Cherokee Strip Land Run
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| Date | September 16, 1893 |
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| Location | Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Also known as | Cherokee Strip Land Run or Cherokee Outlet Opening |
The Land Run of 1893, also known as the Cherokee Outlet Opening or the Cherokee Strip Land Run, marked the opening to settlement of the Cherokee Outlet in Oklahoma's fourth and largest land run. It was part of what would later become the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1907.
The Cherokee Outlet was one of three areas the Cherokee Nation had acquired after resettlement to lands in present-day eastern Oklahoma in 1835 as part of the Treaty of New Echota. Starting with the publication of a Chicago Tribune article in 1879, a growing movement of those pressing for the opening up to homesteading of the unoccupied Unassigned Lands located in Indian Territory – people known as ‘Boomers’ – began to gain widespread popular political clout. The Boomer’s views had already prevailed in convincing the government to open up public domain lands to settlement in the 1880s culminating in the Land Run of 1889.
After the issuance of Benjamin Harrison's Presidential Proclamation, which forbad all grazing leases in the Cherokee Outlet after October 2 of 1890 effectively eliminated tribal profits from cattle leases, the Cherokee came to an agreement to sell these lands to the government at a price ranging from $1.40 to $2.50 per acre the following year. Part of their agreement was that individual Cherokees were permitted to establish claims in the Outlet, an option many of them took advantage of.
At the same time, droughts, sharply declining agricultural prices, and the Panic of 1893 precipitated many to begin gathering in Kansas's boomer camps. Tension was high as the numbers of potential settlers waiting in tents or makeshift dwellings increased in the anticipation running up to the opening up of the last large remaining portion of tillable land that still remained in the public domain.
The Land Run itself began at noon on September 16, 1893, with an estimated 100,000 participants hoping to stake claim to part of the 6 million acres and 40,000 homesteads on what had formerly been Cherokee grazing land. It would be Oklahoma's fourth and largest land run.
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