Volume 18 , Issue 44

1889 - White Man Decreed Indian Territory & Indian Must Go

1889 - White Man Decreed Indian Territory & Indian Must Go. In "The Sun," out of New York, New York, dated 7 April 1889, Sunday, page 6, "What Shall Be Done With Charley Quapaw?" - via Talequah, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, March 30 1889.

Found on Newspapers.com

The Indian Territory must go. The Indian must go. The white man had decreed it. The Indian sees and admits the inevitable. The time was very near at hand. Some well-informed people assert, and one who had looked over the Territory and the surrounding States could scarce resist the conclusion, that within five years neither the Indian Territory nor the Indian would have an existence. Within that time what was then known as the Indian Territory would become two great States, Oklahoma, and another called, perhaps, Sequoyah, after the greatest of the Cherokees.

In place of the Indians there would be a host of American citizens rich in the ownership of vast stretches of productive land and proud of the blood that tinged their complexion a shade swarthier than even the constant winds and sunshine of the fair climate could do.

In 1889, civilization in the States bordering on the Indian Territory had become congested. As time passed the fever increased. The trouble was easily understood. Take the condition of Kansas, for twenty years Kansas people had sat up nights, had tossed on sleepless beds, had risen early in the morning, that they might devise new schemes for inducing emigrants to come to them and help develop what they were pleased to call their exhaustless resources.

It was in the pursuit of development they had bonded their counties to build county court houses and jails of wondrous and expensive architecture. They bonded their townships and villages to build railroads. They had bonded everything within sight to build school houses. They had mortgaged their farms and town lots to build barns and dwellings and wire fences, and to buy stock and machinery. They had gone down into their pockets and taken good money by the million to give to manufacturers in other States as bonuses to induce the moving of the factories from the other States to Kansas.

That the Indian Territory must go. That the Indian must go. The financial condition in Missouri, Arkansas and Texas was not so feverish as it was in Kansas, but the same restless anxiety to get over into the Indian Territory exists in those States.
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