"A Love for Exclusive Property"
The Creek Nation and the creation of capitalist private property
On November 8, 1899, Phillip B. Hopkins and a team of “enrolling clerks” left Okmulgee, an outpost in the territory of the Creek Nation, to tour the towns far-flung settlements that composed the Creek confederation. Their aim was to record, or enroll, the names and heritage of all 18,000 members of the Nation, scattered across 47 towns.1 Work had begun on this endeavor in April, operating from a small Land Office in Muskogee, but the recalcitrant Creek had simply failed to show up in the numbers required. Thus, Hopkins and Co. set off on an enrollment tour. The trip was arduous; met with open disdain in the towns, and with no modern office amenities like the telephone, typewriter, monotype and linotype machines, and vertical filing cabinets, the task required writing the names and racial characteristics of each legitimate citizen by hand, on paper. Travel was inhibited by flooding and communication back to Muskogee by unreliable postal service in the sparsely populated territory. Additionally, Hopkins “had to use a mule with a bad leg and a buggy that was a ‘discarded relic’”.2
When Hopkins finally arrived in Tuskogee with a broken-down wagon, he set up two tents, “one for Indians and one for African Americans”.3 Applicants for enrollment were placed by Hopkins and his clerks into one or the other, and then began the process: the Creek would present themselves in front of the field tribunal with evidence, testimony, and correspondence hoping to prove their “full blood” status. After all had been accounted for, and the Creek had been apportioned by the clerks into groups with legitimate tribal citizenship and those without, they would pack up and advance to the next town – after Tuskogee, they arrived at Moran on December 1st, and then Bristow, before being recalled to Okmulgee on December 14th, and then to the Muskogee Land Office in January the next year.4 Hopkins resigned shortly thereafter, but the Dawes Commission continued its work until 1910, when allotment was complete, and was disbanded in 1914.
The creation of the Dawes “rolls”, as the lists of citizens were called, were never intended to be a simple product of bookkeeping. The Dawes Commission had as its highest aim the ostensibly humanitarian realization of the aims of its namesake, Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes, who summarized his position nicely in an address to the third annual meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference: “There is no selfishness” among Native nations – a quality which, to him, “is at the bottom of civilization”. For a bleeding-heart reformer like Dawes, this was unconscionable; until the Nations made to divide their common-held territories and reservations, “so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress”.5 Dawes also saw, in extending landownership to those left behind, the possibility of ‘intermixing’ the Native population with white Euro-American settlers, uniting them under common bonds of private property: “When man has set himself up on his farm, he doesn't want anything to do with a reservation, so that your reservation fades out of itself and disappears like the snow in April. When you have set the Indian upon his feet, instead of telling him to ‘root hog or die’, you take him by the hand and show him how to earn his daily bread”.6
Blood and progress
Dawes’ brand of chauvinistic, genteel charity towards Indigenous Americans is and was quintessentially American in itself. Writing in 1789, Henry Knox, the Secretary of War, wrote to George Washington on the problem of co-existence:
“the civilization of the indians would be an operation of complicated difficulty. That it would require the highest knowledge of the human character, and a steady perseverance in a wise system for a series of years cannot be doubted—But to deny that under a course of favorable circumstances it could not be accomplished is to suppose the human character under the influence of such stubborn habits as to be incapable of melioration or change a supposition entirely contradicted by the progress of society from the barbarous ages to its present degree of perfection…Were it possible to introduce among the Indian tribes a love for exclusive property it would be a happy commencement of the business”.7
The raw inputs which were later transmuted into Dawes’ dreams of capitalist integration are already on full display here: the “civilizing” qualities of “Lockean individualism as common sense” are married to an idea of schematic temporal uplift qua progress.8 The fervent belief in capitalism as a civilizing force also animated Benjamin Hawkins, another member of the early American plantation royalty and commissioner, and eventual “principal Indian agent”, to the Creeks in their original lands, comprising of most of present-day Alabama, half of Georgia, and north-central Florida,9 though as early as 1772 Euro-American “settlers, traders, and speculators had used debt and violence to force the Creeks to cede 2 million acres to the state of Georgia”,10 lands which were an object of extreme speculative interest to the British.11
