Shawnee: A Land Run Town on Potawatomi Ground

Before the land run of September twenty-second, eighteen ninety-one, this stretch of central Oklahoma belonged to the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, relocated here from the Great Lakes region under an eighteen sixty-seven treaty. The tribe's presence was so defining that when voters chose a county name in eighteen ninety-two, they picked Pottawatomie in their honor. The Shawnee people, a separate nation, had also settled in the area, and their name went to the new town that rushed into existence overnight when the land run opened the surplus reservation lands to settlement.

Members of the Beard family were among the early claimants. Within years Shawnee had a railroad and grew into the largest city in the county. Oklahoma Baptist University arrived in nineteen ten, anchoring an educational legacy alongside the Citizen Potawatomi tribal headquarters that still operates here.

Shawnee is one of the clearest examples along I-Forty of a city that is, in effect, built on land its founders arrived to claim in a single chaotic afternoon.