Due to American Indian unrest in the area, Camps Radziminski and Augur were established in 1858 and 1871, respectively. In 1867 the Medicine Lodge Treaty created a reservation for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache (KCA) in southwestern Indian Territory. By the 1880s prominent Texas ranchers, Daniel and William Thomas Waggoner and Samuel Burk Burnett, leased grazing lands from those tribes. In 1892 the Jerome Commission began enrolling the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache in preparation of opening their reservation to non-Indian settlement. On August 6, 1901, a lottery was held to open those lands, and in December 1906 the area known as the Big Pasture was opened.

MEDICINE LODGE TREATY (1867)

In October 1867 a U.S. Indian Peace Commission signed three treaties at Medicine Lodge Creek near Medicine Lodge, Kansas. One treaty was made with the Kiowa and Comanche, a second confederated the Plains Apache with the Kiowa and Comanche, and a third was negotiated with the Arapaho and Cheyenne. The United States promised the tribes peace and protection from white intruders in return for amity and relocation to reservations in western Indian Territory. The Senate ratified the treaties in July 1868.

Post Civil War America focused on westward expansion, sending migrants across the southern plains via the Santa Fe Trail. Increased contact between Americans and Plains Indians bred conflict as Americans encountered raiding, hunting, and captive-taking practices that were central to the Plains Indians' way of life. The United States intended the Medicine Lodge treaties to remove Indians from the path of American expansion, thereby avoiding costly wars.

The articles of the treaties defined reservation boundaries, the Indian agent's role, and the government's obligations to the tribes. The agent was charged to oversee reservation affairs, including construction of buildings, employee residences, and schoolhouses. He was also an agent of civilizing measures incorporated in the treaties. Annuity goods included clothes and implements for the building of an agrarian economy. A provision restricted off-reservation bison hunting to lands south of the Arkansas River. Rations, a de facto requirement for regional stability, were not mentioned. The tribes also promised to end hostility and objection to railroad construction and military posts. Article Twelve required approval of three-fourths of the adult male tribal population for future land cessions. Kiowa complaints that a 1900 allotment of reservation land without majority consent violated Article Twelve resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1901).

Both the United States and the tribes failed to honor a number of articles in the treaties. The agreements became ensnared in a revolt unleashed by the House of Representatives against the Senate over the control of treaty making with American Indian nations. This conspicuously political quarrel produced the end of treaty making in 1871. Meanwhile, appropriations for Indian annuity goods and rations were delayed and wholly inadequate, producing starvation, sickness, and material deprivation among the tribes. The tribes continued raiding and taking captives outside their reservations in violation of the treaties, in part to resist the United States, in part to alleviate their starving conditions.

LONE WOLF v. HITCHCOCK (1903)

This U.S. Supreme Court decision (187 U.S. 553, 1903) culminated a century-long push to detribalize American Indians, keeping law in the forefront of the assimilation thrust of American society. Following the American Civil War, southwestern Oklahoma became home for thirteen tribes forced onto reservations there. Reservation confinement led the attempt to force change upon the tribes.

Kiowa leader Lone Wolf sued Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock to halt the allotment of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation. The Court's opinion dispossessed the Indians of their reserve, opened their lands to non-Indian settlers, and violated and abrogated the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The decision underscored the supremacy of federal plenary power over tribes and the dependency of tribes within the American national legal and political structure. The decree placed the high court's seal of approval upon forced allotment of Indian lands, having an immediate impact as well upon northern Plains Indian land holdings.

The bitterness engendered by the pronouncement marred the reform reputation of the interior secretary and radically altered the tactics that the leading Indian reform organization, the Indian Rights Association, would use in the future. Shortly afterward, more than fifty thousand settlers flooded into the region for the "surplus" lands, inundating the one thousand Kiowa who resided there. Proponents of a harsh assimilation policy had won. In subsequent years court opinions have modified the 1903 decision, but courts have not repudiated it. The plenary power doctrine of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock is still often cited as a foundation of federal Indian policy.