Nearly 125 years ago, on May 23, 1895, the smallest and last federally-approved land rush in Oklahoma Territory got under way as "surplus lands" of the Kickapoo were thrown open for settlers to homestead.
That rip-off had begun in 1889. The Kickapoo had fled their homeland in southwestern Wisconsin after the Blackhawk War in 1832. By a circuitous route over many years, they had ended up in Indian Territory. That region had been the turf of the ancestors of the Caddo, Osage, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Wichita, and Comanche for millennia. But in the 1830s, it became the new home of the "Five Civilized Tribes" who were being removed at gunpoint from their east-of-the-Mississippi homelands. Over the next several decades, 20 more tribes were shipped to what became Oklahoma.
In 1889, there were in the western part of the territory areas originally meant to be filled with other removed tribes, 2 million acres of so-called "Unassigned Lands." As part the Indian Appropriation Act of that year, those lands were set aside for white settlement. Out of that came the first Oklahoma land rush.
Also in 1889, the Cherokee Commission aka the Jerome Commission was established. It was a tribunal, comprising two generals and a civilian. But the chief negotiator was David Jerome. His mission was to legally acquire Indian-owned lands. In practice, this meant intimidating the tribes into dissolving their reservations and accepting allotment under the Dawes Act of commonly owned land to individual Indians in 80- to 320-acre plots. What was left over after allotment, the so-called "surplus," was sold to the government at the government's price. This surplus was then opened up to homesteaders, 15 million acres in all, in a series of land “rushes.”
The corruption involved—with sheriffs, their deputies, minor federal officials, and others getting a head start on the best land, the so-called "Sooners—is a story for another time. For the Indians, that part is irrelevant. It was all over for them when they were forced to sign away their rights. By June 1890, agreements had been "obtained" from the hold-outs, the Iowas, Sacs and Foxes, Potawatomies, and Absentee Shawnees. Only the stubborn Kickapoo remained. After a commission visit with the Kickapoos, Jerome wrote to his superiors on July 1:
The Kickapoos are altogether the most ignorant and degraded Indians that we have met, but are possessed of an animal cunning, and obstinacy in a rare degree. We were prepared, by what we had heard before our coming for an exhibition of these qualities. [...] The Commission, each member in turn, made speeches to them, explained our business with them, told them of the impending changes in their mode of living, earning a living &c, and submitted to them a proposition in writing, which is hereto attached and made a part hereof, and placed a copy of it in the hands of the Chief, and asked them to go with their Interpreter and consider it. [...] When the paper, containing the proposition, was placed in the hands of the Chief, the Kickapoos seemed to become somewhat uneasy—a little Indian jargon was exchanged—when he, the Chief, handed back the paper and refused to keep it. They then took their leave, and promised to return in the afternoon. At the time appointed they came back, and promptly told us, that they would not make any contract, because it would offend the Great Spirit.