Hawkins’ time among the Creeks was defined largely by attempts to instill, if not a love for exclusive property, at least a recognition of it, by following his “plan for civilization”.12 Hawkins’ efforts were, in the main, to enforce the basic acknowledgement of private property by demanding its defense. To this end, he “recommended to them to make fences”,13 as well as established a “national council” which superseded the confederated rule of “Town Kings” and was backed by a police force cum terror squad which, among other things, toured Creek towns with the collected ears of horse thieves and destroyed offenders’ houses.14 His efforts were remarkably successful; though the territory had no fences at all as late as 1750, Hawkins noted with pleasure that by 1800 the practice of constructing “worm fences” to keep livestock contained had exploded, leading also to the establishment of personal property in the form of estates.15
The lords of these estates quickly found themselves “seduced” by the power conveyed by the accumulation of wealth, with many adopting Euro-American style, custom, language, and the holding of slaves; as these often found themselves trading with wider American society, they became the face of the Creek for many, conferring upon the Nation as a whole the status of a “civilized tribe”, along with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole. This “Indian Gentry” was composed of men and women who worked to make themselves indispensable to the occupying Euro-American settlers – see, for example, Coosaponakeesa or Mary Musgrove, a Creek woman who by “exploiting her prestigious Muskogee lineage, the teachings of British relatives, and proceeds of her commercial trade with Indians” facilitated “interactions between important Creek Indian communities and authorities in colonial Georgia…[and] expected and received property on a par with the richest Georgians”.16 Additionally, many white Americans (Hawkins included) married into these tribes, becoming “squaw men” and gaining access to tribal lands, building out their holdings and defending them with slave labor. This is not to say that full blood Creek were immune: Claudio Saunt cites a letter from lower town landholders and Chiefs Tustanagee Hopoy (Little Prince) and Tuskegee Tustanagee, written to Benjamin Hawkins, in which the two state that “Every man who has understanding enough to acquire property and to know his own ought to know his neighbors’ property and in a country of Laws and property should be made to respect it”.17
Traditionalist class war
Murmuring tensions surrounding the inequality between an ascendent class of estate-owners and the rest of Creek society exploded in the Redstick War. Though Hawkins and his police force had done much to revise the typical understanding of work and property in Creek society, their efforts remained incomplete. The full subsumption of the Nation’s political economy had stalled, leaving two groups: old communist-conservatives, who eschewed the accumulation of property and followed traditional directives which did not recognize inheritance, among other things; and on the other side, new capitalist-progressives.18 In the Creek context, the accumulation of wealth in land led inexorably the accumulation of wealth in other forms, constituting together a capitalist class which held the majority of its capital in land. But property as capital was the goal and the measure of wealth, as evidenced by the indiscriminate defense of property in all its forms.
The communist-conservative traditionalist faction, known as the Redsticks, ravaged the holdings of the civilized capitalist-progressive class, leaving livestock dead and fields burning. In August, fearful estate farmers which had fortified themselves in Fort Mims, north of Mobile, Alabama, were set upon by the Redsticks, who killed 250 of the defenders in what became known as the “Fort Mims Massacre”, prompting the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the landowners and their property.19 That said, there was anticipation among wealthy Euro-Americans of a “general war” which would involve the US far before the attack on Fort Mims; Joel W. Martin writes that they “did not feel they had to wait for the rebellion to spill out of Muskogee [a name for Creek territory] in order to take action”, and that “a peaceful resolution of the rebellion would leave no pretext to crush…and absorb greater portions of their land”.20
