The history of Oklahoma refers to the history of the state of Oklahoma and the land that the state now occupies. Areas of Oklahoma east of its panhandle were acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, while the Panhandle was not acquired until the U.S. land acquisitions following the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).
Most of Oklahoma was set aside as Indian Territory, with the general borders of the Indian Territory being formed in 1834 from the Indian Intercourse Act. It was opened for general settlement in 1889. The "Sooners" were settlers who arrived before this period of official authorization. From 1890 to 1907 Oklahoma split into two territories known as Oklahoma Territory in the west and Indian Territory in the east. Oklahoma became the 46th state to enter the union on November 16, 1907. Early on in Oklahoma's statehood, it was primarily a ranching and farming state, with oil being a major economic producer as well.
Precontact Oklahoma
People have lived in what is now Oklahoma since at least the Last Ice Age. Archaeologists refer to the earliest cultures as Paleo-Indians. The Burnham site, near Freedom in Woods County, Oklahoma is a pre-Clovis site, that is, an archaeological site dating before 11,000 years ago. The earliest known painted object in North America, the Cooper Bison Skull, which dates between 10,900 and 10,200 radiocarbon years ago, was found at a Folsom tradition site in what is now Harper County, Oklahoma.
The Caddoan Mississippi Culture
Between AD 800 and 1450, much of the midwestern and southeastern US (including the eastern part of what is now Oklahoma) was home to a group of dynamic cultural communities that are generally known as the Mississippian culture. These cultures were agrarian, their communities often built ceremonial platform and burial mounds, and trade between communities was based on river travel. There were multiple chiefdoms that never controlled large areas or lasted more than a few hundred years.
The Caddoan Mississippian culture appears to have emerged from earlier groups of Woodland period groups, the Fourche Maline and Mossy Grove culture peoples who were living in the area around 200 BC to 800 AD. By 800 AD early Caddoan society had begun to coalesce into one of the earlier Mississippian cultures. Some villages began to gain prominence as ritual centers, with elite residences and platform mound constructions. The mounds were arranged around open plazas, which were kept swept clean and used for ceremonial occasions. The Caddoan homeland was on the geographical and cultural edge of the Mississippian world and had similarities to both Mississippian culture and Plains traditions. The Caddoan communities were not as large as other eastern and southern Mississippian communities, they were not fortified, and they did not establish large, complex chiefdoms; with the possible exception of the Spiro Mounds on the Arkansas River. As complex religious and social ideas developed, some people and family lineages gained prominence over others. This hierarchical structure is marked in the archaeological record by the appearance of large tombs with exotic grave offerings of obvious symbols of authority and prestige, such as those found in the "Great Mortuary" at Spiro. The descendants of the Caddoan Mississippian culture continue to live in Oklahoma as part of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma primarily in Caddo County.
Wichita Plains culture
Archaeologists believe that ancestors of the Wichita and Affiliated tribes occupied the eastern Great Plains from the Red River north to Nebraska for at least 2,000 years.Schlesier, Karl H. Plains Indians, 500-1500 AD: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994: 347–348. These early Wichita people were hunters and gatherers who gradually adopted agriculture. Southern Plains villagers flourished throughout central and western Oklahoma from 900 to 1400.Drass, Richard R., "Southern Plains Village Complexes in Oklahoma." Oklahoma Archeological Survey. 1998–2001. Accessed March 14, 2017
About AD 900, on terraces above the Washita and South Canadian Rivers in Oklahoma, farming villages began to appear. The inhabitants of these villages grew corn, beans, squash, marsh elder, and tobacco. They hunted deer, rabbit, turkey, and increasingly bison, and caught fish and collected mussels in the rivers. These villagers lived in rectangular thatched houses. They became numerous, with villages of up to 20 houses spaced every two or so miles along the rivers.http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/D/Richard.R.Drass-1/Washita.html , accessed July 12, 2010 The Wichita of southwestern Oklahoma appears to have had regular trade contact with tribes in current Texas and New Mexico.Drass RR & TG Baugh (1997), The Wheeler Phase and cultural continuity in the Southern Plains. Plains Anthropologist 42: 183-204. The Wichita people continue to live in Oklahoma as the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes (Wichita, Keechi, Waco and Tawakoni) primarily in Caddo County.
Tonkawa
The Tonkawa people lived in the central Plains, and were recorded in 1601 living in what is now north-central Oklahoma near the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River and Medicine Lodge River. Their Tonkawa language is a linguistic isolate. The tribe was later pushed south to the Red River by 1700 and later to Texas. The Tonkawa people would later be forcibly relocated from Texas back to Oklahoma. They continue to live in Oklahoma as the Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma.
Plains Apache people
Plains Apache, a Southern Athabaskan–speaking people — today federally recognized as the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma — entered the Southern Plains between AD 1300 and 1500, before European contact. However, it appears that they co-existed with the Wichita tribe in the region for some time.
