How a land-rush stampede created the Sooner State.

These days, we’re all pretty familiar with the layout of the continental United States. But for several decades, America had an odd blank spot in the middle of it. This gap arose not out of some grand design, but brute convenience. And its eventual filling managed to be both completely unbelievable and totally obvious at the same time.

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as European settlers pressed further inland, the U.S. government systematically pushed indigenous peoples into a parcel of land in the country’s center that shrunk with every passing decade. After the Civil War, the feds decided to permanently seize a large portion of what was collectively known as “Indian Territory” from the resident Creek and... Read More