The US Army and the Creek bourgeoisie they were nominally defending repaid blood in kind, slaughtering 1,500 Redsticks in total, including 800 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.21 Brigadier General Andrew Jackson, who had lead the American forces, set about dictating terms before the war was over, demanding 22 million acres in the Treaty of Fort Jackson’s Articles of Agreement and Capitulation,22 compensation for the expenses accrued in prosecuting the war,23 comprising most of Georgia and southern Alabama. The Creek bourgeoisie were forced to comply, feeling the bite of the “spur of hunger”, as their livestock and crops were devastated. The historical importance of capitulation was well understood. Steven Weeks, biographer of Benjamin Hawkins, wrote “this treaty was the death-knell of the nation; even the friendly chiefs withered under its influence, and the passing of the people for whom he had so long and faithfully labored perhaps hastened the death of Hawkins himself”.24 The Creek Nation had ceased to be a threat to American encroachment in the Deep South, and their previously held territory dissolved into a free-for-all whereby the Creek bourgeosie, led by chiefs Big Warrior, McIntosh, and Little Prince attempted to exact money for wartime damages as the rest starved.25
In sum: a national bourgeoisie, seeking aid against a surging revolutionary element in an existential class war, found itself at the cessation of hostilities once again a captive, with their territory transferred into the hands of their savior. Jackson’s savvy, driven by both a genocidal fury and a desire for imperialist expansion, was expressed in his opportunistic seizing of the Creeks’ territory; he recognized the obvious, which was that deprived of access to the productivity of their land, either by war or by fiat, the Creek Nation would encounter great difficulties in sustaining and reproducing themselves on the most basic of levels. In so doing, he established himself as the mailed fist to Hawkins’ acculturating velvet glove, though both served the same master. If anything, Weeks’ claim that Hawkins’ death was “hastened” by the forced disintegration of the Creek is an object lesson in the paucity of the difference between him and Jackson; both sought the destruction of the Creek in toto; though the former’s preferred tactic was cultural annihilation and the latter’s bloody extirpation. In either case, the end result was similar: a large amount of property was added to the burgeoning United States, giving over to a speculative “land rush” of the sort that predominated the early U.S., functioning as an escape valve for both economic crisis and a salve for the restlessness of poor white settlers.
In Indian Territory
In 1830, now-President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act was signed into law, overriding US Supreme Court rulings on native sovereignty, effecting the nearly-immediate “deportation of 18,000 Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokees, and Creeks to Oklahoma in forced marches plagued by cholera, malaria, blizzards, starvation, violence, and more than 7,000 deaths”.26 This march has been dubiously immortalized as the “Trail of Tears” or the “Removal of the Five Tribes”27 represented as the final, charismatically brutal phase of a “series of mainly coerced and/or fraudulent treaties”28 and removals which had begun a decade prior.29 Though the Creek were not required to leave, immediately following the passage of the Act, “more than 25,000 American land-seekers converged on Creek territory in an impromptu land run that forcibly evicted the Creek”, an eviction which was swiftly followed by Jackson’s closure of the Creek Agency in the former territory.30 Following the arrival of two overland parties, the Creek quickly established residency between the Arkansas and Verdigris Rivers in Indian Territory, vying for land alongside the Caddos, Wichitas, Quapaws, and Apaches – the indigenous residents of their new lands – and others of the Five Tribes, as well as the relocated Kickapoos, Miamis, Delawares, Cheyennes, Pawnees, Kiowas, Comanches, and Osages.31 The Creeks carried with them Hawkins’ old prescribed accoutrements of private property, building fences, fields, and homes in “compact” towns. The accumulation of wealth in the southeast among the Creek bourgeoisie left them, as a class, in a prime position to engage once again in a lopsided process of acquisition, using slaves to stake out and enforce larger claims than other smallholders could reasonably obtain. Having already been exposed to the corrosive effects of private property in land, the Creek carried the necessary legal and possessive framework – backed by exploitation, slavery, and force – with them to their new domain.
