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Indian Territory
The land set aside for removed Native nations, 1834–1907
Former 1834–1907
Indian Territory was the destination of the forced removals of the 1830s. Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the federal government pushed the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations out of their homelands in the Southeast and onto lands west of Arkansas, in what is now eastern Oklahoma. Thousands died on the journeys remembered as the Trail of Tears. In their new lands the five nations rebuilt governments, courts and schools, with capitals such as Tahlequah and Okmulgee.
The territory shrank steadily. After the Civil War, new treaties stripped away its western half, which was opened to settlers in land runs beginning in 1889 and organized as Oklahoma Territory in 1890. Allotment broke communal lands into private plots, and when leaders of the five nations proposed their own State of Sequoyah in 1905, Congress refused. In 1907 the two territories were merged into the state of Oklahoma. More than a century later, in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), the Supreme Court held that the Muscogee reservation had never been disestablished.