Cherokee Allotments

Newkirk owes its location not simply to the opening of the Cherokee Outlet to homesteaders, but to the twenty-one Cherokee allotments taken in Kay County before the opening. The Outlet comprised eight million acres of prairie that formed part of the agreement made when the Cherokees gave up their homelands and moved to Oklahoma, where this land was to serve as their outlet to the west. The Cherokees made several attempts to colonize the Outlet but were forcibly removed by the government. The Outlet was then leased to the Cherokee Strip Cattlemen's Association, but the government canceled the leases in order to force the Cherokees to sell. An agreement was finally reached under which the Cherokees sold the Outlet to the government. As part of the negotiations, Dennis Bushyhead, a former Cherokee Chief and one of the negotiators, was allowed to choose 160 acres in the Outlet, paying the same price per acre as any other homesteader. It was assumed he would choose the area where his family owned a rock quarry in the northeast corner of Kay County. It was also agreed that seventy other Cherokees could take eighty-acre allotments if they had lived there and made improvements before 1891. If a family was living in the Outlet, the husband, wife, and each child could each choose eighty acres, and those acreages did not have to be adjacent. Sixty-two allotments were awarded, twenty-one of them in Kay County. Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith had established county seat sites for the Outlet, but once the allotments were chosen, most of the sites were surrounded by allotments. To reduce speculation, Smith moved all sites and kept them secret until the opening. The original county seat site of Kay County was to have been near the Kildare depot. Bushyhead and three others located near Kildare, and Bushyhead and his cohort Robert L. Owen had a plat drawn of Kildare that included a courthouse square. Because of the Cherokee allotments, Newkirk is located where it is today.

Newkirk, Oklahoma · United States