Buck—:Tlie Settlement of Oklahoma. 
335 
have had the right to make these leases, but those who had pos¬ 
session merely under executive order had no authority to do so. 
It was, however, understood that the Department of the Inte¬ 
rior would not interfere. In spite of all the landed possessions 
of these Indians in the territory and of the money flowing into 
their coffers from these cattle leases, they were still paupers of 
the government, unable to take care of themselves, and it was 
costing the United States a quarter 1 of a million dollars every 
year to support them. 1 
Another aspect of this region, surrounded as it was with 
settled states, was the fact that it furnished an unusually safe 
harbor for criminals and outlaws from all the surrounding 
region. A fugitive from justice had but to make his way into 
Indian Territory and be adopted into some of the tribes or join 
some of the cattle ranches, and he was practically safe from 
the arm of the law. 2 That Indian Territory was the home 
of the law breaker is shown by the fact that the United States 
District Court for western Arkansas, which had jurisdiction 
over Indian Territory, had five hundred and fifty-two- criminal 
prosecutions in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1885, a number 
double that of fifty-seven of the other sixty-eight districts in the 
United States. 3 Such, then, was the situation in Indian Terri¬ 
tory in the eighties, and everything was indeed ripe for the 
work of the “Oklahoma boomers 1 .” 
THE AGITATION FOR THE OPENING OF OKLAHOMA. 
There are many facts which tend to show that the plan of 
settling Oklahoma with white men was in the beginning the 
work of the railroad interests involved. 4 In July 1866, shortly 
after the Indian treaties of cession, a bill was rushed through 
Congress granting to- the Atlantic and Pacific railroad each 
alternate section for forty miles on both sides of the proposed 
1 Congressional Record, vol. 17, Appendix, p. 177. 
2 Ibid., p. 5214. 
s Ibid., Appendix, p. 178. 
4 'New York Tribune Extras, vol. 1, no. 7, p. 23; Sen. Eix. Doc., 50, 
48 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 49, 55. 
