Name-a-Day Calendar, June 9: Oklahoma Sooners
Page 215 of 365
Chosen in: 1908
Chosen by: It was a cultural term from the land rush 19 years prior
At the risk of going off on a whole tangent about Native American history, here’s a very coarse summary of how this all went down.
Beginning in 1830, when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, Native Americans began to be removed from elsewhere in the country and sent to Indian Territory, which consisted of all of present-day Oklahoma except for the panhandle. Several different tribes were given their own distinct swaths of land within the territory. This included the Seminole Tribe, though the Seminoles were never completely conquered and a few thousand of them remained in Florida.
Then the Civil War happened and, largely on account of geography, almost all of these tribes supported the Confederacy. Most prominently, the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe signed a support treaty with the Confederacy, and two different companies of Confederate soldiers in Florida included Seminoles. The Confederacy, of course, lost the war, and the reunited government of the United States wasn’t particularly happy that these two tribes supported the traitors.
The U.S. forced the Muscogee and Seminole tribes into treaties that ceded some of their land in central Indian Territory to the federal government for pennies on the dollar. Some of this land was reassigned to other tribes but most of it wasn’t. The government kept almost 3000 square miles for themselves and dubbed it the Unassigned Lands.
Starting circa 1879, white men began to ask the question: if no one else can settle this land, why not us? These people were known as “boomers”, as they were calling for a land boom. After a whole bunch of folks settling the land without permission, the government kicking them out, and a bunch of backstage legal mumbo jumbo setting the stage, President Benjamin Harrison signed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889. This act opened the land to white settlement under the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed settlers to claim lots of up to 160 acres as long as they lived on the land for five years and improved it.
President Harrison signed the act on March 2 and the land was officially opened for settlement at noon on April 22. That gave would-be settlers a lot of time to prepare to claim their land. It also gave sneaky pioneers a lot of time to make their way into the Unassigned Lands and stake their claims at the most highly coveted real estate before anyone was supposed to be allowed. This was easier than you’d think given the land was on the modern-day I-35 corridor and the closest federal authorities were stationed some 170 miles away in Fort Smith, Arkansas. These gun-jumpers were commonly called “sooners”.
Almost immediately after the land rush began, a bunch of different settlements began fighting over which one would get to be the territorial capital. Norman’s settlers cleverly went for a less contested institution: the territorial university. They got it without much opposition and the Norman Territorial University was established in 1890. Also in 1890, Indian Territory was split in half and the western half combined with the panhandle (then known as No Man’s Land) to establish Oklahoma Territory. The entirety of the previously Unassigned Lands were located in the new Oklahoma Territory.
Norman Territorial began playing football in 1895, their first teams known as the Boomers in honor of those who led the movement to settle the Unassigned Lands. After 1898’s Spanish-American War, they were also (less frequently) known as the Rough Riders in honor of the legendary cavalry regiment of the same name.
On November 16, 1907, Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory were recombined and admitted to the Union as the 46th state. Norman Territorial University was subsequently renamed the University of Oklahoma. The next year, the school changed its athletic nickname from “Boomers” to “Sooners”, and the rest is history.
Today, Oklahoma is represented by two costumed horse mascots, Boomer and Sooner, who serve as “extensions” of the official mascot of the University of Oklahoma: the Sooner Schooner.
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