Railroad map of Indian Territory, now eastern Oklahoma, showing the lands granted by the US government to the five "Civilized Tribes" after they were forced to leave their ancestral homes during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. It was published to accompany a report to the Department of the Interior by the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, also known as the Dawes Commission after its first chairman, Henry Dawes. Railways, both proposed and constructed are marked on the map, as are the recording offices of the Dawes Commission.



The Dawes Commission was created in 1893 to negotiate with the five "civilized tribes", the Creek, the Seminoles, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Chickasaw, all of whom had been forcibly relocated to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. The Commission's goal was to convince the members of these nations to abandon their communal tribal land rights, to divide the lands into individual parcels, and to distribute the newly-divided lots to individual members of the tribe. By this method, the US government hoped to compile citizenship rolls for each of the five nations and facilitate European-American settlement of former Native American land.



The grid which overlays this map shows how the U.S. government had begun to divide the Native American lands into square parcels after 11 years of registration work by the Dawes Commission.



The results of the Dawes Commission were devastating to many member of the Five Nations, some of whom are still fighting court battles to this day to reclaim nationhood which was unfairly stripped away from them. African Americans with some Native American ancestry were particularly affected by the Dawes Commission which used an individual's outward appearance and "blood heritage" to determine whether they could belong to a tribal nation. Former slaves belonging to Native Americans who were freed after the Civil War were legally eligible to become members of the tribes of their former owners, but many of these individuals were excluded from membership by the tribes and included on separate "Freedmen Rolls' instead, thus forfeiting any claim to tribal land.



The Five Nations also lost enormous swathes of their former land grants as the Dawes Commission was authorized to auction off any "surplus land" after all of the members of a tribe had been allocated a plot. This, of course, created a perverse incentive for the Commission to undercount or reject members of the tribes so that more land could be sold to European-American settlers. Individual members of the tribes were also allowed to sell their parcels if they wished, something which had not previously been allowed when land was held communally by the whole Tribal Nation.



Photo-lithographed by Julius Bien & Co. and printed by the Office of Government Printing on behalf of the Department of the Interior. Printed colour. (SL) [USA9083]