How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [141]
As it happened, the Five Tribes set aside their jealousies less than two years later when Congress added a clause to its 1893 appropriation for the Office of Indian Affairs. Inserted into the bill in the last few hours before Congress adjourned, the amendment gave the consent of the United States for tribes to divide and deed their lands to individual members. In addition, those Indians who acquired ownership of their share of land would become citizens of the United States. The option was accepted with virtually no debate.
The seemingly benign amendment regarding land deeds enabled a geographic shift of politically epic proportions. Transferring ownership of Indian land from a tribe to its members would shift the authority to sell the land. From the perspective of Indian leaders, such a shift would be nothing short of divide and conquer.1 In 1896 McCurtain, now the elected chief of the Choctaw Nation, called for a convention of the Five Tribes to plan their opposition. When they met in November of that year, the delegates ultimately agreed to relinquish their tribal form of government and to divide their lands among each tribe’s individual members—on condition that the Indian Territory be admitted as a state.
It was not a decision easily reached. Very few, in fact, of the delegates who voted in favor of the resolution fully agreed with it—including the man who had initiated the summit, Green McCurtain. “It has come to the point where the Indian must take a decisive step forward or forever be swallowed up and lose his identity,” he agreed, but he opposed the demand for immediate statehood. “Today the Choctaw Indian—and what I say applies equally to the other tribes—is not prepared to have a state or territorial government.… It will result in the red man being outvoted by the white occupants of the territory.”2 McCurtain preferred a gradual implementation of the land shift, to buy time for American Indians to learn how the levers of power worked in white America. Once acclimated, he hoped, Indians would be able to maintain their hold on those levers when the land transition was completed and statehood conferred.
Even that, he knew, was a huge hope, since those levers of power weren’t always securely fastened. When a proposal for Oklahoma statehood first came before Congress in 1905, the Dallas Morning News showed how they could become unhinged.
A circumstance in this statehood controversy worthy of remark is the beautiful faith of the Indians that Congress will redeem the promises … made as far back as 1839.… These agreements between the government and the Indians … were not intended to express a fixed policy for all future time but were designed to meet the exigencies of the period in which they were made.
McCurtain put it differently:
No Indian can get the better of a paleface.… Two Oklahoma palefaces once hunted in my camp. They spent the evening with me and over the fire.… Bill said, “Sam, let’s trade horses—my bay for your roan.”
“It’s a go,” Sam agreed. “Shake on it, partner.”
They shook hands. Then Bill said with a loud laugh, “I’ve bested ye this time. My hoss is dead. Died yesterday.”
“So’s mine,” Sam said, “Died this morn’n. And what’s more, I’ve took his shoes off.”3
Despite his misgivings, when the Sequoyah Convention for statehood was convened in August 1905, McCurtain joined in, serving as one of its vice presidents. A fellow vice president, representing the Chickasaw Nation, was William H. Murray, soon to be widely known as “Alfalfa Bill” for his urging Oklahomans to grow alfalfa. Murray, however, was not of Chickasaw descent. Born to a poor family in Toadsuck, Texas in 1869, he had arrived in the Indian Territory in 1897 as a young lawyer and became involved in the successful election campaign of Chickasaw governor Douglas Johnston. Not long after, he married Johnston