Cherokee Outlet

The Cherokee Outlet, or Cherokee Strip, was located in the northern part of what is now the state of Oklahoma. It was a 60-mile-wide (97-kilometer) parcel of land south of the Oklahoma–Kansas border between 96 and 100°W. The Cherokee Outlet was created in 1834 from a treaty signed at Fort Gibson the previous year.

The United States forced the Cherokee Nation of Indians to cede to the United States all lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for a reservation and an "outlet" in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). At the time of its creation, the Cherokee Outlet was about 225 miles (362 km) long. The cities of Enid, Woodward, Ponca City, and Perry were later founded within the boundaries of what had been the Cherokee Outlet.000

The first section of land called the Cherokee Strip was a 2.5-mile (4.0 km)-wide piece of land running along the northern border of the Cherokee Outlet and in extreme southern Kansas. It was the result of the Osage Reservation's southern border and the language of the Fort Gibson Treaty of 1833 that involved the Cherokee Nation.

The 1833 treaty reads, in part:

[...] thence up said Grand river [the Neosho] as far as the S. line of the Osage reservation, extended if necessary; thence up and between said S. Osage line, extended W. if necessary [...]
—excerpt from Treaty of Fort Gibson, 1833

Although the Osage Reservation was close to the southern extent of the State of Kansas, formed long after the Fort Gibson treaty, it was unexpectedly a little ways north of the 37th parallel north. Maps of the era conflated the two.

When Nebraska and Kansas were surveyed around 1861 by Mark W. Delahay and others, the Osage Reservation was found to be entirely within Kansas, but the borders did not coincide with each other. The gap between the Osage lands and Kansas border could finally be determined by an accurate survey, which began for this region around 1867. It was an obscure fact that would not come into play until after the Osages left their reserve around 1871, when the lands in southern Kansas were being surveyed and patented by white settlers.

This 2 or 3 mile gap produced the Cherokee Strip— lands which were in Kansas but originally part of the Cherokee Outlet. The white citizens of Kansas wanted this strip of land, which resulted in a windfall for the Cherokees, as they were guaranteed a $1 per acre payment, as required in Article 17 of the July 19, 1866 treaty. Because of the mixup and all of the land cessions of the Osages, land patents in places like Montgomery County, Kansas ended up with several different sources: the Osage Diminished Reserve, Osage Ceded Lands, Osage Trust Lands, and Cherokee Strip Lands for property close to the Oklahoma border.

The whole of the Cherokee Outlet (60-miles wide) was later often called the Cherokee Strip.