The Civil War (1861-1865), the Homestead Act (1862), the Reconstruction Treaties (1866), and the Indian Appropriations Act (1871) further demonstrated the opportunistic character of Euro-American crusaders for land-capital.32 The onslaught of war, studded with legal defeats, by turns forced the nations into backing the Confederacy (given their location well within Confederate territory, to do otherwise would have been suicide); to endure another wave of white settler-speculators who threatened Native claims with their own perceived legal right to settle;33 to be labeled seditious by the victorious federal government for their fighting in the Civil War; and finally, in the 1871 Appropriations Act, to have their status as sovereign nations revoked entirely.34 In 1862, in the depths of the Civil War, Superintendent of Indian Affairs W.G. Coffin recommended that, while he understood that though “self-preservation in many instances compelled them [the Creeks and other Indian Territory nations] to make the best terms they could with the rebels” and that they were left at the mercy of the Confederacy by the withdrawal of all Union soldiers from forts in the area, any new treaties after the war must “provide that the Indians shall take their lands in severalty, and wholly abandon the policy of holding them in common”.35 Severalty – the enforced devolution of property from tribal to legally-mandated individual ownership – would cure Coffin’s charges of the “indolence and idleness” for which they were “well-known” and also provide the opportunity, “after the Indians make their selections”, of course, for the remainder of the (surplus) land to be opened up to “sale and settlement by whites”.36 Coffin, occupying the historical midpoint between Hawkins and Dawes, like them leavens his grinning desire for landed property with chauvinistic concern for the current owners of that land. This bleeding-heart conceit would define the remainder of the Indian Territory’s existence, for Creeks and all alike, holding that, in accordance with republican truths, “the pursuit and care of private possessions fostered virtues that citizens should have: industry, frugality, and foresight. People in a state of savagery – namely, Indians – lacked those virtues”.37 At the same time, the Native bourgeoise seized upon the introduction of barbed wire fencing, a technology which paired with the “booming demand for cattle range”, the invasion of Euro-American landowners, and outside money for speculation, to enrich themselves further and consolidate ever more vast estates, some encompassing tens of thousands of acres.38
Both the consolidation of internal holdings and outside pressure for Territorial lands were driven by a fanatical desire for private property, but there was no more voracious eater of land than the railroads. The federal government, as an impetus to build a valuable north-south rail line to better facilitate troop movements in the American West, had dangled exclusive through rights in the form of a land grant through Indian Territory to the first concern which built out track to the Neosho Valley at the southern Kansas border. On July 12, 1870 the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (or “Katy”) Railroad, emanating from Junction City, Kansas, reached the critical point, and was awarded the contract, though it was initially successfully contested by a combined effort from Indian Territory nations. However, foreign speculators, reacting to the government contract and accompanying land grant, and construction continued, reaching Muskogee in 1872.39 The grant contained a curiously, bloodily prophetic provision: “attached to the grant of the right of way” to build the Katy, was a “further provision that if these tribes should ever cease to exist…and it should become a part of the public domain…this road should be entitled to alternate sections ten miles wide on each side of its track the entire length of the Territory”.40 The 1871 Appropriations Act, which destroyed Native claims to sovereignty, would now see use as an impetus by which the Nations themselves could be dissolved, land and all, turned from coherent polity into a collection of disparate properties.
Allotment
In January 1881, Senator Richard Coke of Texas, chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, a general bill which called for land in the Indian Territory to be divided up and distributed to tribal members in a process of allotment by severalty. Coke’s proposal was a dead letter, but it inaugurated a decade of debate, culminating finally in Henry L. Dawes’ 1887 General Allotment Act.41 Dawes was not alone; he rode a groundswell of support in a bizarre temporary allegiance running across the entire political spectrum, taking in reactionary white settlers, protean finance capitalists, proto-Socialist Populists, eastern ‘Friends of the Indian’, Henry George and his reformist allies, and some non-landowning Natives, and many more in his crusade to eliminate all Indian reservations and for their communal lands to be dispersed into individualized Indian possession.
