Oklahoma War Chief

Payne's paper existed to agitate for opening the Unassigned Lands. He first published it at Wichita, Kansas, in 1883, and in 1884 moved the press to Rock Falls, where editors William F. Gordon and J. B. Cooper printed it for about two thousand readers in defiance of the interior secretary's posted order against printing in the Outlet. After Cherokee protests, the Army arrested the colonists and seized the press on August 7, 1884. A new press kept it going at South Haven, Kansas, until Payne died that November, and it finally suspended at Caldwell on August 12, 1886.

What the plaque says

Oklahoma War Chief First newspaper printed in the Cherokee Strip, June 14, 1884. Published at tent town of Rock Falls, 2.5 miles N.W. of here by Capt. David L. Payne, leader of Oklahoma "Boomers". Printing office was burned and "Boomers" disbanded by U.S. troops, Aug. 1884. Oklahoma Historical Society 33-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Etzanoa — 22 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.
• Marland Mansion — 24 mi
  E. W. Marland's 55-room Palace on the Prairie, built in Ponca City from 1925 to 1928 on oil first struck on a Ponca allotment, and lived in for only about three years.
• Standing Bear Park & Museum — 25 mi
  An eight-acre park and museum in Ponca City built by six area nations and the town together, under a 22-foot bronze of the Ponca chief whose 1879 case made Native people persons at law.

More markers nearby

• Caldwell and the Chisholm Trail — 13 mi
• Oklahoma, The Indian State — 18 mi
• Chilocco Indian School — 18 mi
• Cherokee Outlet — 19 mi