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This chapter examines Max Weber's exploration of the American heartland and frontier, with particular emphasis on his experiences in Oklahoma and the Indian Territory. It first considers how the idea for Weber's Oklahoma and Indian Territory trip originated in the first place before discussing the “unique problems” that Weber encountered in the Indian Territory, including questions of tribal membership or citizenship, and land allotment. It then analyzes Weber's claim that the coming of modern industrial civilization led to the rapid disappearance of the romanticized past. As he put it, the “Leatherstocking romanticism” of native life and the frontier was coming to an end. The chapter also explores Weber's views on the construction of “nature,” the emergence of a new world, and traditionalism and concludes with an assessment of the significance of the frontier to Weber's work.

This chapter traces the history of black people's emancipation from slavery in Indian Territory, with particular emphasis on the 1866 treaties that leaders of the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations entered with the United States to abolish racial chattel slavery in each nation. From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Native American slaveholders held thousands of people of African descent in bondage, exploiting their labor and reproduction for power, prestige, and wealth. During the 1830s era of Indian Removal, the federal government forced Indian nations to leave Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and resettled people in the region known as Indian Territory, where the nations retained limited sovereignty over their people and land. This chapter shows that the federal government's actions to end slavery after the Civil War went hand in hand with efforts to expand national sovereignty over the lands of Native Americans.

In the Antebellum era, slaveholders dominated the Creek government. Under their guidance, the Creek Nation passed laws punishing abolitionists, defending slavery, and discriminating against black Indians.

During the Civil War, many Creek Indians (as well as other members of the Five Civilized Tribes) joined the Confederacy. This chapter follows the fate of the Graysons as some family members went South and others headed North. In Indian Territory, slavery and race played a significant role in dividing families and communities.

Many Creeks, including Katy Grayson, understood Indian removal as an object lesson in the power of race to shape their lives. The policies of the federal and state governments as well as scientific racism, propounded by some of the nation's leading scholars, suggested that dark-skinned peoples faced a daunting future in the United States. When Katy Grayson arrived in Indian Territory, she settled far from her black relatives.

In the era of Reconstruction, the Creek Nation pursued a policy of states' rights in order to defend its sovereignty against the federal government. The Creeks' conflation of states' rights and tribal sovereignty poisoned relations with ex-slaves, who were increasingly marginalized in Indian Territory.

From 1871 to 1896, the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas was located in Fort Smith and held jurisdiction in Indian Territory. It is widely claimed that “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker presided over seventy-five thousand square miles with two hundred Deputy US Marshals bringing in outlaws, seventy-nine of whom hanged in Fort Smith. These basic talking points are used as hard evidence of the relentless justice of Parker and that the “long arm of the law” reached over a vast domain of lawlessness. This chapter scrutinizes and contextualizes this discourse, arguing that the way the popular tourist narrative is told crafts a cultural memory that silences injustices perpetrated by the court, by deputies, and by Parker himself. In fact, Parker’s jurisdiction in Indian Territory was never as large as often touted. For over two-thirds of his time on the bench, it was less than thirty-five thousand square miles and, for the last third of his tenure, shrunk to twenty-two thousand. Mythic proportions of justice are further sensationalized in Fort Smith by intermixing imagery from the novel and film adaptations of True Grit.

This chapter focuses on the Cherokee people’s uncertain future in the wake of their forced removal and resettlement in the trans-Mississippi West during the late 1830s. It examines how the Cherokees worked hard to overcome the trauma of being separated from what they believed to be their ancient homeland in the Southeast of the American republic by forging a political homeland in Indian Territory. It considers how this new political homeland became an important symbol that reminded Cherokees living throughout North America and the Pacific that there was a geographical refuge from the settler colonial world, occupied and governed by fellow Cherokees. It also explores how feelings of distrust, suspicion, and a desire for vengeance pervaded Cherokee public life in Indian Territory; the reformation of Cherokee nationalism in relation to Cherokee diaspora; the effects of racial slavery on Cherokees living in diaspora; and the connection between what it meant to be Cherokee and the memory of forced removal.

This chapter examines Cherokee dramatist Rollie Lynn Riggs’ Mexico plays, in which he imagines the dramatic geographies of the many Indian territories of the United States and Mexico. These geographies are so historically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually similar that they appear interchangeable: the Cherokee Nation is Indian Territory; Indian Territory is indigenous Mexico; and indigenous Mexico is Indian Territory and the Cherokee Nation. Riggs produces a Great Indian Territory or Greater Indigenous Mexico, though only a consideration of his entire corpus makes this intertribal and indigenous transnational space legible.

This chapter examines questions related to Cherokee identity, social status, “blood,” and migration—what the prominent Cherokee leader W. P. Adair called the refugee business—in the trans-Mississippi West in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. More specifically, it considers the social, political, and economic problems caused by refugees who settled in and around Indian Territory after the Civil War. It also discusses the impact of frontier violence on people of Cherokee descent after the Civil War; the migration of North Carolina Cherokees to Indian Territory; and how the loss of land undermined the political homeland of the Cherokee diaspora. It shows how the migration of people of every race, religion, and ethnic background to the West following President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act in 1862 affected the Cherokee Nation in terms of land ownership.