Colonial era (1541–1803) Spanish first contact
The Expedition of Spaniard Francisco Vázquez de Coronado traveled through the state in 1541, In 1601, Juan de Oñate led an expedition near the Antelope Hills in western Oklahoma. The expeditions encountered many cultures of Caddoan language-speakers, including the Caddo and Wichita. In 1629, Father Juan de Salas was likely the first Catholic missionary to record working in present-day Oklahoma. In 1650, Don Diego del Castillo led an expedition to the Wichita Mountains in search of gold and silver deposits.
18th century migration
After obtaining horses, Comanche people entered the Southern Plains by the early 18th century, coming from the Great Basin in the West.
The Kiowa, who speak a Kiowa-Tanoan language, migrated into the Southern Plains from the Rocky Mountains. Tanoan languages are those that were spoken in the Jemez, Piro, Tiwa, and Tewa pueblos of New Mexico. Linguists who study the history of languages, however, believe that Kiowa split from the Tanoan branch over 3,000 years ago and moved to the far north. The Kiowa and Plains Apache adopted many of the same lifestyle traits but remained ethnically distinct. They communicated using Plains Indian Sign Language. The Kiowa and Plains Apache lived in the plains adjacent to the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado and western Kansas and the Red River drainage of the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma.B.R. Kracht, Oklahoma Historical Society
The Osage people, who speak the Osage language, migrated to northeastern Oklahoma by 1796.
Louisiana (New France)
In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed all of the Mississippi River and its tributaries for the Kingdom of France. In 1719, Claude Charles du Tisné's expedition likely passed through parts of Oklahoma. Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe led a second 1719 expedition through eastern Oklahoma to Arkansas. The land that would become Oklahoma was under French control from 1682 to 1763 as part of the territory of Louisiana (New France). Colonization efforts primarily occurred in the northern aspects (e.g., Illinois) and the Mississippi River valley; Oklahoma would be untouched by French colonial efforts.
New Spain
At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War and its North American counterpart, the French and Indian War, France was forced to cede the eastern part of the territory in 1763 to the British as part of the Treaty of Paris. France had already ceded the entire territory to the Kingdom of Spain in 1762 in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau; the transfer to Spain was not publicly announced until 1764. Spain, which ceded Spanish Florida to the British in the Treaty of Paris in order to regain its colonies in Havana and Manila, did not contest British authority over the eastern part of French Louisiana as it desired the western portion that was adjacent to its colony of New Spain.
Return to France
Spanish colonization efforts focused on New Orleans and its surroundings, and so Oklahoma remained free from European settlement during Spanish rule. In 1800, France regained sovereignty of the western territory of Louisiana in the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso. But, strained by obligations in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to sell the territory to the United States.
American claims Louisiana Purchase and Arkansas Territory
With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States acquired France's 828,000 square mile claim to the watersheds of the Mississippi River (west of the river) and Missouri River. The purchase encompassed all or part of 15 current U.S. states (including all of Oklahoma) and parts of two Canadian provinces.
Out of the Louisiana Purchase, Louisiana Territory and Orleans Territory was organized. Orleans Territory became the state of Louisiana in 1812, and Louisiana Territory was renamed Missouri Territory to avoid confusion.
Arkansas Territory was created out of the southern part of Missouri Territory in 1819. The border was established at parallel 36°30' north with the exception of the Missouri Bootheel. Arkansas Territory thus included all of the present state of Oklahoma south of this latitude. When Missouri achieved statehood in 1821, the territorial lands not included within the state's boundaries effectively became an unorganized territory. On November 15, 1824, the westernmost portion of Arkansas Territory was removed and included with the unorganized territory to the north, and a second westernmost portion was removed on May 6, 1828, reducing Arkansas Territory to the extent of the present state of Arkansas. This new western border of Arkansas was originally intended to follow the western border of Missouri due south to the Red River. However, during negotiations with the Choctaw in 1820, Andrew Jackson unknowingly ceded more of Arkansas Territory to them than was realized. Then in 1824, after further negotiations, the Choctaw agreed to move farther west, but only by "100 paces" of the garrison on Belle Point. This resulted in the bend in the Arkansas/Oklahoma border at Fort Smith, Arkansas.
The Adams–Onís Treaty and New Spain
The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 was between the United States and Spain. Spain ceded the Florida Territory to the U.S., the U.S. gave fringe areas in the West to Spain, and the boundary was established between the U.S. and New Spain. The new boundary was to be the Sabine River north from the Gulf of Mexico to the 32nd parallel north, then due north to the Red River, west along the Red River to the 100th meridian west, due north to the Arkansas River, west to its headwaters, north to the 42nd parallel north, and finally west along that parallel to the Pacific Ocean. Informally this was called the "Step Boundary", although its step-like shape was not apparent for several decades. This is because the source of the Arkansas, which was believed to be near the 42nd parallel, is actually hundreds of miles south of that latitude, a fact that was not known until John C. Frémont discovered it in the 1840s.