332 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
318). 1 The last disposals were made in August 1883, when 
the Iowas and Kickapoos were located by executive order on 
Tracts 13 and 14 respectively. 2 
04 the remaining territory, the title of the United States to 
Tract 15 was disputed by Texas owing to a disagreement as to 
what constituted the Ked river of the treaties of 1819 with 
Spain and 1828 with Mexico. The portion of the Cherokee 
Outlet which was still unassigned, and consequently still under 
the jurisdiction of the Cherokee®, is represented by Tracts 17 
and 18, including about six million acres. Tract 15, including 
1,887,800.47 acres 3 in the very center of Indian Territory, 
and embracing parts of both the Creek and Seminole cessions, 
Was still unassigned. This was the region known to the In¬ 
dians and afterwards to the “boomers” and the world at large 
as Oklahoma, “the beautiful land.” 
Such was the status of the land in the western part of Indian 
Territory, later the territory of Oklahoma, in the decade from 
1879 to 1889, the period of the Oklahoma “boomers.” And 
now perhaps some statistics regarding the density and con¬ 
dition of the Indian population will be of value in understand¬ 
ing the situation. To take first the Indians settled on the 
Cherokee strip in Tracts 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 and 12, Plate XII; 
es.- 
we find in 1884 a population all told of four thousand, three 
hundred and eight Indians possessing an extremely fertile tract 
of two million, one hundred and twenty-two thousand acres, or 
nearly five hundred acres for every man, woman and child. 4 
When we consider that the white farmers, who- afterwards settled 
Oklahoma thought a farm of one hundred and sixty acres ample 
for a family, an average of about thirty-two acres per individ¬ 
ual, we can comprehend the fact that the poor down-trodden 
American Indian had become a wealthy landlord. These In¬ 
dians on the Cherokee strip were mostly semi-civilized and culti¬ 
vated the soil to some extent. The Indians on what was. some>- 
1 Sec. Ini. Rept., 1883, vol. 2, p. 42. 
2 Sen. Ex. Doc., 50, 48 Cong., 2 Sess., p. 18. 
3 Ibid., p. 19. 
4 Stec. Int. Rept, 1883, vol. 2, pp. 131-33. 
