Dept. of Interior, Map of Indian Territory and Oklahoma, 1890

This historically significant map documents a momentous period of transition in the history of Oklahoma—it shows Indian Territory and the newly created Territory of Oklahoma together, and is perhaps the only Government Land Office map to do so.

The creation of Oklahoma Territory by Congress in 1890 occurred soon after President Benjamin Harrison authorized the opening of “surplus” Indian reservation lands for sale. Yielding to pressure from cattlemen in the surrounding states and to railroads planning construction through unassigned lands two years earlier, the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 had made U.S. settlement of Indian Territory a certainty. According to the act, each Indian male received a private allotment, and the land remaining became available for sale. Because of previous treaties, the act did not extend to the area held by the Five Civilized Tribes in the eastern half of the territory at this time. Hence, the territory became divided into two autonomous entities, divided on the present map by a bold red line. Both territories clamored for statehood, but neither particularly wanted to be part of the other. David Wallace Adams describes the cultural climate in which this map was commissioned:

. . . Whereas Indians historically had been able to retreat before the moving line of civilization, the onrush of technology and white settlements had finally caught up with them. Great stretches of the prairie were now being churned by the settler’s plow; the once-still prairie air was now alive with the hum of telegraph lines and the locomotive whistle; the rich grasslands, which had once fed vast buffalo herds, now supported the white man’s thriving cattle industry. And what was the Indian to do in the face of this flowing tide of civilization? As Commissioner John Oberly noted, there was little he could do. The forests into which he had once run “whooping” had all but been felled. “The game on which he lived has disappeared. The war-path has been obliterated. He is hemmed in on all sides by white population.”

The present map records the substantial encroachment of settlers by 1890, including the presence of thirteen rail lines “authorized by Congress” and indexed in the lower right corner. Historical notes at the lower left provide information about the various Indian Lands and related treaties. The present map was prepared as part of the U. S. Census Report of 1890 and became a noteworthy publication in its own right. Lithographed by Julius Bien and Company of New York, this map provided both a graphic summation of nineteenth-century cartography and a preface to twentieth-century mapping. In its presentation of population, vital statistics, as well as agricultural, medical, economic, and physiographic data, this map represents the most comprehensive and imaginative use of graphics and analytical mapping seen until the 1930s.

Refs.: Graff, 4396; Schwartz and Ehrenberg, p. 319.