Cherokee Outlet

Before the run the outlet was cattle country. Cattlemen, mostly Kansans, formed the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association in 1880, and after it incorporated in Kansas in 1883 the Cherokee Nation leased it the outlet for $100,000 a year, then $200,000. In 1890 Congress voided the lease and authorized buying the land at $1.25 an acre, a price the Cherokees protested as too low after they had rejected the cattlemen's offer of $3.00, and President Benjamin Harrison barred all grazing after October 2. The Cherokees' claim for the land's real value was settled only in 1964, for about $14.7 million.

What the plaque says

Cherokee Outlet The Cherokee Outlet or Strip south of here was opened to a land rush in 1893. This tract of land was 60 miles wide and stretched along the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Due to a surveying error, a two-mile strip lay north of the Kansas border. The land had been the property of the Cherokees since 1836. As a result of the Cherokee Nation's support of the Confederacy during the Civil War, the Cherokees were persuaded by Congress to eventually cede more than 8 million acres to the U.S. government for about $1 an acre, making the Cherokee Strip available to settlers. Every eligible settler who could stake a claim would receive a quarter section or a town lot. Finally on September 16, 1893, more than 100,000 people lined the border awaiting the pistol shots that began the nation's last great land rush. Competitors walked, rode bicycles and horses, and drove cabs, covered wagons, and buggies. By nightfall papers had been filed on dozens of new town sites, homesteads, and ranches. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Etzanoa — 4.2 mi
  The ancestral Wichita town on the Walnut River that Spanish soldiers called the Great Settlement in 1601, located again by archaeologists at Arkansas City and opened to visitors in 2026.

More markers nearby

• The Gas That Wouldn't Burn — 19 mi
• Chisholm Trail in Sumner County — 28 mi