| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865–1907. By Murray R. Wickett. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. xx, 240 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8071-2584-9. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 0-8071-2647-0.)

When one thinks of "contested territory" in the nineteenth-century American West, images of the United States frontier military battling Mexicans, Apaches, or Comanches for the Southwest or Sioux and Cheyenne warriors for the northern Plains first come to mind. Yet this impressive new study by Murray R. Wickett suggests that Oklahoma also became an important contested space in the West and that the primary contestants there were mixed-blood, fullblood, and freedmen members of the Five Civilized Tribes, white Sooners and boomers, and African American immigrants. "The Indian Territory became a battleground in the late nineteenth century as whites, African Americans, and Native Americans sought to ensure their foothold in 'paradise.'" 1

By the late nineteenth century, the Oklahoma and Indian territories represented the only place remaining in America where Native Americans, whites, and blacks still coexisted in significant numbers. Historians of the territories have tended to concentrate on relations between whites and blacks, whites and Indians, or Indians and blacks. This is the first significant study to look comparatively at relations among the three groups in the area that became the state of Oklahoma. . . .

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