Oklahoma Land Run

Race undertaken by American homesteaders to claim plots of land in the former Indian Territory of Oklahoma, USA, on 22 April 1889. Over 800,000 ha/2 million acres of unassigned land in Oklahoma District were purchased from the Plains Indians by the US government in 1889. These were surveyed and divided into 65-ha/160-acre plots. The race began at noon and all the land was claimed within 24 hours. Towns such as Oklahoma City, Norman, and Stillwater were established in a single day. Oklahoma had been the last large territory held by the Plains Indians, who were now confined to Indian reservations, small areas of unwanted land. Americans now owned the land between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast, making US belief in its manifest destiny to expand westwards a reality.

The land run was chaotic, with people on foot, bicycles, horses, and wagons. Conflicts raged over who reached a plot of land first and were sometimes settled violently because of the lack of law and order in the West. Cheating also occurred - those who slipped through the US Army lines along the territory's border to find the best plots before the race began were nicknamed ‘Sooners’.

Oklahoma Territory Originally created for those American Indians relocated from the East under the Indian Removal Act (1830), the Indian Territory of Oklahoma was the only large area of the Great Plains left in the hands of the Indians at the beginning of the 1890s. Its population was made up of 55 groups, including the Cherokee, whose journey from the East, during which thousands died of exposure, disease, and starvation, became known as the Trail of Tears. At the time the US government believed that Americans would never need the land of the Great Plains, and adopted a Permanent Indian Frontier policy, declaring the land to the west of the Mississippi as Indian Territory ‘forever’.

Collapse of the East-West frontier The work of the beaver trappers known as mountain men, the California gold rush of 1848-56, the movement of farming settlers to California and Oregon, and the relentless rise in the population of the USA all contributed to the breakdown of the Permanent Indian Frontier. Furthermore, as the US government were keen to adopt the concept of manifest destiny, a term coined in 1845, and expand westwards to secure lands held only by paper title from Britain, France, and Spain, no effort was made to support the frontier. When land in California and Oregon ran out, settlers of the 1860s looked to the Great Plains. The US government's Homestead Act (1862) encouraged its settlement. The increasing flow of Americans entering lands that the Plains Indians believed had been promised forever led inevitably to conflict.

Plains Wars With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and the flood of homesteaders from 1866, after the end of the American Civil War (1861-65), tension heightened between the Plains Indians and the US government. The spread of ranching in the early US cattle industry and the destruction of the North American buffalo (bison) herds by American hunters meant that the Plains Indians were losing their lands and livelihood at a rapid pace. Their response on many occasions was to fight but, although there were some successes in the Plains Wars, such as Red Cloud's War (1865-68) and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Montana, in 1876, the general pattern was victory for the Americans.

Once defeated, the Plains Indians were forced to live on reservations and their lands distributed to settlers. By 1889 this process was complete except for Oklahoma Territory, and these lands were eyed with increasing determination by settlers who were unable to find land elsewhere on the Great Plains. With the sale of these American Indian lands to the US government, the dispossession of the Plains Indians was complete.