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From Native Sovereignty to an Oilman’s State: Land, Race, and Petroleum in Indian Territory and Oklahoma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2021

Mark Boxell Open the ORCID record for Mark Boxell [Opens in a new window]
Mark Boxell*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Indian Territory and the State of Oklahoma experienced one of the world’s largest petroleum booms, with much of the oil extracted from the territory and state produced on land owned by Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race peoples. White settlers, backed by governing institutions and cultures rooted in settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and anti-monopolism, struggled to seize control of oil-rich land amid the allotment of Native-owned property. These latter elements insisted that non-whites could not grasp the value of petroleum nor be trusted with the control of such a vital resource, especially in the shadow of ever-looming oil monopolies. Settlers and wildcat prospectors built a white-supremacist oil-field politics that elevated the rights of small-scale, proprietary "independent" oilmen and worked to ensure that the latter controlled flows of crude vis-à-vis non-white property holders and “outside” corporations. For white settlers in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, oil rose to the top of collective imaginaries about race, property, and wealth, encouraging the creation of both legal and often violent extralegal strategies for dispossessing unworthy landowners of their hydrocarbon inheritance.

Keywords

oilwhite supremacysettler colonialismracial capitalism
Type
SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Prize
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 216 - 233
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Condra, G.E, “Opening of the Indian Territory,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 39:6 (1907): 323, 337, 340 (accessed Dec. 10, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://www.jstor.org/stable/198869. Although Gould does not appear as an author, he is indicated as a contributor to the tract. Condra taught at the University of Nebraska while Gould founded the Department of Geology at the University of Oklahoma, laying the groundwork for one of the most important schools of petroleum geology in the twentieth-century world. See Gould, Charles N, Covered Wagon Geologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frehner, Brian, Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Field, Kendra Taira, Growing Up with the Country: Race, and Nation after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 24–25, 74–80, 130–36Google Scholar. See also Fixico, Donald L, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources, 2nd ed., (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012)Google Scholar; Forbes, Gerald, “Oklahoma Oil and Indian Land Tenure,” Agricultural History 15:4 (Oct. 1941): 189–94, www.jstor.org/stable/3739783 (accessed Dec. 10, 2018)Google Scholar; Frymer, Paul, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Harmon, Alexandra, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Miles, Tiya, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Miner, H. Craig, The Corporation and the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial Civilization in Indian Territory, 1865–1907(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Stremlau, Rose, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference.”

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6 The politics of natural-resource production and management in the United States has traditionally been written from a much different historiographical perspective than this, but those works are still worth citing. On the Progressive Era natural resource state, see Hays, Samuel P, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Melosi, Martin V, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Karen R. Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30:4 (Winter 1999): 449–73, www.jstor.org/stable/971422 (accessed July 29, 2019); Bruce J. Schulman, “Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the Development of the American State, 1900–1912,” Journal of Policy History 17:4 (2005): 375–403, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/189747 (accessed Apr. 17, 2019); Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Kyle Williams, “Roosevelt’s Populism: The Kansas Oil War of 1905 and the Making of Corporate Capitalism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19:1 (Jan. 2020): 96–121, DOI:10.1017/S1537781419000446 (accessed Jan. 28, 2020). Tyrrell is the only one of these authors to directly discuss race in relation to the United States’ growing overseas empire.

7 C.B. Glasscock, Then Came Oil: The Story of the Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1938), 112; Indian-Pioneer Papers, Western History Collections (WHC forthwith), University of Oklahoma, Gardner Tubby interview, https://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm/ref/collection/indianpp/id/4265, (accessed Oct. 6, 2019); Black, Brian C, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 22 Google Scholar.

8 Franks, Kenny A, The Rush Begins (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 1984), 5 Google Scholar; Glasscock, Then Came Oil, 113–15; Carl Coke Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), 12–24; For the environmental history of the early Pennsylvania oil fields, see Black, Petrolia; and Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Jones in particular focuses on the importance of transport in the construction of a fossil-fuel energy system.

9 Wolfe, “After the Frontier,” 25–26. Henry George was an American political economist who advocated for the creation of a single tax on land as a means to alleviating growing poverty and inequality during the late nineteenth century. George argued that economic value derived from land should be collectively held. His book, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide. Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 21–22; Linebaugh, Peter, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 247; Chang, The Color of the Land, 79–80, 110–11, 119–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family, 72–73; D.W.C. Duncan, Vinita Chieftain, Aug. 25, 1898, cited in Miner, The Corporation and the Indian, 151–53.

