My 2x great grandmother Della was born near Deadwood , SouthDakota.
The discovery of gold in the southern Black Hills in 1874 set off one of the great gold rushes in America.
By 1876, miners were dashing into the northern BlackHills.
The landing site for prospectors a gulch full of dead trees and a creek full of gold – Deadwood was born.
Practically overnight, the gold camp boomed into a town that played by its own rules that attracted outlaws, gamblers and gunslingers along with the gold seekers.
Wild Bill Hickok was one of those men who came looking for fortune.
But just a few short weeks after arriving, he was gunned down while holding a poker hand of aces and eights – forever after known as the Dead Man’s Hand.
Calamity Jane also made a name for herself in these parts and is buried next to Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery.
Other legends, like Potato Creek Johnny, Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen, created their legends and legacies in this tiny Black Hills town.
The area became no place for a family, and that is when my ancestors headed south.
Signed into law in May 1862, the Homestead Act opened up settlement in the western United States, allowing any American, including freed slaves, to put in a claim for up to 160 free acres of federal land.
On February 8, 1887, The Dawes Act was sponsored by lawyer and U.S. Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts and was passed.
Henry Dawes believed ownership of land played an important part in persuading people to accept the laws of the federal government.
Dawes therefore suggested that Native Americans should be granted land in exchange for renouncing tribal allegiances.
Before the Dawes Act, 150 million acres lands remained in Indian hands – within 20 years, two-thirds of their land was gone.
The provisions of the Dawes Act were as follows:
● 160 acres to farm
● 80 acres to raise cattle
● 40 acres for normal living purposes
Each Native American Indian chose his or her own allotment and the family chose a land allotment for each minor child , but the Five Civilized Tribes and several other were exempt from the act.
The term “Five Civilized Tribes” derives from the colonial and early federal period of the United States. It refers to five Native American nations—the Cherokee,Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole.
Native Americans not residing on their reservation, or without reservations, received an equal land allotment held by the Secretary of Interior “in trust” for 25 years.
On completion of the land patent process, the allotment holder became a United States citizen.
By the end of the Civil War, 15,000 homestead claims had been established, and more followed in the postwar years.
Eventually, 1.6 million individual claims would be approved; nearly ten percent of all government held property for a total of 420,000 square miles of territory.
Major turmoil began when the Dawes Act ignited land controversies on every Indian reservation in the West.
It became the cornerstone of federal Indian policy well to present day , including the protest in Standing Rock – which was highly reminiscent of stand offs from centuries ago .
The U.S. federal government began the policy of allotting Indian land as early as 1798.
Several treaties with tribes included provisions that stated land would be divided among their individual members.
The 1830 Indian Removal Act had given the federal government the power to force the relocation of Native Indians, living in the east of the country, to territory west of the Mississippi River, referred to as Indian Territory, which had resulted in the horrific re-location of the Five Civilized tribes along the infamous Trail of Tears.
Congress had created a massive Indian Territory, from Texas to the middle of the Missouri River and about 90,000 Native American Indians had been forcibly relocated and obliged to merge with other tribes.
After 1871, however, Congress declared that no further treaties would be made and all future dealings with Indians would be conducted through legislation.
President Grover Cleveland signed the Dawes Severalty Act into law.
The act split up reservations held communally by Native American tribes into smaller units and distributed these units to individuals within the tribe.
The law changed the legal status of NativeAmericans from tribal members to individuals subject to federal laws and dissolved many tribal affiliations.
The Dawes Severalty/General Allotment Act constituted a huge blow to tribal sovereignty.
President Cleveland’s goal was to encourage Native Americans to integrate into American agrarian culture, or so it’s widely maintained.
Cleveland, said though the people support the government; the government should not support the people,and led a socially reformist yet financially conservative government which did not believe in welfare handouts.
He signed misguided attempt to improve the Native Americans’ lives by incorporating them into American culture, rejecting earlier policies toward Native Americans forced them to live on desolate reservations where it was difficult to make a living.
However, his support of the Dawes Act actually did more damage than good.
Under the Dawes Act, the head of each Native American family received 160 acres, in to encourage Native Americans to take up farming, live in smaller family units that were considered more American.
The government held such lands in trust for 25 years, until the recipients could prove themselves self-sufficient farmers.
Before the family could sell their allotment, they were required to get a certificate of competency.
If the family did not succeed at farming, the land reverted back to the federal government for sale, usually to settlers.
The Dawes Act reduced Native American landholdings from 138 million acres in 1887 to 78 million in 1900 and continued the trend of settlement on previously Native American-held land.
Indian Territory opened for white settlement (1889 Oklahoma Land Rush).
However, the purpose of the Dawes Severalty Act was also an attempt to integrate Native American Indians into American society, by changing their nomadic lifestyle to the static, settled western lifestyle of farmers and settlers.
In addition, the law created federally funded boarding schools designed to assimilate Native American children into a European modeled society.
Family and cultural ties were practically destroyed by the now-notorious boarding schools, in which children were punished for speaking their native language or performing native rituals.
Henry Dawes was appointed to head a three-member commission (the Dawes Commission) to the Five Civilized Tribes, to negotiate agreements with the leaders of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes, which would end tribal land ownership and give each member individual possession of a portion of the tribal lands.
The Dawes Rolls documented a list individuals, who chose to enroll and were approved for membership in the Five Civilized Tribes.
My great grandmother was sent to a boarding school , as a young girl, probably about 4. The event traumatized her for life,
and was so shocking, my current relatives, retell what happened to her with tears in their eyes.
The Dawes Act was finally abolished in 1934, during President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.
The Dawes Act failed because the plots were too small for sustainable agriculture.
The Native American Indians lacked tools, money, experience or expertise in farming.
The farming lifestyle was a completely alien way of life.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs failed to manage the process fairly or efficiently.
Another reason why the Dawes Act failed was because Native Indians were suspicious and appalled by previous relocation efforts and refused to register on the Dawes Rolls for fear that they would be caught and punished.
I personally, do not believe that it was a sincere attempt of helping Native Americans, or even if that’s partially true the fact that oil was discovered in attempt to drill a salt mine in Oklahoma 1859 , at a main territory,
in the area the Dawes Act, wasn’t able to be developed because it was on tribal land.
The solution , make it public or private land and drill.
below: Landrush
There were several other reasons allotment proponents supported the policy.
First, many of them considered the Indian way of life and collective use of land to be communistic and backwards.
They also saw the individual ownership of private property as an essential part of civilization that would give Indian people a reason to stay in one place, cultivate land, disregard the cohesiveness of the tribe, and adopt the habits, practices and interests of the American settler population.
Furthermore, many thought that Indian people had too much land and they were eager to see Indian lands opened up for settlement, as well as for railroads, mining, forestry and other industries.
Coal was also a huge profit business and was just waiting to be exploited.
Overall, from the 1870s to the 1980s more than 200 million tons of coal came out of Oklahoma’s mines, combine that and the wide spaces that were needed for a developing rail road sysem across North America, it’s no surprise why the Feds wanted the Indian land.
Oklahoma was also where my great 2x grandmother was trying to set off on a life of her own, already having lost her mother. She became to a hugely unscrupulous man, drawn there by all the prospects.
God saw her through and to a prosperous life in Texas after her escape and a much revered matriarch of our family. Below I am attaching the newspaper article, that tell what she went through.
