Volume 10 , Issue 4

Indian Territory Reduced In Size

By the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (May 30, 1854) the Indian Territory was reduced in size by taking from it all the vast region extending from the 37th parallel of North Latitude to the Niobrara River. The Indian Territory, proper, was thus reduced to the area which it included up to the time of the passage of the Organic Act under which the Territory of Oklahoma was formed in 1890.

The boundary line between the Indian Territory and Kansas Territory (which extended westward to the Continental Divide) was surveyed during the summer of 1857, by a party under the command of Lieut.-Col. Joseph E. Johnston, of the Second United States Dragoons. Colonel Johnston subsequently became one of the most distinguished generals in the Confederate Army.

The western boundary of Oklahoma, from the Red River North as far as the Canadian, was surveyed under the direction of Daniel C. Major, of the U. S. Astronomical Observatory, in the summer of 1859.

Although Kansas and Nebraska were cut off from the Indian Territory together, they still contained the reservations of about twenty tribes of Indians, most of whom had been removed from states East of the Mississippi River. In addition to these, in the central and western portions of the two new territories, there were a number of tribes of the untamed Indians of the plains, whose people still roamed unhindered in the wilderness and who had as yet no reservations assigned to them. Eventually, most of these tribes were removed to the Indian Territory, though not until after the close of the Civil war. -- A Standard History of Oklahoma, Joseph B. Thoburn, Chapter XXVIII, pg. 207, Vol. 1.
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