Coercion

In an excerpt from “By the Fire We Carry,” Rebecca Nagle explores the concept of “allotment”—and its repercussions.

By Rebecca NagleSeptember 8, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Environment

• History

AT THE TURN of the century, both of my great-grandfathers got land within what would later become Oklahoma. How they acquired that land, however, was very different. Patrick Sarsfield Nagle was a young lawyer and staunch Democrat whose father emigrated from County Cork, Ireland. On April 22, 1889, he waited on the edge of two million acres with 50,000 other eager white settlers. Once Congress announced the land run, people came from everywhere. They arrived by train, wagon, horse—even by foot. At noon, guns, trumpets, and cannons fired. And the mob surged forward.

Dust plumed as thousands of settlers raced across the prairie. To claim the allowable 160 acres, they planted little flags in the ground marking out their plots. By nightfall, all two million acres were taken. Towns were planned and tent cities went up overnight. Nagle, driving a wagon hitched to two mules, staked out a smaller town lot in Kingfisher. There he opened a law office, got married, started a family, and helped found the Oklahoma Democratic and then Socialist parties as the land became a state.

The 1889 and subsequent land runs are celebrated today through reenactments at elementary schools; the mascot of the University of Oklahoma; and by one of the world’s largest bronze sculptures, in downtown Oklahoma City. The image of settlers taming the wild frontier is integral not just to Oklahoma, but also to American identity. Today 46 million Americans—nearly 20 percent of the adult population—descend from white settlers who got free, Indigenous land, myself included.

The two million acres opened for white settlers in the 1889 land run was originally the homelands of the Comanche, Wichita, and Osage tribes, and later the treaty territory of Muscogee Nation. When the Five Tribes (Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole) were expelled west of the Mississippi to what was then called Indian Territory, their new lands were promised to them for “as long as the grass grows or the water runs.” At that time, the westernmost US state was Missouri. By the late 1800s, the western boundary of the United States was California. As the US stretched from sea to shining sea, the Five Tribes’ treaty territory became an island of Indigenous-controlled land right in the middle. And the political will of the United States to fulfill its treaty obligations buckled.

On September 18, 1900, my great-grandfather William Dudley Polson stepped into a drab federal office in the small town of Vinita, Cherokee Nation. Sixty-one years after the death of John Ridge, his grandson was being interviewed by federal officials. They needed to add William Dudley to a list of every Cherokee citizen so they could begin allotment. Through allotment, all land belonging to Cherokee Nation—the land for which John had signed away his life—would be divided up and assigned to individual citizens. In the late 1800s, the US government decided that, rather than push Native people onto shrinking reservations, it would assimilate Native people to white society by privatizing their land. The policy was called allotment. For William Dudley, the federal officials had a long list of questions: “What is your name?” “What is your age?” “What is your post office address?” “Are you a recognized citizen of the Cherokee Nation?” “What degree of blood do you claim?” “What is the name of your father?” “Is he living?” “Is he an Indian by blood?” “What is your mother’s name?” “Is she living?” “Is she an Indian by blood?” “For whom do you apply for enrollment?” “What is the name of your wife?” “Is she living?” “What was the name of your wife before you married her?” “When did you marry her?” “Have you a certificate of marriage?” “If you have a certificate of marriage, can you send it to us?” “What is the name of your child?” “How old is he?” “Have you any proof of his birth?” “Is your mother living?” “Is your father dead?” To most of their questions, William Dudley gave two-word answers: “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.”

Before allotment, all Cherokee land was owned communally by the tribe. Tribal citizens could build a house, open a store, plant crops, or fence out a farm wherever they wanted. Whatever they built they owned, but the tribe held all the land underneath. The house John Ridge lived in after removal, the farm he started with enslaved labor, and the cemetery where he was buried all stayed in the family. William Dudley lived at the old home place as a child, moved away for school, and came back as an adult. Communal land ownership allowed the farm to pass easily among relatives. With allotment, however, the farm got divided up, with each family member assigned a different piece. William’s niece was given the section with the house on it. Fanning out from there, the land smooths into a long, flat prairie. William Dudley and his children were assigned seven rectangles of it—some adjoined, some not. There was no house or place to stay on his assigned land, and so William Dudley rented a place in town a mile up the road, where he worked at a drugstore.

