Buck—The Settlement of Oklahoma. 
361 
A DECADE OF GROWTH. 
After the opening of the Cherokee Strip in 1893, the terri¬ 
tory of Oklahoma enjoyed a decade of steady, rapid growth, 
with but one period of boom when the Wichita and the Kiowa, 
Comanche and Apache reservations were settled in 1901. Dur¬ 
ing this period the population advanced from two hundred and 
fifty thousand in 1894 to five hundred and fifty thousand in 
1902, the valuation of taxable property in the same period 
from $19,948,000 to $72,677,000, and the amount of occupied 
land from 7,870,000 acres to 17,230,000 acres. Besides the 
opening mentioned above, which will be discussed later, 
the Kickapoo Indian reservation (Tract 14, Plate XII) 
was made available to settlement in May 1895. The agreement 
with the Kickapoos had been made June 21, 1891, but was not 
ratified by Congress until March 3, 1893 (27 Stats., 557). 
After the Indian allotments had been made, the territorial 
government selected about one hundred thousand acres of this 
land as indemnity school land in lieu of that which was lost 
by being in the Osage Indian reservation, and this left only 
about fifty thousand acres open to homestead settlement, enough 
for some three hundred farms. But the school land was rap¬ 
idly leased out, and the reservation was soon all under culti¬ 
vation. 1 
The next addition to the jurisdiction of Oklahoma Terri¬ 
tory was made in March, 1896, when the Supreme Court finally 
decided the dispute over Greer county in favor of the United 
States. The Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians had also ad¬ 
vanced a claim to interest in this district, so the President, in 
order to prevent complications, issued a proclamation declaring 
the land in this region to be not yet open to settlement. 2 The 
claim of the Indians having proved to be without foundation, 
Congress passed an act on January 18, 1897 (25 Stats., 490), 
providing for the opening of the land. Preference was to be 
given to all actual settlers and occupants at the time of the pas- 
1 Sec. Int. Rept., 1895, vol. 3, p. 524. 
2 Ibid., 1896, vol. 1, p. 108. 
