The State That Almost Was

On August twenty-first, nineteen oh five, delegates packed the Hinton Theater in Muskogee, Indian Territory. They were there to write a constitution for a new American state. They called it Sequoyah.

By nineteen oh five, the Five Civilized Tribes understood that the era of Indian Territory as a separate jurisdiction was ending. Congress had dissolved their tribal courts. The Dawes Commission had spent years breaking up communal land into individual allotments. Statehood for some arrangement of these lands was inevitable. The question was whether the tribes would have any voice in what came next.

W. C. Rogers, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, and Green McCurtain, chief of the Choctaw Nation, called the convention. The delegates drafted a constitution, drew county boundaries, selected Fort Gibson as a temporary capital, and prepared a petition for Congress. On election day, voters in Indian Territory approved the constitution by fifty-six thousand, two hundred seventy-nine votes to nine thousand seventy-three. The margin was decisive. The demand was clear.

Congress said no. President Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican-controlled Senate wanted a single state, not two, and they certainly did not want to add what they predicted would be two Democratic senators from an Indian-majority state. On June sixteenth, nineteen oh six, Roosevelt signed the Oklahoma Enabling Act, which combined Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into a single state. Oklahoma entered the union on November sixteenth, nineteen oh seven, the forty-sixth state.

There is a coda that the history books rarely linger on. The constitution that the delegates had so carefully drafted for the State of Sequoyah did not go to waste. Its framers had done their work well, and much of the language found its way into the Oklahoma constitution that followed. The state that never existed helped write the one that did.