Their alliance, despite appearing outwardly confused and liable to factional disintegration, was actually an easy confederation of loyal proponents of capitalist property, though this singular allegiance was perhaps unconscious for some. Radical agrarian support for the Territory’s existing communal-tribal landowning, of which the only notable organization was the National Indian Defense Organization lead by Thomas Bland, was minimal, politically untouchable, and thereby doomed to fail.42 Given the unique class character of the tribal bourgeoisie – comprised of capitalists who happened to own their capital in the form of large land monopolies – the attack on tribal holdings shared much with contemporary attacks on similar monopolies outside of Indian Territory,43 wherein “unscrupulous speculators” carried out “systematic frauds…under the public land laws” by, for example, using proxy claims to assemble vast contiguous holdings, exploiting lax enforcement in the federal government’s deeding out private land claims to individuals, or directly ignoring limitations on tenancy in order to extract rents – especially onerous for a nation and a program which at that time still ran on the Jeffersonian ideal of the primacy of smallholding subsistence farming on one’s own property.44 Indian advocates and progressives, like Connecticut Senator Orville Platt, denounced the Territories as a holdout of the feudal remnant, populated by “barons”.45 In particular, Henry George’s populist condemnations of land monopoly in his widely-read Progress and Poverty, paired with his disapproval of the “savage” lives of Indians which, in his view, could be remedied only by broad participation in capitalist life46 provided a readymade case against tribal ownership among progressives47 that nicely echoed Dawes’ own, all arguing “that the destruction of this tribal preserve would be ‘uplifting’ because it would mean ‘permanent prosperity’ for the region”48 with the transformation of “Indian lands into private property and Indian people into property seekers”.49
Dawes’ 1887 Act introduced allotment to the Indian Territories and other, more far-flung nations, but it wasn’t until 1893 “when settler pressure to open up even more Indian Territory lands prompted the government to create the Dawes Commission and charge it with the task of convincing the Five Tribes to submit to the allotment process”.50 The Commission went to the Territory with the initial intent of negotiating with the Five Tribes, Dawes at their head. In 1894, the Creek National Council (the same body originally installed by Hawkins!) contended that allotment, and private ownership of land overall, “impoverished not only Indians but Americans more generally”.51 The Creek Nation, or in reality, the threatened Creek bourgeoisie (such as chiefs Isparhecher and Pleasant Porter), maintained that the inequities in the existing Creek tenure system, would be replaced by a by design inequitable system of ownership, and that allotment constituted not just an economic but a cultural threat to Creek society, based as it was on a however bastardized and shakily “propertized” form of common tenure, justifying their own massive holdings with a “spout a mythology of opportunity as robust as the one Americans invoked to justify unfettered private property rights”.52 The Creek strove to defend their holdings on two fronts: one, by claiming that the gargantuan estates was proof positive that the Creeks were in fact possessed of a love of property, expressing itself in venal landlordism, while on the other claiming that “competition” and avarice were totally absent in their territory. Suffice to say these arguments were not convincing. The Nations were, in common thought, on one hand, too enterprising and monopolistic, and on the other, shiftless and lazy. These two condemnations united to potent effect to determine the shape of Dawes Act allotment.
Even if the arguments presented by the Creek had been enough to win popular support, when it came to existential questions of Native tribes, the American government was well practiced with answering in force. In addition, “progressive” Creeks, “often of mixed heritage”, came to see the writing on the wall.53 Sure enough, in 1898, the Curtis Act, an addendum to Dawes’ original, was passed, imposing allotment unilaterally, owing much to the fact that, conveniently, the Creek Nation’s sovereignty had already been done away with in the 1871 Appropriations Act. As such, the National Council was barred completely from making any decision on newly private lands. The Creek Nation was dead.
What followed was the enrollment process to determine citizens, detailed above. All eligible, or full blood, men, women, and children were made to select their allotments in the form of 160 acre parcels, as well as define 40 acres of the 160 as a “homestead”. This homestead was subject to strict restrictions on taxation, sale, mortgaging, liens, were placed, with the remaining 140 acres defined as “surplus”. The supposed generosity in the allotment – intended, like in most other contemporary land claims, for agricultural use – was a further inducement to white settlers, who had long looked askance at “vacant” lands in the territory as proof of the size of tribal holdings and a tacit lure for their own more productive ownership.54 The surplus was given up as an inducement to sell, with the reformist-imposed detour through Native ownership intended to be a preamble to eventual white ownership. When allotment finally ended in 1910, Oklahoma had been admitted to the union, fusing Indian Territory with the neighboring Oklahoma Territory. Remaining territory combined with the “Unassigned Lands” the Creeks had been forced to cede in the Treaty of 1866 and was fully opened to white settlement and homesteading.55 Lawmakers, reformers, Populists, settlers, and corporations celebrated for the briefest of moments before rushing into the vacuum, to the point that by 1900, 200,000 whites were estimated to be living in the Territory.56 The final result of over a century of “acculturation” in the form of a reactionary Long War to admit Indigenous Americans as fully capitalist laborers and landowners, was described, ultimately, by the victors “as a measure of justice not only for poor Indians but also for Americans in need of homes”.57
The creation of capitalist property
Here we have, represented in miniature, another of countless examples of the process by which capitalist property overwhelms and annihilates historically prior examples of land tenancy. In the case of the Creek Nation, the war for landed property, to both install and to claim it, just happened to likewise be a war of extermination.