While the land run is remembered today with mascots and statues, allotment is hardly known about outside of Native communities. But it redrew the map of the United States. Through allotment, tribes lost nearly two-thirds of their land base—an area the size of Montana. This chapter of land loss was carried out not through war but through bureaucracy. The mountain of paperwork, however, was capable of a shocking level of violence.

After Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were assassinated in 1839, Cherokee Nation saw a period of relative peace and prosperity. Unbelievably, the time after removal is called the Golden Age. The tribe rebuilt homes, schools, and its centralized government, and constructed the first college for women west of the Mississippi. The prosperity, however, was made possible by enslaved labor. By the 1840s, Cherokee Nation hardened its slave codes and in Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Muscogee Nations, enslaved people were prohibited from learning to read or write, sing hymns, or even sit at the same table as their owner.

One spring morning in 1842, the plantation community of Webbers Falls in the fertile Arkansas River Valley awoke “to find themselves abandoned by their slaves.” Twenty enslaved people had escaped in the darkness of night and were headed to Mexico. Cherokee Nation immediately formed a posse to capture the runaways. As the escapees traveled south, other enslaved people from Muscogee and Choctaw Nations joined them. When the runaways found a slave catcher returning a family to their Choctaw enslavers, they killed the catcher and freed the family. After 13 days and 280 miles, the Cherokee posse caught them. Five members of the group were sent to jail, but most of them were returned to a punishment materially the same: slavery.

When the US Civil War broke out, the Confederacy courted an alliance with the Five Tribes. Understandably, none of the tribes felt a particular allegiance to the United States, and many of the slaveholding elite sympathized with the South. Federal troops stationed in Indian Territory abandoned their posts, and at the dawn of the Civil War, the promise of federal protection had been withdrawn. At first, Cherokee Nation voted to stay neutral, but after the four other tribes—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Muscogee Nations—signed treaties with the Confederate government, Cherokee Nation formally joined. But Cherokee people were deeply divided.

As Cherokee Nation was pulled into the broader American Civil War, our own civil war broke out. Traditionalists opposed to slavery and the influence of white society fought for the Union. Under the leadership of Stand Watie—Elias Boudinot’s brother and a general in the Confederate army—another faction fought for the South. The tribe’s conflicting position meant it was invaded by both the Union and Confederacy and offered little protection from either. By the end of the war, Cherokee Nation was devastated. Similar divisions broke out within Muscogee Nation, with Opothle Yoholo and those loyal to the Union fleeing to Kansas—where, in a refugee camp, he died.

Four years after Cherokee Nation signed a treaty of allegiance to the Confederacy, General Robert E. Lee surrendered and the American Civil War was over. Stand Watie waged battles in Indian Territory for another two months—making him the last Confederate general to lay down arms. When leaders from the Five Tribes met with federal officials to negotiate peace, they were startled by the US government’s demands. As punishment for siding with the Confederacy, the United States wanted almost half the land set aside in the removal treaties. Tribal leaders tried to protest, but on the losing end of the war, there was little they could do. These revised boundaries—as described in the 1866 treaties—are what the Five Tribes consider their reservations today. The treaties also formally ended slavery in all five tribes, and in Cherokee, Seminole, and Muscogee Nations granted full citizenship to formerly enslaved people. But the concession that proved most fatal seemed small at first: at the federal government’s insistence, the tribes allowed railroads to pass through their land.

From the passenger windows of the St. Louis, San Francisco, and Kansas railroad lines, white people watched fertile farmland, valuable timber, and prime pastures roll by. And like generations of settlers before them, they coveted it. While it was illegal to move there without a permit from the tribes, they came in droves. “We could chase out white men and they [would] be right back the next day,” a Euchee man recalled. “Sometimes there are more white people back than we had chased out.” First the intruders came by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, until finally over 300,000 white people moved onto the Five Tribes’ land—until they outnumbered tribal citizens. In 1890, Muscogee citizens were still the majority of the people on their land. Five years later, they were less than 20 percent. “Whom do you see?” one observer wrote. “White men, white men everywhere! The scarcest object is an Indian, and this is the Indian territory.”

Muscogee Nation arrested the squatters and turned them loose in Kansas or Missouri, but they just came back. The federal government, which was obligated to remove the intruders, was no help. When lighthorsemen cut down fences illegally erected by trespassing cattlemen, a federal court indicted them for “malicious mischief.” When the lighthorsemen evicted one squatter, US courts awarded the man $100 in damages. Illegal settlers grazed their cattle on Muscogee grass, chopped down Muscogee trees to sell the timber, and erected entire towns on Muscogee land.

