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Townsend, H. C. and W. B. Doddridge.

Oklahoma and The Cherokee Strip Reached Via the Missouri Pacific Railway and Iron Mountain Route “The Canaan Of The Home-Seeker” [panel title]. A Correct Map of the Oklahoma Country and Cherokee Outlet Reached Via the Missouri Pacific Railway and the Iron Mountain Route [map title].

St. Louis, Missouri: Missouri Pacific Railway, [ca. 1893]. Woodward & Tiernan Printing Co.; Higgins & Co. Engravers. Folding 8vo brochure (8.125” x 3.75”) opening to 16.125” x 29.5. 16 panels of text on one side, other side with large map printed in black, red, pink and yellow, 14.375” x 21” plus margins, flanked by panels of text. CONDITION: Very good, a few tiny separations at folds.

A very scarce publication issued by the Missouri Pacific Railway, promoting settlement in the newly-created Oklahoma Territory in general and the Cherokee Strip in particular shortly before the Cherokee Strip (a.k.a. “Cherokee Outlet”) land run of September 16th, 1893.

As of the early 1890s the Missouri Pacific Railway operated lines throughout the adjoining states of Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas, as well as Northwest Texas, but none through the new Oklahoma Territory (in 1890 Congress had created Oklahoma from the western part of Indian Territory). Yet the Missouri Pacific had every reason to promote the region. It would profit handsomely by transporting homesteaders, hauling lumber and supplies to brand-new townsites, and carrying out cattle, grain, coal, and cotton once those towns took root. Publications like the one offered here doubled as travel guides and advertisements, designed to funnel emigrant and freight traffic onto Missouri Pacific routes instead of those of its rivals.

The panels of text on this brochure are organized under several headings: “How to Locate Your Land,” “How to Reach the Promised Land and Where to Outfit,” “The Cherokee Strip,” “Public Land Laws,” and “Valuable Assistance.” Two panels are devoted to timetables. The section on locating your land incorporates a numbered township grid of thirty-six square miles, with each division comprising 640 acres, and discusses how lands are marked. Text on the panel devoted to reaching “the Promised Land” identifies the locales from which the lands could be accessed:

The Missouri Pacific Railway, although it does not enter the Cherokee Strip, touches it at Arkansas City, Kiowa, and runs within six miles of the line of the Strip from Anthony to Kiowa, and settlers cannot miss getting choice claims of excellent farming lands. At any of the above towns, settlers can outfit advantageously and make their way to the Promised Land by the various wagon roads.

The section headed “The Cherokee Strip. The Garden Spot of the Southwest,” which occupies three panels, begins with a general description of the relevant lands:

THE CHEROKEE STRIP or outlet is a body of land one hundred and seventy-five miles in length and fifty-seven miles wide, containing over eight million acres. That portion of the Strip which is about to be opened, extends from the Arkansas River on the east to "No Man's Land" on the west. Kansas adjoins it on the north, and the Oklahoma country on the south. The small reservations of the Osages, Poncas and Otoes, in the eastern part, will not be opened until the Indian Commissioner treats with these tribes and induces the members to take their land in severalty.

The five panels of “Public Land Laws” provide extensive details relevant to the settlement of the region and make reference to “the right to homestead upon public lands…conferred by Section 2298 of the United States revised statute,” amended by Act of Congress, Mach 3rd, 1891.

The Map

Titled “A Correct Map of the Oklahoma Country and Cherokee Outlet, Reached Via the Missouri Pacific Railway and Iron Mountain Route,” the map shows all of Oklahoma and small portions of Indian Territory subdivided by the familiar grid of townships laid out by the General Land Office, a prerequisite for settlement. Color coding is used to guide viewers as to the availability of land: pink indicates lands not open to settlement; yellow indicates “Oklahoma Territory Lands, now open for settlement”; and bright red indicates “Land designated in the Peel Bill and to be opened for settlement by the President’s Proclamation.” The “Peel Bill” is evidently a reference to the “Indian appropriation bill,” which would have originated in the House Committee on Indian Affairs, chaired by Samuel West Peel (1831–1924) of Arkansas.

