1840–1863
The Indian Territory
The place that Bass ran to was known as the Indian Territory. It’s called Oklahoma now. Back then it included parts of Kansas and Arkansas and an edge of northern Texas. It is filled with people now, and towns and cities and schools, and churches and hospitals and miles of highways and roads, and airports and strip malls and hot and cold running water, and forced-air heating and air-conditioning systems and electricity and streetlights—all the beauty and some of the ugliness of what we know as civilization.
But a hundred and sixty-five years ago, it was a vastly different kind of place. So pitch dark at night that people lived from sunup to sundown, staying close to a modest campfire once night fell or safely inside the dimly lit cabins they called home. The stars and the moon were the only illumination on those vast plains once the sun went down.
Even in the long, tragic story that is the history of how the United States government has mishandled its Native American population—some parts seem so horrible they are virtually unprintable—it is hard to fathom how settlers could have stooped as low as they did when the government formed the Indian Territory.
A land-hungry fledgling government attempted to wipe out a people by allowing starvation and disease and hardship to go unchecked. It is frightening to contemplate what might have happened if the American government had possessed the technology for mass extermination of a culture.
The Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Cree and Seminoles— the United States government called them the Five Civilized Tribes of Native Americans—lived in the eastern and southern parts of the country in the early 1800s. The first four tribes were scattered across the southeastern states, with the Seminoles in Florida.
They were by all modern standards truly civilized.
They had towns and settled farms with livestock, and roads between the towns, and farms and written languages and religions (many were Christian), and schools and churches and art. Their culture was in some ways equal to and in many cases better than that of white Americans.
They had spent generations settling their land and cultivating the soil, raising crops that filled complete nutritional needs (corn, beans and squash were unknown to Europeans before they came to the Americas). Since ninetyseven percent of Americans then lived on farms, and since the tribes’ farms were successful and, sometimes, large and wealthy …
America wanted them.
The U.S. military drove the people off their farms, out of their towns, away from their homes, killing those who refused to go, destroying their culture. Many of the tribes fought to keep their homes, but they could not overcome the might of the American army. The Seminoles fought the hardest, actually defeating the army in a fight called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. They are the only tribe that has to this day never surrendered to the United States government. But in the end, even the Seminoles were driven off their farms and out of Florida.
All these people—men, women and children—had no place to live and seemed condemned to simply wander until they died.
So the United States stipulated a place (the phrase “concentration camp” comes easily to mind) where all the tribes should be forced to go. A wild area was selected that was completely unsettled, one that nobody else would conceivably want, so remote that the problem of what to do with the Five Civilized Tribes would be out of sight, out of mind, and—one would suppose—out of conscience. They called it the Indian Territory.
Unfortunately, it was already occupied by a large tribe called the Osages. The American government sent a small task force to that region, and these officials got two lesser chiefs drunk on cheap whiskey and “bought” the Indian Territory from the Osages for five hundred dollars. The Osages were forced to move—with military “help”—north to a less hospitable region. Many years later, it turned out to contain one of the richest oil deposits in the world. For a brief time, the Osages had the highest per capita income in the world.
The Indian Territory of that time had no roads, no settlements, no amenities of any kind. The land suffered blazing summers with high humidity, water moccasins, rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes, black widows, tarantulas, scorpions, mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, very poor soil (compared to the farms back East), countless tornadoes, vicious winters with killing blizzards and ice storms, floods, droughts and poor hunting.
When the Japanese conquered the Philippine Islands during the Second World War, they made the American soldiers who had surrendered march from the peninsula of Bataan to prisoner of war camps. The march was a little over eighty miles long, and more than ten thousand American soldiers died. It is called the Bataan Death March and remembered with horror.
Some of the members of the Five Civilized Tribes had to walk two thousand miles, through wild country, crossing raging, flooded rivers, facing often hostile people and terrible weather. And it must be remembered that what was waiting for them was not the Promised Land—it was worse than the country they had traveled through.
The tribes measured the distance in blood, in bodies. Nobody can even guess how many died or how much they truly suffered. This enforced journey has forever been known by the tribes as the Trail of Tears. It is nothing short of a miracle that any of them made it at all.
It is truly amazing that when they got there they had enough energy and strength left to build camps, settle the country and make homes for themselves. Despite everything, they maintained their compassion and dignity and generosity.
The tribes held together, and their names still live on in the counties where each tribe once lived in Oklahoma. Other peoples were allowed into the Territory, many of them Native Americans and African Americans running from persecution. Before long, there was a large mixture of cultures and populations. Unfortunately, many people who arrived were white criminals fleeing arrest: murderers, thieves, rapists and con men. The lowest of the low in any culture.
Crime soon got out of hand and the government more or less ignored the whole territory for over half a century.
The Chickasaw tribe started a Native American police force called the White Horse Policemen and tried to instill law and order. For a short time it seemed to help. But in the end the criminal element took control of the entire Territory for almost forty years. Hardened criminals looked on the Territory as their private sanctuary and flocked to the rolling hills and broken gullies that made up most of the land.
Everybody was armed, alcohol in the form of cheap, strong whiskey was everywhere, morals were nonexistent and there was absolutely no law enforcement of any kind. Life was unbelievably cheap. A man could and would be murdered for his watch. A dog or even a child might be shot just to see if a gun was accurate. A woman might be raped because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And into this territory rode seventeen-year-old Bass Reeves.