By the late 1800s, the squatters started to complain to Congress. They had a piece of land to live on, but they didn’t own it. The vast quantities of money they had spent on their illegal fences, farms, homes, and towns would be lost if the United States didn’t give them property rights. In Congress, the intruders found a sympathetic ear. In 1893, senators reassured them, “The United States has not forgotten you.” As Congress shaped its policies to fit the squatters’ demands, one politician emerged as their most powerful ally: Senator Henry L. Dawes.

When the idea of allotment first came to Congress, Senator Dawes—then chair of the Indian Affairs Committee—sponsored it. The Republican and lifelong politician claimed he was helping Indigenous nations by breaking up their treaty territories. Communal land ownership, in Dawes’s mind, held tribal citizens back, but allotment would turn them into self-serving capitalists. “They have got as far as they can go,” he said of the Cherokees at an annual gathering of East Coast humanitarians, because “there is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.” Tribal leaders told Dawes communal land ownership worked; there were no poor families or “paupers,” they said—in contrast to the United States, one Cherokee citizen observed, “where there are so many landless people and so much poverty.”

The supposed benefit to tribal citizens was not the only reason allotment was necessary, Dawes argued. The other reason was crime. The land of the Five Tribes had become a refuge for “murderers, train robbers, horse thieves, bank robbers, and the outlaw class in general,” one report alleged. In his speech to that gathering of humanitarians, Dawes claimed “something like one thousand men” had been hanged for crimes committed in the Territory. In reality, only a few dozen were executed in 21 years. Dawes also argued that most tribal citizens actually wanted allotment, but their governments—controlled by “mixed bloods and adopted citizens”—suppressed their voice. Those same “mixed bloods” got rich off communal land ownership by controlling the best farmland, while the average citizen eked out their subsistence in the hills. Some in Congress may have been inclined to uphold the treaty rights of the Five Tribes, but Dawes told them the “wholly corrupt” tribal governments were “unworthy.”

After he retired from the Senate, Congress placed Dawes at the head of a three-person commission tasked with bringing allotment to the Five Tribes—whether they wanted it or not. Dawes shared a trait with many white people who have harmed Native nations: the hubris to believe that he knew what was best for Native people—better than Native people ourselves.

With his plan in tow, Henry Dawes headed to Indian Territory. Everywhere the Dawes Commission went, however, the tribes said no. Cherokee Nation refused to meet with them. In front of Dawes, the principal chief of Muscogee Nation asked a crowd of thousands to stand on one side of a public square if they wanted allotment, and on the other side if they didn’t. In unison, the crowd voted allotment down. The Choctaw general council made it illegal for any citizen to agree to cede any portion of Choctaw land. The punishment for the first offense was six to 12 months in jail; for the second offense, it was death. In joint councils, leaders from the Five Tribes condemned allotment, printed several thousand copies of their resolutions, and posted the broadsheets around the Territory.

Originally, Dawes wanted to assign each tribal citizen some amount of land, and then open what was left over to white settlers. The land assigned to tribal citizens would be allotted; the leftover land would be ceded to the United States. For this plan to work, Congress needed what is called a land cession. At the time, the body didn’t believe it could alter a tribe’s treaty territory without their consent. (Congress has since changed its opinion. If Congress wants to get rid of a reservation today, or every reservation for that matter, it can do so unilaterally.) The US was happy to coerce that “consent” through war, torture, starvation, bribes, and trickery, but it still needed tribal leaders to sign something. To further thwart Congress’s plan, the Five Tribes owned their land outright. On most reservations, this is not the case: instead, the United States owns the land, but holds it in trust for the benefit and use of the tribe. During removal, negotiators for the Five Tribes demanded to hold a patent to their land—the same way a homeowner holds a deed. This worried Congress: if the legal owner of the land—the tribes—refused to sell, how could anyone else own it? So Congress gave up on cession. All land within the tribes’ treaty territory would be assigned to tribal citizens; none would be left over for white settlers. While land ownership within it would change, the Five Tribes’ treaty boundaries would remain intact.

Our ancestors were not able to stop allotment or removal, but during periods of unimaginable loss, they fought for every inch they could save. These smaller victories—holding the patent to the land and preventing cession—would make all the difference in Murphy. Generations of tribal leaders mitigating colonization allowed their descendants to come back a century later and fight for their reservation.

