17 Facts About Indian Territory

The concept of an Indian Territory was an outcome of the US federal government's 18th- and 19th-century policy of Indian removal.

Term Indian Territory Reserve describes lands the British set aside for Indigenous tribes between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River in the time before the American Revolutionary War .

Indian Territory later came to refer to an unorganized territory whose general borders were initially set by the Nonintercourse Act of 1834, and was the successor to the remainder of the Missouri Territory after Missouri received statehood.

The borders of Indian Territory were reduced in size as various Organic Acts were passed by Congress to create incorporated territories of the United States.

The 1907 Oklahoma Enabling Act created the single state of Oklahoma by combining Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory, ending the existence of an unorganized unincorporated independent Indian Territory as such.

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Indian Territory reservations remain within the boundaries of US states, but largely exempt from state jurisdiction.

The term Indian Territory country is used to signify lands under the control of Native nations, including Indian Territory reservations, trust lands on Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area, or, more casually, to describe anywhere large numbers of Native Americans live.

Indian Territory, known as the Indian Territories and the Indian Country, was land within the United States of America reserved for the forced re-settlement of Native Americans.

Indian Territory was never an organized incorporated territory of the United States.

Concept of an Indian territory is the successor to the British Indian Reserve, a British American territory established by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that set aside land for use by the Native American tribes.

The Indian Territory Reserve was slowly reduced in size via treaties with the American colonists, and after the British defeat in the Revolutionary War, the Reserve was ignored by European American settlers who slowly expanded westward.

Indian Territory removal became the official policy of the United States government with the passage of the 1830 Indian Territory Removal Act, formulated by President Andrew Jackson.

Arkansas Indian Territory, which included the present State of Arkansas plus most of the state of Oklahoma, was created out of the southern part of Missouri Indian Territory in 1819.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Indian Territory had been essentially reduced to the boundaries of the present-day U S state of Oklahoma, and the primary residents of the territory were members of the Five Civilized Tribes or Plains tribes that had been relocated to the western part of the territory on land leased from the Five Civilized Tribes.

The citizens of Indian Territory tried, in 1905, to gain admission to the union as the State of Sequoyah, but were rebuffed by Congress and an Administration which did not want two new Western states, Sequoyah and Oklahoma.

Many of the tribes forcibly relocated to Indian Territory were from Southeastern United States, including the so-called Five Civilized Tribes or Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creeks, and Seminole, but the Natchez, Yuchi, Alabama, Koasati, and Caddo people.

Western Indian Territory is part of the Southern Plains and is the ancestral home of the Wichita people, a Plains tribe.