In many cases it is not, at least not on its face. The existence of capitalist landed property depends upon the basic ability of certain people to own land, which they can dispose of according only to their private will; this prerequisite was admirably introduced to the Creek Nation by Benjamin Hawkins and his terror corps. The Redstick War and Jackson’s reaction to it also sanctified an important milestone, by depriving tenants of their ability to survive, or expropriating them from their land, and throwing them into the world to either work or starve shambling through their blasted, war-riven wastelands. Further, capitalist landed property is defined by the complete dissolution of all non-economic ties to the land – all former political and social ties, such as holding in common, must be stripped from the property, allowing it to be bought and sold freely, with its title, to any who seek to buy it. This development was secured by the forced conscription of the Creek to allotment by severalty under the Dawes and Curtis Acts. The historically previous notion of tenancy, experienced by the Creek until the 1750s and 1760s, underwent a centuries-long transformation, by prodding, by violence, by legal sanction, emerging on the other side in the early 20th century profoundly transformed into any other property owned by any other individual. Finally, a price may be levied upon the land, standing in for the expectation of future rents to be gained. Though the action of assigning a price is logically incoherent – as Marx writes, “the expression is as if one were to speak of the ratio of a £5 note to the diameter of the earth” – this step, and the acceptance of that price as economically salient and motivating, indicates that the subsumption of the land and its owner fully into capitalist landownership is complete.58
Thus, the experience of the Creek after the coming of the Americans – encompassing their insidious corruption, military devastation, and finally, legal annihilation – together forms a coherent portrait of capitalist landed property, born of blood.
Chang, D. A. (2010). The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929. University of North Carolina Press, 90.
Carter, K. (1997). Snakes & Scribes: The Dawes Commission and the Enrollment of the Creeks. National Archives, 29(1). https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/spring/dawes-commission
Ellinghaus, K. (2017). Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy. University of Nebraska Press, 29.
Carter, K. (1997). Snakes & Scribes: The Dawes Commission and the Enrollment of the Creeks. National Archives, 29(1). https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/spring/dawes-commission
United States Board of Indian Commissioners. (1875). Annual report of the Board of Indian Commissioners. Washington : G.P.O. http://archive.org/details/annualreportofbo17unitrich, 90.
Ibid., 91.
Knox, H. (1789, July 7). Letter to George Washington, 7 July 1789. University of Virginia Press; Founders Online National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-03-02-0067
Harmon, A. (2003). American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age. The Journal of American History, 90(1), 118.
Hawkins, B. (1848). Creek confederacy and a sketch of the Creek country. Savannah. http://archive.org/details/creekconfederacy00hawk
Woods, C. A. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso, 146.
Earl of Dartmouth. (1772, December 12). The Earl of Dartmouth’s letter to James Habersham, stipulating plans to be carried out upon the Cherokee and Creek cession of lands, such as surveying and allocation of finance raised by sale of those lands. http://www.colonialamerica.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/CO_5_661_061
Hawkins, B. (1916). Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1806. Georgia Historical Society, 429.
Ibid., 82.
Saunt, C. (1999). A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge University Press, 198-200.
See both Harmon, A. (2003). American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age. The Journal of American History, 90(1), 111. and Saunt, C. (1999). A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge University Press, 174.
Harmon, A. (2010). Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. University of North Carolina Press, 59.
Saunt, C. (1999). A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge University Press, 164.
Nunez, T. A. (1958). Creek Nativism and the Creek War of 1813-1814. Ethnohistory, 5(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.2307/480844
Watson, R. P. (2014). America’s First Crisis: The War Of 1812. State University of New York Press, 151.