The map places Indian and Oklahoma Territories in the context of neighboring states, which are crisscrossed by heavy black lines representing the routes of the Missouri Pacific. This gives the map a wonderful “persuasive” quality, in that the lines of competing carriers such as the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and the Kansas Pacific are excluded.

Background

The legal and geographic framework for what became “Indian Territory” was laid in the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Under authority of the Act, the Federal government reached agreements with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole—the “Five Civilized Nations”—which compelled them to cede their homelands in the Southeast and remove to lands west of the Mississippi. Between the mid-1830s and early 1840s, they rebuilt governments, towns, schools, and economies in a region then designated as Indian Territory, bounded roughly by present-day Oklahoma (minus the Panhandle).

The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed adult citizens to claim 160 acres of surveyed public land, on condition that they occupy it and improve it by farming. Though not applicable to tribal lands, the Act helped fuel later demands to open “unused” portions of the Indian Territory to white settlement. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the 1866 Reconstruction Treaties—imposed because the Five Nations had allied, to varying degrees, with the Confederacy—forced cessions of land in Indian Territory and granted railroad rights-of-way, accelerating non-Native pressures on the Territory’s land base.

By the late 1880s federal policy shifted toward allotment—the division of communally held tribal lands into individual parcels assigned to Native households, with any “surplus” sold to non-Indian settlers—and opened portions of the Indian Territory to settlers. The “Unassigned Lands” at the Territory’s center were the first to go, producing the famous Land Run of April 22nd, 1889. Congress then formalized a dual structure with the Organic Act of May 2nd, 1890: the western portion became Oklahoma Territory (to which the “Cherokee Strip”—today’s Panhandle—was attached), while the eastern portion, where the Five Nations retained their governments, remained Indian Territory. In effect, from 1890 to statehood in 1907, two overlapping jurisdictions coexisted—one moving rapidly toward American territorial governance and homesteading, the other still organized under tribal law but increasingly encircled by federal policies aimed at partition and settlement.

The 1836 Treaty of New Echota, concluded by the Jackson Administration, forced the Cherokee to cede all lands east of the Mississippi. In return they were granted a 228-mile long by 58-mile wide strip of land in the northwest corner of the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma). Along with this “Cherokee Outlet” (or “Strip”) came “a perpetual outlet west…as far west as the sovereignty of the United States,” to be used by the Cherokee for access to hunting and grazing lands. After the Cherokee sided with the Confederacy however, the Federal Government in 1866 imposed a new treaty depriving them of access to the Outlet and confining them to reservations in the eastern part of Indian Territory, along the Arkansas River.

In early 1893 the Government pressured the Cherokee into accepting roughly $8.6 million in return for their title to the Outlet. The General Land Office quickly surveyed the area and subdivided it into thousands of quarter-section (1/4-mile square) parcels. This set the stage for the “Cherokee Outlet [Cherokee Strip] Land Run,” Oklahoma’s fourth, largest and most chaotic land rush. At noon on September 16th, 1893, set loose by the firing of cannon, huge crowds of settlers—estimated by some to number 150,000!—streamed into the Strip in search of the best parcels.

When the dust settled thousands of land patents were recorded during what is often thought of as the last days of the wide-open West. Many historians mark this event as the closing of the “American Frontier” and the end of a two century-long era of settlement and westward expansion. Except for the unexplored wilds of Alaska, this great unclaimed remnant of the public domain was the last major land area managed by the government which was opened for homesteading and settlement (Bureau of Land Management, “The 120th Anniversary of the Oklahoma Land Rush”).

OCLC records just one example under the outer panel title used here, at Yale. Another six examples are recorded under the map title, but the map appeared in at least one other Missouri Pacific Railway publication, so it is unclear what is represented by these holdings  

In all, a remarkable survival of the Cherokee Strip Land Rush, one of the most dramatic events in the settlement of the American West.

Offered in partnership with Boston Rare Maps of Southampton, Mass.

Item #9768

Price: $4,500.00

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