Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center
Oklahoma
The museum just off the highway tells the story of the biggest land rush in American history.
On September sixteenth, eighteen ninety-three, the federal government opened the Cherokee Outlet, a sixty-mile-wide strip along the Kansas border that had served as Cherokee grazing land. More than one hundred thousand people lined up at noon and raced for forty thousand homesteads. On horseback, by wagon, by train, and on foot, they scrambled for six million acres in a single afternoon. The chaos was extraordinary: inadequate enforcement and widespread fraud.
The Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center, operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society, opened in two thousand eleven and holds the artifacts, photographs, and oral histories from that day and from the decades of settlement that followed. Enid itself was founded on that September afternoon.