Martin, J. W. (1991). Sacred revolt: The Muskogees’ struggle for a new world. Boston : Beacon Press, 153.
Saunt, C. (2000). Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century. The William and Mary Quarterly, 57(4), 734.
Nunez, T. A. (1958). Creek Nativism and the Creek War of 1813-1814. Ethnohistory, 5(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.2307/480844
Debo, A. (1941). The Road to Disappearance. University of Oklahoma Press, 83.
Weeks, S. B. (1916). Biography of Benjamin Hawkins. In Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1806. Savannah, Ga., Georgia Historical Society, 8.
Saunt, C. (2000). Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century. The William and Mary Quarterly, 57(4), 746.
Woods, C. A. (1998). Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso, 153.
Debo, A. (1941). The Road to Disappearance. University of Oklahoma Press and Debo, A. (1968). And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Princeton University Press; Foreman, G. (1972). Indian removal: The emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. University of Oklahoma Press; McLoughlin, W. G. (1993). After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’ struggle for sovereignty, 1839-1880. University of North Carolina Press; Peterson, H. A. (2011). The Trail of Tears: An annotated bibliography of Southeastern Indian removal. Scarecrow Press; and finally, Sturgis, A. H. (2007). The Trail of Tears and Indian removal. Greenwood Press, to name a few.
Peterson, H. A. (2011). The Trail of Tears: An annotated bibliography of Southeastern Indian removal. Scarecrow Press, xxii.
Roberts, A. E. (2021). Who Belongs in Indian Territory? The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20(2), 334. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781421000177
Hurt, D. A. (2000). The shaping of a Creek (Muscogee) homeland in Indian territory, 1828–1907 [Ph.D., The University of Oklahoma], 68.
Ellinghaus, K. (2017). Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy. University of Nebraska Press, 59.
Roberts, A. E. (2021). Who Belongs in Indian Territory? The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20(2), 334. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781421000177
Gates, P. W. (1936). The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System. The American Historical Review, 41(4), 660. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/41.4.652
Gates, P. W. (1973). Landlords and tenants on the prairie frontier; studies in American land policy. Cornell University Press.
Coffin, W. G. (1862). Southern Superintendency (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs No. 24), 168. https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AX24XLS4KV225786
Ibid.
Harmon, A. (2003). American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age. The Journal of American History, 90(1), 110.
Harmon, A. (2010). Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. University of North Carolina Press, 151.
Veenendaal, Jr., A. J. (n.d.). Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway. The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=MI046
The New York Times. (1897). A CURIOUS LAND CLAIM.: Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway’s Opposition to Indian Allotment Based on a Unique Reason. 11.
Hoxie, F. E. (1984). A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. University of Nebraska Press, 98.
Johnson, B. H. (2001). Red Populism? T. A. Bland, Agrarian Radicalism, and the Debate over the Dawes Act. In C. M. Stock & R. D. Johnston (Eds.), The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State (pp. 15–37). Cornell University Press, 16.
Hoxie, F. E. (1984). A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. University of Nebraska Press, 49.
See Gates, P. W. (1973). Landlords and tenants on the prairie frontier; studies in American land policy. Cornell University Press; also Moody, W. G., & Spencer, H. (1883). Land and labor in the United States. C. Scribner’s Sons. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100869861 and Limerick, P. N. (1988). The legacy of conquest: The unbroken past of the American West. Norton; for good measure.
Hoxie, F. E. (1984). A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. University of Nebraska Press, 156.
George, H. (1926). Progress and Poverty, 500.
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Really loved this piece. My brother and I spent the holidays talking about the absence of research and analysis on the role of land severalty laws in dismantling Indigenous formations of human-land relations and their subsequent political economies. Curious if you have ever seen Rose Stremlau's or Mike Witgen's work on allotment. Both are Indigenous scholars who have written about that process and period from the perspective of the Indigenous communities facing them. They add a lot of useful analysis and history on how Indigenous land tenure systems represented long standing threats and counters to privatization and accumulation. Would be interested to see how you might handle your future pieces on the development of the financial concept of "land," not just as the conquest of the market, but also in its conflict with other concepts of "land" that represented wholly different formations of how people relate to each other and the environment.