From maverick lands to managed lands: Ranching and school lands in Cimarron County, Oklahoma.

Abstract

In this dissertation I trace the decisions affecting school lands since 1890, and I try to assess how these decisions impact Cimarron County ranchers. The story is ongoing, and my contribution is to provide a more complete understanding of the issues involved. My insights are informed by archival and newspaper accounts, plus interviews and questionnaires conducted in Cimarron County in the mid to late 1990s.

In Cimarron County a ranching community evolved that depends in a critical way on the continued leasing of these lands. These ranchers have bonded with their ranches over four or more generations, and understandably, when the five-member Commissioners of the Land Office (CLO), created at statehood in 1907, periodically threaten to auction off school lands, misunderstanding and conflict emerge. The threat of land sales has loomed even larger since litigation in 1982. This conflict between Cimarron County ranchers and the CLO is my focus.

Native Americans settled the eastern half of present-day Oklahoma decades before surveyors implemented the state-wide township and range surveys mainly in the 1880s. The traditional sections to be reserved for the support of schools---in Oklahoma sections thirteen, sixteen, thirty-three and thirty-six---were already in many cases occupied at the time of the surveys. Thus, officials gathered together blocks of "in lieu of" school lands in western Oklahoma and its Panhandle beginning in 1890, the year they created Oklahoma Territory. Approximately 30 percent of these "in lieu of" lands came to exist in Cimarron County, the most westerly of three counties that comprises the Panhandle.