User:Jkwambai/Land Rush of 1889

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During the 18th century, the time civil war was at the peak, the president of the United States of America then-president Abraham Lincoln came up with strategies to reduce landlessness in the country by signing the Homestead act into law with an aim of opening Western lands to allow people to settle on idle tracts of land especially the group that filed court petitions. The conditions set for claimants included the that one had to improve condition of the land for the five years that they were allowed to settle in it as well as cultivate part of it for agricultural purpose. When the act became law, majority of the the occupants along the Indian territory that is known in the present day as Oklahoma came from a group came from a group of people called the five civilized tribes comprising of Chickasaw, Cherokee, creek, choktaw and Seminole

The government, in 1887 passed an Act called the Dawes Severality which aimed to remove the five tribes of Indian origin from their lands and therefore the indirect way of accomplishing this task was through the provision of the Dawes Severality Act that proposed that every household head among the five civilized tribes be allocated a piece of land. In the Act, each household head was to receive 160 acre plot (Bohanon, Cecil, and Philip, 25). The initial aim of the Act was to enhance the process of civilization in the US but the major impact that was realized is that it reduced the idea of tribal land ownership. The white 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 where, the household heads of the five “civilized” tribes were to take 160 acre plot.

The other Indian tribes outside the five civilized tribes that were moved to Oklahoma were privileged to be ceded approximately one half of the total landmass occupied by the five tribes. The two of the five tribes, the Seminoles and the Creeks, were conviced to sell part of their land that approximated to 1.9 million acres to the US government. This part of the land included the land occupied by the Arapaho and the Cheyenne. The Annual Indian Appropriation bill was passed on 2nd of March 1889 by the US Congress thus opening the 1.9 million acres of the “unassigned” land for settlement. In support of this idea, on March 23 Benjamin Harrison, the then newly inaugurated president of the United States signed the bill and in his statement he said that the land will be opened for white settlement on 22nd day of April 1889. In the bill, it was provided that no one was allowed to settle on the piece of land until the exact stated time that otherwise one was to forfeit the right of owning a homestead in Oklahoma.

In preparation of the settlement scheme into the 1.9 million acre of land, the US army were deployed in two regiments in order to ensure that no one entered into the territory before the stated time. The people who tried to settle in the land before time came to be identified as “sooners” and therefore the army troop cleared all the “sooners” from the land and also helped in surveying and subdividing the land into 160 acre each that was to be shared among the white settlers on a first come first serve basis. Kingfisher and Guthrie became the host of land offices where claims and grievances to the government were registered as provided by the Homestead Act.

Prior to the date of settlement, large number of people that were identified as potential settlers continue camping along the perimeter of the Indian land increasing the population of the area that grew within a few days into a metropolitan. On 22nd day of April 1889, the day that the government had set aside for the settlement, the crowd in the Oklahoma white settlement land was overwhelming and when the signal for the process of land registration was raised, thousands of people rushed across the border and this was later known as the Oklahoma land rush. Approximately fifty thousand people; the young and the old, men and women rushed to try their luck in acquiring the 12,000 land tracts that were available.