11 Pleasant Porter speech, in L.C. Heydrick Collection, WHC, packet 1, folder 8, unnamed, undated newspaper article, “Regrets the Finding of Oil.” The violence that was visited upon Osages due to their oil wealth is well-known. In part, this is why I do not include them in this article. The Osages also maintained reservation lands overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which altered the rules of property ownership vis-à-vis other Indian Territory and Oklahoma tribes. See Terry P. Wilson, The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (New York: Doubleday, 2017); Katherine Ellinghaus, “The Moment of Release: The Ideology of Protection and the Twentieth Century Assimilation Policies of Exemption and Competency in New South Wales and Oklahoma,” Pacific Historical Review 87:1 (Winter 2018): 128–49, http://phr.ucpress.edu/content/87/1/128 (accessed Oct. 19, 2019).

12 U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee. Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Matters Connected with the Affairs in the Indian Territory with Hearings, November 11, 1906–January 9, 1907. 59th Cong., 2nd sess., 1906–7 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), 164–67. For more on the divisions within the oil industry between the monopolistic “majors” and “independent” oilmen, see Dochuk, Darren, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019)Google Scholar.

13 U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee. Report of the Select Committee, 599–600, 606–8, 618–19.

14 On the Glenn Pool field, see Connelly, W.L, The Oil Business as I Saw It: Half a Century at Sinclair (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Franks, The Rush Begins, 68–83, 133–35; Johnson, Arthur Menzies, Petroleum Pipelines and Public Policy, 1906–1959 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 36–42 Google Scholar; Rister, Oil!; George O. Carney, Cushing Oil Field: Historic Preservation Survey (Stillwater: Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University, 1981), 7, 26. The significant concentration of pipelines and storage tanks in Cushing, which originated with the initial oil boom, continues today. Because of its status as an oil-transport hub, Cushing acts as the price point for North American oil futures contracts traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

15 Thorne, The World’s Richest Indian, 14, 33–35; Erik M. Zissu, Blood Matters: The Five Civilized Tribes and the Search for Unity in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2001), 24–29, 40–49; “Joseph Bruner, Second Interview,” Indian-Pioneer Collection, WHC, https://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm/ref/collection/indianpp/id/3456 (accessed Oct. 7, 2019), cited in Field, Growing Up with the Country, 44; Debo, And Still the Waters Run, 286; Ray Miles, “King of the Wildcatters”: The Life and Times of Tom Slick, 1883–1930 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 31; “Syrian Came to Oklahoma to Garden,” Daily Ardmoreite, Feb. 18, 1915, 1.

16 An example of a federally mediated oil lease between a Native allottee and an oil producer, including correspondence, can be seen online courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/HenryAppletreeB1F3.pdf. See also Charles Francis Colcord Collection, WHC, box 19, folders 3 and 4.

17 Gilcrease, Thomas vs. G.R. McCullough et al., 1914, box 40, folder 11, CCB.

18 Proposed settlement of claim of Martha Jackson as minor heir of Barney Thlocco, deceased, May 4, 1918, box 11, folder 2, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Five Civilized Tribes Agency, Records of Tribal and Probate Attorneys, Case Files of Creek National Attorneys, Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration—Southwest, Fort Worth (forthwith Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth);

19 “Objection to Dismissal of the above Appeal,” box 31, folder 7, CCB; Memoranda in re to Martha Jackson case, Apr. 8, 1920, box 11, folder 2, Creek Nation Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth. In addition to Gilcrease and J. Coody Johnson, William Keeler acted as both principle chief of the Cherokee Nation and president of the Phillips Petroleum Company (known for the Phillips 66 brand) during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

20 Martha Jackson et al. v. B.F. Davis, County Judge of Seminole County, Oklahoma, and R.W. Parmenter, Supreme Court for the State of Oklahoma, No. 11226, box 11, folder 2, Creek Nation Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; Oklahoma Appellate Court Reporter, Vol. XIV, 482–83, box 11, folder 2, Creek Nation Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; The Petroleum Gazette 17:1 (Apr. 1912), https://books.google.com/books?id=iQcdAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22dana%20kelsey%22%20%22oil%22&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=%22dana%20kelsey%22%20%22oil%22&f=false (accessed Mar. 3, 2019).

21 “Oil Burning on River,” Tulsa Daily World, Feb. 5, 1915, 10; “Prairie Trying to Force Oil down to Forty Cents,” Sapulpa Herald, Jan. 6, 1915, 1. All newspapers are from the Oklahoma Historical Society’s “Oklahoma Digital Newspaper Program,” https://gateway.okhistory.org/explore/collections/ODNP/.

