Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center

At noon on September 16, 1893, about 100,000 people raced into the Cherokee Outlet for 160-acre homesteads and town lots. The Outlet was land the Cherokee Nation had been given on removal and was made to sell after the government shut down its grazing leases. The Historical Society tells it as a disaster. Everyone had to register first, at one of nine booths staffed by only 45 clerks. Lines ran a mile long, people waited days without water, and at least ten died of heat. On the line at Chilocco a soldier shot and killed John R. Hill as the crowd broke early. Sooners took many of the best claims, and more people went home empty-handed than got land.

Enid had its own fight. The government moved the townsite three miles south of the Rock Island station just weeks before the run, and the railroad would not stop at the new town. In the summer of 1894 a mob from the south town sawed through a trestle and wrecked a cattle train. Congress then ordered the trains to stop, and the feud ended in a celebration on the run's first anniversary.

The Sons and Daughters of the Cherokee Strip Pioneers started the museum in the 1960s, and the present center opened in 2011. Behind it, Humphrey Heritage Village keeps the 1893 Enid Land Office, where thousands of claims were filed, an 1896 one-room school, a 1902 church, the 1905 Glidewell house and a settler's log cabin rebuilt in 2024.