Allotment, Congress ultimately believed, they could force onto the tribes. And so they did. To bully the tribal governments, Congress took away everything they could—writing the list Lisa Blatt would rattle off 12 decades later. The secretary of the interior assumed possession of all tribal property, including schools, courts, buildings, and money. Tribal governments were prohibited from meeting except to discuss allotment. Squatters were allowed to incorporate their illegal cities and towns, pass laws, and even start collecting taxes. Finally, Congress scheduled allotment to happen with or without tribal consent. The coercion worked; eventually, all five tribes agreed to the allotment of their land.

After the Five Tribes conceded to allotment, resistance to the policy did not stop. It just shifted from the tribes to their citizens. In Muscogee Nation, traditionalists formed their own government, passed laws forbidding Muscogee citizens from taking an allotment, and even whipped the violators. (The government made their headquarters at Hickory Ground—near the Ryal community where Patrick Murphy and George Jacobs are from. Eufaula Harjo, James Floyd’s great-grandfather, himself was from the Weogufkee tribal town. Even at this time, traditional communities lived in the southern portion of the Muscogee reservation.) Harjo was one of the leaders. He would later tell US senators that he wanted the “old treaty” to be upheld. “This land was given to us forever, as long as grass should grow and water run,” he told them. But then the government came and “divided the land up without the consent of the Indian people.” To put down their resistance, the United States sent in federal marshals and the cavalry.

But still the people protested. Twenty-four thousand tribal citizens refused to enroll for allotment. Some who refused to enroll for allotment were arrested and carted off to jail. But mostly federal agents just changed the rules. Now, the testimony of a family member or neighbor could enroll someone against their will. One day, when he was in town for an errand, the postmaster handed Eufaula Harjo a piece of mail. It was his allotment certificate; he had been assigned land without his knowledge. Harjo took the certificate and returned it to the Dawes Commission office. Other traditionalists gave Harjo their certificates, and he returned them in batches. “The Indian people did not know anything about it until the land was cut up,” Harjo said of allotment. “We are pushed out of all that we had,” he went on. “They are in the houses that we built.”

The final wave of intruders were the bureaucrats. The Dawes Commission brought with them an army of office workers—clerks, field inspectors, commissioners, surveyors, and many a man who got his job through a friend in Washington. They opened offices in Wewoka, Atoka, Tishomingo, Muskogee, and Vinita. From behind their desks, they got busy carrying out allotment. The project was massive: 15.7 million acres needed to be divided up and assigned to over 100,000 tribal citizens. Each of the Five Tribes’ treaty territory was surveyed and sectioned off into perfect little grids, and—no matter how close together or far apart they lived at the time—each citizen had to be assigned an equal portion of it. Muscogee citizens got 160 acres, each Cherokee 110, and each Seminole a different amount depending on the value of the acreage. In Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations—who signed a joint agreement—each citizen got 320 acres, except for formerly enslaved people and their descendants, who received only 40.

Before the Dawes Commission could assign allotments, they needed a list of every tribal citizen who would receive one. Originally the tribes wanted to use their own rolls, but the commission argued that the “corrupt” tribal governments would be unfair. So Congress put the commission in charge. The Dawes Commission segregated the rolls by placing formerly enslaved people and their descendants on a freedmen roll for each tribe. As tribal citizens, freedpeople were entitled to the same land as everyone else and, as allotment took shape, also experienced the same hardships. At the same time, Indian Territory was the only place in the world, as Choctaw and Chickasaw freedpeople descendant and historian Alaina Roberts writes, “in which land distribution to former slaves was not an unfulfilled promise but a reality.”

The commission’s hubris quickly turned to frustration. While tens of thousands of tribal citizens refused to enroll, over 100,000 non-Native people claimed to be citizens of the Five Tribes in order to receive a free piece of land. (The Dawes Commission processed the enrollment applications of more than 250,000 people but approved only about 101,000.) The nightmare of finalizing the rolls was characteristic of the time; every task took longer and encountered more obstacles than anticipated. The wheels of bureaucracy were in turn messy, indifferent, cumbersome, violent, and corrupt. But once in motion, they didn’t stop.

At the turn of the century, the principal chief of Muscogee Nation warned that “communal land ownership” had been a form of “protective power” for tribal citizens, but that allotment would leave each person to cope “single-handed with the avaricious land sharks of the American continent.”

And that is exactly what happened.

¤

This is an excerpt from Rebecca Nagle’s By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, which will be published on September 10 by HarperCollins.