22 Two examples of this can be found in the persons of Charles Colcord and Robert Galbreath, both of whom were “unreconstructed Democrats” and early settlers and oilmen in Indian Territory and Oklahoma. See Charles Francis Colcord, The Autobiography of Charles Francis Colcord (C.C. Helmerich, 1970); Frank Galbreath, Glenn Pool and a Little Oil Town of Yesteryear (Self-published, 1978).

23 Steve Gerkin, “The White Knight Vigilantes: Exposing the Founders of Tulsa’s KKK,” The Frontier, May 8, 2016, www.readfrontier.org/stories/the-white-knight-vigilantes-exposing-the-founders-of-tulsas-kkk/ (accessed Feb. 5, 2020); Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference,” 894.

24 For African Creeks, see Chang, The Color of the Land; Field, Growing Up with the Country; Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). For the fraught politics surrounding the inclusion of Black Indians as citizens of other nations among the Five Tribes, see Littlefield, Daniel, Seminole Burning: A Story of Racial Vengeance (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1996)Google Scholar; Miles, Tiya and Long, Sharon P, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miles, Ties that Bind; Jesse T. Schreier, “Indian or Freedman?: Enrollment, Race, and Identity in the Choctaw Nation, 1896–1907,” Western Historical Quarterly 42:4 (Winter 2011): 458–79, DOI: 10.2307/westhistquar.42.4.0459 (accessed Apr. 21, 2019).

25 In the County Court in and for Muskogee County, Oklahoma, “Hearing on Valuation of Property Known as Fish property, May 1, 1917,” box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; WMH to Hon R.C. Allen, June 17, 1914, box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; For how families in the Five Tribes navigated allotment, see Chang, The Color of the Land; Field, Growing Up with the Country; Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family. For sharecropping, tenancy, and rural poverty in Oklahoma and on the Southern Plains, see Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Green, James R, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Sellars, Nigel Anthony, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

26 Oil companies generally offered leasing landowners a one-eighth royalty on all oil produced. Oliver Bradley, U.S. Oil Inspector, “Development and Operation,” box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; WMH to Hon R.C. Allen, June 17, 1914, box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth; Charles A. Looney, Direct Examination, Dec. 5, 1918, box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth. Judge Thomas W. Leahy, Muskogee County, to Secretary of the Interior, May 27, 1914, box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth.

27 Judge Thomas W. Leahy, Muskogee County, to Secretary of the Interior, May 27, 1914, box 15, folder 2, Creek National Attorneys, NARA, Fort Worth.

28 Chicago Defender, Nov. 15, 1913, cited in “Remember Sarah Rector, Creek Freedwoman,” African-NativeAmerican.BlogSpot.com, http://african-nativeamerican.blogspot.com/2010/04/remembering-sarah-rector-creek.html (accessed Oct. 10, 2019); “Life Term for Child Murder,” The Oklahoma Leader, Feb. 4, 1915, 6.

29 Kansas City Star, May 14, 1914, 11–12, in box 42, “Petroleum in Oklahoma,” Historic Oklahoma Collection, WHC.

30 Gerkin, Steve, “The Unlikely Baroness,” This Land, March, 2015, 62–63 Google Scholar; Ellsworth, Scott, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Hirsch, James S, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)Google Scholar; Chris M. Messer, “The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: Toward an Integrative Theory of Collective Violence,” Journal of Social History 44:4, Social Memory and Historical Justice (Summer 2011): 1217–32, www.jstor.org/stable/41305432 (accessed Mar. 12, 2019); Hollie A. Teague, “Stage Rights: Performing Masculinity in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” American Studies Journal 64 (2018), DOI: 10.18422/64-04 (accessed Jan. 2, 2020); Teague, “Bullets and Ballots: Destruction, Resistance, and Reaction in 1920s Texas and Oklahoma,” Great Plains Quarterly 39:2 (Spring 2019): 159–77, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723273/pdf (accessed Dec. 31, 2019).

31 For the connections between oil and agriculture in the region, see Wallace Scot McFarlane, “Oil on the Farm: The East Texas Oil Boom and the Origins of an Energy Economy,” Journal of Southern History 83:4 (Nov. 2017): 853-88; John Haynes Holmes, “Tulsa!,” Unity 87:1 (1921): 245–48. In terms of contemporary sources, oil’s connections to the massacre are clearly made in Allison Keyes, “A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eye-Witness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 27, 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/ (accessed Feb. 20, 2020).

32 Carter Blue Clark, “A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1976), 1–20; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Rules, KKK, 67th Congress, 1st session, 1921, pg. 6, cited in Clark, “A History of the Ku Klux Klan,” 59; Carney, George O, Cushing Oil Field: Historic Preservation Survey (Stillwater: Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University, 1981), 13, 40–41 Google Scholar.