KCA allotment

The government, over organized tribal opposition. The Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867) required three-quarters of adult male members to consent to any cession; the Jerome Commission came in 1892 and produced signatures, which the tribes contested hard as fraudulent, misrepresented, forged, badly interpreted, and short of the threshold, with Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief, leading the fight with Comanche support. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) didn't rule on whether the signatures were fraudulent, it said it didn't matter, that Congress holds plenary power over Indian affairs and can unilaterally abrogate treaty provisions, unreviewable by courts. Called the Indians' Dred Scott, and moot anyway: Congress passed the allotment act in 1900 and the lands were opened by lottery in August 1901, two years before the decision.

Motive: Dawes-era ideology said communal landholding kept Indians "savage" and freehold farming would civilize them, sincerely believed by reformers who thought of themselves as friends of the Indian. Underneath it, Oklahoma Territory was the last large block of arable land not yet open to settlement, cattlemen leasing grazing rights wanted the arrangement permanent and unmediated by tribal consent, and the Indian Office wanted the treaty obligations and expense terminated. The "surplus" mechanism was the point of the design: allot 160 acres per member, declare the rest excess, open it, and ~2 million acres became surplus on the KCA, for which the tribes were to receive roughly $2 million, about a dollar an acre, held in the Treasury at interest rather than paid out and far below fair value. Settlers paid essentially nothing: ~13,000 homesteads drawn by lottery from ~165,000 registrants, filed under homestead law at a $14–16 fee plus five years' residence and improvement, though later KCA tracts, including the 1906 "big pasture" lands, were auctioned and did fetch real prices. Individual allotments were 160 acres held in trust and inalienable for 25 years; the losses came after, as trust periods were shortened and "competent" allottees were issued fee patents that made the land taxable and salable, and nationally Native landholdings fell from ~138 million acres in 1887 to ~48 million by 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act finally halted allotment.