Oklahoma

The territory promised to displaced nations in perpetuity and then opened to settlers in a single afternoon. Indian Territory was where the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole were forced in the 1830s along the Trail of Tears, and where dozens of other nations were later confined; the Five Tribes rebuilt constitutions, courts, newspapers and schools there. Their support for the Confederacy was used to justify taking the western half after 1866, and the Dawes Act then broke communal holdings into individual allotments, with the surplus opened to whites. The land run of 22 April 1889 started fifty thousand people across the line at noon, and those who slipped in early gave the state its nickname. Statehood in 1907 merged the two territories and dissolved the tribal governments. Greenwood in Tulsa, the wealthiest Black district in the country, was destroyed by a white mob in 1921 with hundreds killed. Dust Bowl displacement in the 1930s sent hundreds of thousands west. McGirt v Oklahoma in 2020 held that most of the eastern half remains reservation land for federal purposes. Oklahoma City is the capital. The state has thirty-nine federally recognised tribes. Tulsa is the second city. The state's name comes from Choctaw words meaning red people. Its panhandle was once called No Man's Land, belonging to no territory at all. Oklahoma sits in Tornado Alley and records among the most tornadoes of any state. The 1995 Murrah Building bombing killed one hundred and sixty-eight people, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the country.

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