In negotiations with U. S. government representatives, the Quechan Indians of southern Arizona are compelled to cede much of the most fertile land along the Colorado River to the United States. Some of the signatures on the cession agreement are coerced; others are forged. According to the document’s terms, the Quechan consent to take allotments and allow the government to sell “surplus” lands to whites. In exchange, the U. S. government agrees to irrigate the Indians’ lands, but the promised irrigation system will never be built.
The Navajo (Dineh) agent compels Indian children to attend school.
Under the supervision of the Presbyterian Church, the Fort Defiance Boarding School is established for Navajo (Dineh) students. When few Navajo families allow their children to attend, Indian agent Dana Shipley tries to round up students and force them to go to school. Furious at Shipley, a headman named Black Horse and his followers confront the agent at the Round Rock Trading Post. They drag him from the building and beat him nearly to death before Navajo policemen are able to stop the assault.
Congress appoints the Dawes Commission.
Pressured by the flood of non-Indians into Oklahoma Territory (see entry for MAY 1890), the U. S. government seeks to open the neighboring Indian Territory to white settlement by allotting the reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes. Toward this end, Congress forms the Dawes Commission, headed by Henry Dawes, a former senator and the sponsor of the General Allotment Act (see entry for FEBRUARY 8, 1887). The commission is charged with evaluating the situation in Indian Territory and negotiating allotment agreements with Indian leaders. The Dawes Commission will be authorized to survey tribal lands in 1895 and to prepare rolls of tribal members in 1896.
“We ask every lover of justice, is it right that a great and powerful government, year by year, continue to demand cessions of land from weaker and dependent people. . . . We have lived with our people all our lives and believe that we know more about them than any Commission, however good and intelligent, could know from a few visits. . . . [The commissioners] care nothing for the fate of the Indian, so that their own greed can be gratified.”
—Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders protesting the work of the Dawes Commission in an 1895 letter to the president and the Senate
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner presents his thesis of the “frontier.”
As part of the World’s Congress of Historians and Historical Students at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, delivers a speech about the American frontier. He receives little response until the lecture is published later in the year as “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
The essay cites American democracy as a direct outgrowth of the “existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advancement of American settlement westward.” In Turner’s eyes, the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” with Indians on one side
And whites on the other. Whites’ movement westward, therefore, is celebrated as inevitable social progress, with superior, civilizing whites overtaking the inferior Indian savages that stand in their way. This thesis will be the dominant historical interpretation of Indian-white relations for the next 50 years.
The Cherokee Outlet is opened to white settlement.
In one of the most spectacular land rushes in American history, 100,000 American homesteaders frantically stake claims on the 6.5 million acres of land known as the Cherokee Outlet. Purchased by the United States from the Cherokee Nation for approximately $8.5 million, the Outlet is composed of lands forming what is now the panhandle of Oklahoma.
World History
