How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [140]
OKLAHOMA
ALFALFA BILL MURRAY, EDWARD P. McCABE, AND CHIEF GREEN McCURTAIN
Oklahoma’s Racial Boundaries
I have no doubt that today there are half a million people in the Indian Territory.… A small fraction are full-blooded Indians, another portion are mixed bloods, and a large share of them are white people who are members of the tribe simply by marriage or adoption.… Then, in connection with that, there are a number of negroes.
—SEN. KNUTE NELSON, OKLAHOMA STATEHOOD DEBATE, 1903
Oklahoma came close to being two states. The western half, whose residents were primarily white, would have been the state of Oklahoma. The eastern half, whose residents were primarily Indians, would have been the state of Sequoyah—named in memory of the Cherokee who had devised the first American Indian alphabet and, not, presumably, in memory of the fact that a pole had once been erected to display his head because of boundaries he had helped negotiate (see “Sequoyah” earlier in this book).
In addition, another effort was made to create a different racial boundary. When Indian lands were made available for settlement, a movement was initiated among African Americans to migrate to the new territory (named Oklahoma) in sufficient numbers to constitute a majority of the population. Had the effort succeeded, Oklahoma would have become, in effect, an African American state. But the movement triggered a countereffort to embed white supremacy in the Oklahoma constitution.
Proposed states of Oklahoma and Sequoyah
Green McCurtain, “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, and Edward P. McCabe were three of the principal participants in these different efforts to create, in effect, racial boundary lines. Of the three, only McCurtain, a Choctaw, was born and raised in present-day Oklahoma. At the time of his birth in 1848, Oklahoma was part of a region known as the Indian Territory. The Indian Territory was not composed of U.S. citizens with a governor appointed by the president but rather of American Indian reservations, each with its own tribal leadership. McCurtain was forty-four, married, and treasurer of the Choctaw government when his career was profoundly altered by events in Washington. Aspiring settlers seeking land in the West had been pressuring Congress to open up unassigned lands in the western half of the Indian Territory. Americans rich and poor, along with railroads and other corporations, recognized the opportunities available with this land. “Fully a hundred thousand people are intending to rush into Oklahoma, as soon as it is opened for settlement,” the Atchison Daily Champion reported in February 1889. As arrangements with the tribes were completed, the gates opened, and settlers poured into the new Territory of Oklahoma.
Chief Green McCurtain (1848-1910) (photo credit 40.1)
McCurtain first surfaced in outside news accounts as a result of his tribe’s agreement with the federal government. The Choctaw Nation bore little resemblance to the tribe that had arrived from Mississippi some sixty years before, as could be gleaned from an 1891 Dallas Morning News article on the land transfer: “Some of the members [of the Choctaw Council] could not speak Choctaw and some could not speak English.… Appointed delegates to Washington to watch the interests of the Choctaws … are Gov. W. N. Jones, Treasurer Green McCurtain, and Thomas D. Ainsworth.”
The final paragraph of the same news item contained an omen regarding the state of Sequoyah: “It is frequently suggested that the Five Civilized Tribes [the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles] should form a