was on this day in 1889. Encarta, the Microsoft encyclopedia, has the background.
By the 1880s most of the arable, well-watered land west of the Mississippi had been settled by whites, and land-hungry settlers began to argue that the Indian Territory should be opened to white settlement. Treaties and federal laws protected the ownership rights of Native Americans there, but railroads, homesteader associations, and other business interests initiated a campaign to eliminate the legal obstacles to white settlement. In 1879 professional promoters, called boomers, organized so-called Oklahoma colonies, or communities of home seekers, in northern Texas and southern Kansas and illegally entered Indian Territory. Although ejected each time by U.S. Army patrols, white attempts to settle in the Indian Territory won national attention. President Rutherford B. Hayes even issued proclamations in 1879 and 1880 forbidding settlement in the territory. Violations occurred frequently, and agitation for the opening of the lands to whites increased.
In early 1889 the U.S. Congress finally yielded to the settlers’ demands and opened 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) in central Indian Territory known as the Unassigned Lands. The number of home seekers far exceeded the available land, so the government decided to have settlers line up at the border and simply run to claim land after the signal was given. Many settlers, called sooners, snuck into the Unassigned Lands ahead of time. Many were ejected; but others avoided discovery. On April 22, 1889, 50,000 home seekers gathered on the borders of the Unassigned Lands. At the signal the race for claims began with a burst of speed, and by evening nearly every homestead and town lot in the settlement zone had been taken.