Oklahoma, the forty-sixth state admitted to the union, has a history much more interesting and extensive than its relatively recent statehood indicates. Roy Gittinger’s classic study begins in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, which brought the region into the United States and closes in 1906, when Indian Territory was poised to become the state of Oklahoma.
The territory became the home of the Five “Civilized” Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole—in the years following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Through treaties and Indian removals later in the century, lands were reserved to Plains Indian tribes—the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache in the southwest; Cheyenne and Arapahoe in the west; Iowa, Kickapoo, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee in the central portion; Osage and other tribes in the north and east.
The Panhandle was public land and the central region was the Oklahoma District, not open to settlement by whites or possessed by any Indian tribe. In 1889, the Oklahoma District was thrown open to settlement, and the “land run” allowed thousands of home seekers to settle a portion of the vast territory. It set the stage for subsequent openings, for a territorial government, and finally for Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
The Formation of the State of Oklahoma gives a definitive account of the original Indian land grant, the treaties that settled tribes in Indian Territory, developments after the tribes settled, the problems raised by white settlement, and the dynamic events that led to the establishment of the commonwealth of Oklahoma.
