On April 22, 1889, tens of thousands of settlers lined up along a guarded border waiting for a signal. When it came, a cannon blast or gunshot depending on where you stood, the most chaotic land grab in American history began. Geography by Geoff covered the story of the state’s founding, which traces the violent, complicated, and often contradictory forces that shaped one of America’s strangest states.
Before that spring afternoon, the region was designated Indian Territory, home to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations. These tribes had already been forcibly removed from their southeastern homelands in the 1830s under the Indian Removal Act, a brutal forced migration known as the Trail of Tears. After the Civil War, the federal government used the tribes’ wartime alliances with the Confederacy as justification to seize the western half of their territory, leaving a roughly 2 million acre tract of unclaimed land at its center.
That tract, called the Unassigned Lands, became the target. President Benjamin Harrison officially opened it for settlement at noon on April 22, 1889. It was given away in a first come, first serve system. Settlers who arrived before the signal and hid in ravines to claim the best plots earned a nickname that stuck, the Sooners. By sunset that day, Oklahoma City had grown from a two building railroad stop to a tent city of 10,000 people. Just 18 years later, in 1907, Oklahoma became the 46th state.
