From the passenger windows of the St. Louis, San Francisco, and Kansas railroad lines, white people watched fertile farmland, valuable timber, and prime pastures roll by. And like generations of settlers before them, they coveted it. While it was illegal to move there without a permit from the tribes, they came in droves. “We could chase out white men and they [would] be right back the next day,” a Euchee man recalled. “Sometimes there are more white people back than we had chased out.” First the intruders came by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, until finally over 300,000 white people moved onto the Five Tribes’ land—until they outnumbered tribal citizens. In 1890, Muscogee citizens were still the majority of the people on their land. Five years later, they were less than 20 percent. “Whom do you see?” one observer wrote. “White men, white men everywhere! The scarcest object is an Indian, and this is the Indian territory.”
Muscogee Nation arrested the squatters and turned them loose in Kansas or Missouri, but they just came back. The federal government, which was obligated to remove the intruders, was no help. When lighthorsemen cut down fences illegally erected by trespassing cattlemen, a federal court indicted them for “malicious mischief.” When the lighthorsemen evicted one squatter, US courts awarded the man $100 in damages. Illegal settlers grazed their cattle on Muscogee grass, chopped down Muscogee trees to sell the timber, and erected entire towns on Muscogee land.
By the late 1800s, the squatters started to complain to Congress. They had a piece of land to live on, but they didn’t own it. The vast quantities of money they had spent on their illegal fences, farms, homes, and towns would be lost if the United States didn’t give them property rights. In Congress, the intruders found a sympathetic ear. In 1893, senators reassured them, “The United States has not forgotten you.” As Congress shaped its policies to fit the squatters’ demands, one politician emerged as their most powerful ally: Senator Henry L. Dawes.