The Five Civilized Tribes

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The so-called Five Civilized Tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. Europeans called them that because they had adapted somewhat to living within "civilized" borders.

Living mainly in the Southeast, these tribes went to great lengths sometimes to adopt the customs and practices of the Europeans increasingly settling around them. Members of these tribes lived in European-style houses, worked on European-style farms using European-style tools and techniques, wearing European-style clothes, and even attending Christian churches, as did their European neighbors. In some cases, Native Americans married Americans. In some cases, Native Americans also emulated their European neighbors by owning African-American slaves.

Five Civilized Tribes

More fundamentally, members of the Five Civilized Tribes had their own political systems, modeled somewhat on European ideals. Written constitutions drove the creation of such systems, which included legislative bodies and courts. The largest and usually regarded as the most advanced of the tribes, the Cherokee, had their own language, as developed by the famous Sequoyah.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 provided a mechanism for removing members of these tribes from their ancestral homelands, forcibly or otherwise. Representatives of all of the tribes eventually signed treaties to govern this emigration, and most of the members of all five tribes made their way, forcibly or voluntarily, to Indian Territory by 1840. Once they got there, the tribes had their own assigned territory; the total of land assigned to these five tribes was more than 30,000 square miles.

The lands around Indian Territory gradually became states in the Union and gradually perpetuated a growing debate over slavery that spawned the Civil War. Members of all five Civilized Tribes fought in this conflict, with Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Eastern Cherokee fighting for the Confederacy and Creek, Seminole, and Western Cherokee fighting for the Union. (In addition, a small faction of Western Cherokee fought for the Confederacy.)

Once the Civil War was finished, the U.S. Government dissolved the treaties that it had agreed to with the Five Civilized Tribes and restricted the members of those tribes to living in Eastern Oklahoma. As well, under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, all slaves living within Indian Territory were freed.

As a result of the 1887 Dawes Act, members of the five tribes had to restrict their settlements to specific areas of the territory. A large amount of land, nearly 2 million acres, was not owned by any Native American tribe and was known as the Unassigned Lands.

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 opened Indian Territory to white settlement. President Benjamin Harrison set a date of opening for April 22.

At noon on that day, tens of thousands of would-be settlers rushed into what they hoped was their new home lands. Some went immediately to work, carving out boundaries and setting up the trappings of new towns. This was the Oklahoma Land Rush, and it further spelled disenfranchisement for Native Americans. The following year, Congress divided the area into Indiana Territory and Oklahoma Territory.

Oklahoma in the second half of the 19th Century was very much a part of the cattle industry. The discovery of oil in the last decade of the 19th Century ushered in a new mode of settlement: an oil boom. The first well was drilled in 1897, and the subsequent discovery of large reserves of natural gas also drove the economic expansion of the territory.

The U.S. Government also, in 1898, dissolved the political systems under which the tribes had been governing themselves as dependent nations. In 1905, leaders of the Five Civilized Tribes applied to Congress for statehood, seeking to rename their Indian Territory as the State of Sequoyah. Congress rejected this proposal, instead joining the borders of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory to create the new state of Oklahoma, with everyone living within those borders becoming American citizens.

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