signed, open the land. The word negotiate is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. When the Jerome Commission met with the Cheyenne and the Rapahoe in 1890, historian Donald Berthrong documented what actually happened in those meetings. Hard bargaining, deception, and bribery to break down the resistance of the chiefs who did not want to sign. When the agreement was finally worked out, 3,294 Cheyenne-Arapaho received individual allotments totaling around 530,000 acres. The remaining 3.5 million acres of their reservation, land that they had lived on, hunted on, and buried their dead on, was signed over to the federal government for$1.5 million. That's roughly 43 cents an acre. The settlers that rushed onto that same land in 1892 paid between$1.25 and$2.50 an acre for it. That's a profit of about$0.80 to$2. The Commission used the same word persuaded to describe what happened to the Tonkawa. In October 1891, the Tonkawa ceded$79,000 acres to the United States for$30,000, less than 40 cents an acre. Each of the 73 tribal members kept their individual allotments of 160 acres. The rest of the land around them, the land that had been their world, was folded into what would become the Cherokee Outlet, the largest and most famous of all of the landruns. The people who made those runs were real too, and their hunger for land was real. Jefferson Hefley was one of them. His grandson Maurice wrote his story years later for the Chronicles of Oklahoma, and it reads like a portrait of a particular kind of American restlessness. Lim Hefley came home from the Civil War to Illinois, married, tried farming, and failed to stay put. He moved his family to Kansas in the 1870s, first to Chautauqua County, then to Woodson, then Sumner, and by the late 1880s, his family had grown to eight children. The drought had come, and the country around him had filled up with people, and there was nowhere left to go, except Oklahoma. That's who was lining up on these borders. Not just drifters and speculators, though there were plenty of those too, but families like the Hefleys. People ground down by drought and debt and the simple arithmetic of too many mouse and not enough land. Historians described them as mostly young men desperately intent on making something work, aware that the frontier was closing and that Oklahoma might be their last chance at inexpensive land. They weren't wrong about that. What they mostly didn't know or didn't ask was why the land was available and what it cost to make it so. The first run in 1889 opened 2 million acres. The second in September of 1891 opened another 868,000. The Cheyenne Arapahoe run in April of 1892, 25,000 people racing across the land, that 3,294 people had just been allotted and stripped of their surplus. And then September 16, 1893, the Cherokee Outlet, nearly 6.5 million acres, 100,000 people, 40,000 homesteads available. The Army was supposed to fire the signal at noon, but at one starting point, someone fired five minutes early, and at another, a pistol shot sent 5,000 horses running 11 minutes before the gun. No one could stop them. In October of 1891, George W. Steele, the first governor of the Oklahoma Territory, wrote in his annual report to the Secretary of the Interior It's a fascinating document. Steele was a practical man. He was candid in his ways that official reports rarely are. He described the town site openings of near chaos, lawyers without clients, bankers without banks, gamblers and speculators crowding the real settlers who actually intended to build something. He noted that one man had been killed by his own horse. He complained that the system rewarded the wrong people. And on the subject of the Cherokee outlet, the very run our Tonkawa girl watched from the field. He wrote to the Secretary of the Interior that if the Cherokee could have been bought out at 47 cents an acre, he saw no reason they should object to white settlement. That is the governor. Writing to the federal government in an official report, the system wasn't hidden. It was just described in a different language depending on who was reading it. The Tonkawa stayed on their allotment after 1893. They farmed, and by 1905, 73 of them had allotments and were reported as prosperous. A school ran at the agency. The town that now bore their name had 40 residents by 1894. None of them were Tonkawa. By 1910, there weren't enough Tonkawa left in the agency to keep it open. The government had closed it. The good farmland drew offers from white buyers, and many sold or leased their allotments and moved to town. The powwows and festivals continued through the 1920s, then the depression came. Then the elders began to die. George Miles, the last chief, died in 1925. By 1961, when anthropologist Robert Haskarl wrote his account of the Tonkawa culture and history, he noted that only three full-blooded Tonkawa remained. Three in the town that carries their name. To refer back to Laura Da's word for erasure as Firs, the land runs were a story about Firs. First towns, first settlers, first farms on what the history books called unoccupied land. But Da asks the harder question, in her own words. What is a ghost town in a nation whose settlements, roads, and parks are directly superimposed over indigenous cities, trails, and sacred sites? Many of the settler towns from the landruns are ghost towns now. Timber and railroads came and went, and the cavernous emptiness behind. That land turned over again. The Takawa had been there before it all, and in some form, they still are. That's not a tidy ending, but it's a real one. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a little glimpse of Plains life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to dig a little deeper, check out the show notes for additional reading and a full list of sources used in this episode. Thanks.