Notorious Characters and Lawless Mobs: Postbellum Violence and the Construction of Black Criminality in Indian Territory

The American West in the 1880s is characterized as a lawless space of white gunmen and outlaws. Indian Territory does not play a role in the historical landscape or popular imagination. This paper will examine how Black criminality was constructed in postbellum Indian Territory through an examination of newspapers, government records, court documents, and oral histories. The time period was marked by increasing tensions over citizenship, land rights, and social equality between the people formerly enslaved by members of the Five Tribes and Native leaders. These struggles sometimes resulted in violent confrontations and interactions. Just like in the surrounding states, criminal acts committed by Black and Black-Native people in Indian Territory received lurid attention in newspapers. Native political leaders used illicit behavior as a justification to exclude freedpeople within their borders from exercising full citizenship and civic rights as well as to condemn African American migration from the Deep South to the region. Furthermore, Black criminality was used by Indian leaders to define who could rightfully belong in their respective nations and who could claim a Native identity. An examination of postbellum violence in Indian Territory illuminates historical understandings of Black life in the West and anti-Black ideology in Native communities.