Indian Territory History Month - The Road Less Traveled

 

Indian Territory History Month Bettie Ligon Equity Case 7071

 Around the year 2000 I was asked to meet with a group of people who were forming an organization to advocate for the citizenship and rights of Indian Territory Freedmen. It was a gathering of women and men with similar goals of preserving the history of the Indian Territory Freedmen and advocate for their descendants to have their citizenship re-instated based on the Treaty of Fort Smith in 1866. 

I flew in to the airport in Oklahoma City, rented a car and decided I had some time to stop by the old Oklahoma Historical Society building and look through some of their files. I can’t remember why I did it but I began looking through their newspaper card index (a time before digitization) and began looking under headings like “freedmen,” “Negro,” and “Colored” just to see if there was anything of interest.

 Once I began the search I was amazed at the numerous index cards that had the heading Freedmen, Negro and Colored that immediately I knew this might be an important resource for not only my research but other researchers who had an ancestor that lived among and enslaved by someone in the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek/Muskogee and Seminole Nations. 

I also realized I had to copy everything I could on this trip and that would mean if I didn’t get it all copied before the building closed and get to my destination in Tulsa I was going to have to make the drive all the way back and copy them before my flight back home to California. 

During the course of my copying session I did get quite a few index cards copied but I was keenly aware that I had to figure out how I was going to get back here and make a presentation before the group of people in that Tulsa church that I had no idea where it was located and this was also a time before I owned a cell phone.

 So, my plan was (made on the fly) to go to the meet and greet dinner we planned, get checked into a hotel room and at three or four in the morning get back on that turnpike and head back to Oklahoma City finish copying the indexes and break every speeding law in Oklahoma to get back to Tulsa in time to locate that church and give my talk before the gathering. 

I was so pumped with the information I gathered that I couldn’t wait to tell my partner in crime (aka research) Angela Walton-Raji and we both knew what an exciting discovery this index was and how much it could help tell the story about Indian Territory Freedmen. One of the many discoveries I made looking through the index cards was one that was personal and totally unexpected, it was a reference to a newspaper article about my great grandmother Bettie Ligon!

 

Amazingly of all the newspaper articles I’ve located this is the only one I have not been able to locate. However, one of the good things about old newspapers like now, the Associated Press was in business and that meant other newspapers in the Territory and around the country may have picked the article up and printed the story I so desperately wanted to read.

I was not to be denied and over the years I would search various sites that published newspaper articles hoping to get a copy of the Daily Oklahoman but instead I was able to locate other sources for what I believe was the essence of that article was typewritten on that index card I copied more than twenty years ago.

The title reflects a moment in what was considered one of the “most important cases in Indian Territory history.” But approximately a year following the filing of a legal brief for Equity Case 7071, Bettie Ligon vs the Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation and the United States Department of the Interior on April 13, 1907 the fight for justice for approximately two-thousand children, women and men was published in newspapers all over Oklahoma to California and Washington, D.C. 

Because of the amount of money that was being sought for the land that should have gone to the thousands of people involved with this case it is no wonder there was so much attention given it by the countries newspapers. This would have been an immense amount of wealth in the form of land that the sons, daughters, grand-daughters and grandsons of Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians and may have presented a problem for the country in the process.

 These lands were being carved up by “special interest” like Standard Oil and Railroads as well as other companies seeking to control the natural resources in the new state of Oklahoma and these people, the formerly enslaved population and their descendants were an obstacle to this “progress.”

Today’s historians want to view this fight for land as just a cause for citizenship based on the “blood” of their ancestors but that may be just a bit short sighted. The political question on “race” and the “taint of slavery” as well as the control for natural resources and who was to be paid were at the heart and center of this story and the fight that was never resolved because of the decision of one man attorney Webster Ballinger who with probably the “most important case in the United States history” decided to NOT file a legal brief to argue this case before the United States Supreme Court in 1911.