The Cherokee Strip Run of 1893 — the Largest Land Run in History

At noon on September 16, 1893, a line of soldiers fired their carbines and an estimated 100,000 people surged across the borders of the Cherokee Outlet — a strip of more than six million acres running west across northern Oklahoma — in the largest land run in American history. They came on horseback, in buggies and wagons, on bicycles and on foot, and they raced for some 42,000 quarter-section homesteads and town lots in a furnace of late-summer heat, choking dust, and prairie fires lit by sparks. By nightfall canvas towns of thousands stood where empty grass had been at dawn, and somewhere out on the burned-over flats lay the bodies of those who had not survived the day.

The land itself had a history the racers mostly chose not to know. The Cherokee Outlet — popularly the ‘Cherokee Strip’ — was a perpetual hunting and grazing corridor guaranteed to the Cherokee Nation by the treaties that followed their forced removal west on the Trail of Tears. For years the Cherokees had leased the grass to white cattlemen; then the federal government, through the Cherokee Commission (the so-called Jerome Commission), pressed the Nation to sell outright. After the government cut off the lucrative grazing leases and the Cherokees concluded they had little leverage left, the Nation agreed in December 1891 to cede the roughly eight-million-acre Outlet for $8,595,736.12 — well under the $3 an acre the Cherokees had sought, and a price widely regarded then and since as far below its worth. (In 1961 the Indian Claims Commission would award the Cherokee Nation a judgment for the undervaluation.) The strip was surveyed into homesteads, and the run was set for September 1893.

This run differed from the famous 1889 stampede in one cruel detail: the government, stung by the chaos and ‘Sooner’ fraud of earlier openings, required every prospective claimant to register beforehand at booths along the border and obtain a certificate. The booths could not handle the crush. Tens of thousands waited for days in stifling heat with little water and worse food, some collapsing in line; people died of heat and exhaustion before the run even began. When the guns finally fired, the registered and the unregistered alike poured in together, and the careful order the rules had promised dissolved within seconds.

The Cherokee Strip run was the high-water mark and the exhaustion of the land-run era. It opened the last great block of supposedly ‘surplus’ land in the territory, founded towns like Enid, Perry, Alva, Woodward, and Ponca City in an afternoon, and produced a wave of claims — many of which were abandoned within a few hard years. After 1893 the government largely gave up on runs as a method, switching to lotteries and sealed bids for the openings that remained. The Strip closed out an idea of free land won by speed, and left behind both new farm counties and a fresh accounting of what had been taken from the Cherokee Nation to make them.