Volume 13 , Issue 14

Indian Territory & United States (1866-1906)

Indian Territory & United States (1866-1906) According to the book, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866-1906 written by Jeffrey Burton, After the defeat of the confederacy, the Five Tribes signed treaties which, in permitting the creation of a federal court within Indian Territory, could hasten the dissolution of tribal institutions and absorption the Five Nations into the federal structure, with or without tribal consent.

Some Indian citizens favored reform as strongly as others opposed it. BUT . . . until the 1880's, there was little support for it in Congress. Before 1889 jurisdiction over crimes committed by or against United States citizens in Indian Territory rested with "ousted courts" in Arkansas and elsewhere. These courts temporarily retained some of that jurisdiction even after 1889.

Indian Territory --

Indian Territory was a geographical expression which evolved from a policy. Its formal origins are found in an act of Congress of March 2, 1819, which set the western boundary of the new United States Territory of Arkansas at the hundredth degree of longitude, and in the act of May 26, 1824, defining the extent of the present State of Arkansas.

All the land between the old and new western limits of Arkansas -- bounded to the north by the thirty-seventh degree of latitude and to the south by the Red River -- was reserved by the United States Government for the resettlement of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes.

The sole legal identity of this area of more than 62,000 square miles was contained in the words "the Indian county," but it was commonly, and legitimately, written and spoken of as "the Indian territory."

Indian Territory was the form that appeared in many congressional bills from the 1860's onward. It was not until well into the 1890's that the term "the Indian country" was replaced by the newer phrase in prosecutions undertaken by the United States court.

No Man's Land --

West of the hundredth meridian is a neck of land containing 5,672 square miles now known as the Oklahoma Panhandle and formerly called the Public Land Strip, Neutral Land Strip, or No Man's Land. It was not part of the Indian Territory and was not attached to any State or Territory until it was included in Oklahoma Territory under the provisions of the Organic Act of May 2, 1890.

A tract of 2,300 square miles enclosed by the Red River and its North Fork, nearly coextensive without the three southwestern counties of the present State of Oklahoma, was officially designated Greer County, Texas, until 1896 when after years of wrangling and litigation the Supreme Court of the United States awarded it to Oklahoma Territory.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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