This chapter examines the complex historical backdrop against which the twentieth-century Cherokee diaspora took shape. It considers how the Cherokee diaspora opened up new geographical vistas and socioeconomic opportunities for Cherokees living in diaspora and outside the homelands in Indian Territory and western North Carolina. It also explores how the intersection of the past and present, the significance of travel and migration, and shifting perceptions of “home,” “blood,” and the value placed on memory and historical narration all helped define Cherokee identity. Finally, it discusses the impact of the federal government’s land allotment and assimilation as well as “termination” and “relocation” programs on life in the Cherokee diaspora.

This chapter examines the impact of the American Civil War on Cherokee identity and diaspora. A little over two decades had passed since thousands of Cherokees were forced to relocate from their homeland in the Southeast and create a new homeland in Indian Territory, the Cherokee people found themselves embroiled in the Civil War. The war became an economic, social, and legal calamity for the Cherokee Nation and gave rise to tens of thousands of Cherokee refugees. Most Cherokees considered the prospect of a large-scale war in the trans-Mississippi West as a threat to the future well-being of the diaspora’s political homeland. Others, especially wealthier Cherokees and Cherokee slave owners, believed they shared a social and economic stake in the fate of the Confederacy. This chapter considers how the American Civil War defined Cherokee identity in different legal ways in various parts of the Cherokee diaspora.

The frontier complex reinforces narratives of heterosexual normativity and white male hegemony by using narratives of femme fatales, madam entrepreneurs, and brave deputies. Following Judith Butler’s critique of gender performativity, this chapter details how brothel madam Laura Zeigler is used as an example of “equal opportunity employment in the West” whereas the “Bandit Queen” Belle Starr narrative demonstrates the value of adhering to “proper” gender roles. Meanwhile, deputies and outlaws alike are elevated to legendary, heroic heights to underscore their “bravery.” The 1872 “Going Snake massacre” involving the Cherokee gentleman Zeke Proctor and Deputy US Marshals is ubiquitously offered as testimony to the lawlessness of Indian Territory and the bravery demonstrated to combat it. Seldom heard is the fact that then US Marshal Logan H. Roots was intentionally “scaring up business” for the federal court from which he was embezzling money. These mythic narratives function to silence, conceal, and legitimate the violent and forcible acquisition of land in Indian Territory that made Oklahoma statehood inevitable.

Examines the history of the five so-called “Civilized Tribes”: their expulsion from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States, intertribal disagreements over alliances with North or South, formation of regiments for the Confederacy, and resultant intertribal warfare.

This chapter recounts a journey in academic scholarship and the significance of the Prelinger Award in providing time and resources to research, travel to archives, and to write multicultural women’s history. Because of this award, an understanding of U.S. history, the role of women, and the significance of a multicultural approach was broadened and enhanced.

By the late 1830s, Americans increasingly ventured across the Mississippi. Any barrier that had once existed between Native people and Americans began to break down. Indian Territory became increasingly crowded and chaotic. Kiowas responded by making new alliances with Indian nations, as well as adapting their practices for seeking sacred power. They sought to secure themselves against their enemies and protect their families from disease and hunger. As Americans poured into the West and confronted Native people defending their homelands, they argued for containing Indians on bounded reservations. Leading American Protestants, who saw these new spaces as ideal places for teaching civilization and Christianity, were key reservation promoters. Hoping to secure a measure of security and needed supplies, Kiowas signed an 1867 treaty that created a reservation for them and their Comanche and Apache allies.

Building on Robert Frazer’s framework for understanding forts of the West, this chapter organizes the frontier complex into five eras. The era of Indian removal (1804–1848) to Indian Territory cleared the path for white settlement in the East while driving a westward movement of white settlers. The restraint era (1848–1887) witnessed the cattle trails, cowboys, wagon trains, pioneers, Indian wars, and transcontinental railroad, out of which the mythic frontier was created. The reservation era (1887–1934) extends from the Dawes Severalty Act to the Indian Reorganization Act and represents the pacification of Indians and the firm establishment of whiteness in the West. With the advent of affordable cars and paved roads, the recreation era (1920–1980) saw a burst of frontier tourism reinforced by Wild West Hollywood imagery. Attendance at museums and historic sites has been in decline in the redoubling era (1980-present). Neoliberalism led to globalization and deindustrialization along with the destabilization of middle-class family incomes that has resulted in less discretionary income for family vacations. Combined with the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and new social media, traditional historic sites and museums are now faced with stiff competition for tourists who were once guaranteed in the recreation era of the frontier complex.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory and brought Kiowa lands under the authority of the United States. Over the next 30 years, the federal government worked to purchase Indian lands and create a barrier between settlers and Indians, using treaties and removal agreements to achieve these aims. They also sought to “civilize” Indians by funding Protestant and Catholic efforts to teach farming, domestic skills, and Christianity. Kiowas maintained their way of life, far from events east of the Mississippi, and had strong alliances with other Native peoples and agreements with other colonial powers. They maintained their ritual practices and flourished in many respects. Over time, however, the arrival of Native people who had been removed from the East put new pressures on Kiowas. With more people venturing into their lands, Kiowas finally met with American officials in the 1830s and signed their first treaty with the United States.