The Dawes Rolls were records which were produced between 1898 and 1914 as part of efforts by the United States government to impose western-style landholding principles on the Native American people. Although these landholding reforms were being attempted in large parts of the country, the Dawes Rolls relate to the so-called ‘Five Civilized Tribes’, the Cherokee, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles. The Rolls were produced as part of the process whereby Native Americans from these groups applied for individual plots of land during the land reform process. There are slightly more than 100,000 names on the Final Rolls, with most of the records dating to between 1899 and 1906. The Dawes Rolls are an excellent genealogical source for Native Americans in the United States, though they must be used with some caution, as people who were not part of the five tribes in question tried to masquerade as being so in order to acquire grants of land.[1]
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History of the Dawes Rolls
It is hard to conceive of it from the perspective of the twenty-first-century’s homogenous landholding systems, but in centuries gone by very different approaches to owning land were followed in various parts of the world. Indeed, prior to the nineteenth century the predominant form of land tenure in many countries was communal ownership, whereby a group or community owned land collectively and individuals were allotted the use of it for specific periods of time. This had even been quite common in parts of Europe until the early modern era saw the ‘commons’ that the local peasants had farmed collectively enclosed with ditches and parceled up into units of private property.[2] Elements of it survived surprisingly late. Gavelkind, a form of communal ownership of land, was only formally abolished in Kent in south-eastern England by government statute in 1925.[3]
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It will come as little surprise then to learn that the Native American peoples of North America generally tended to practice communal ownership of land. In an age of increasing capitalism in the second of the nineteenth century, the United States government was anxious to bring to an end any such form of landholding. There was a benign element to this. Instead of simply taking their land from them, as they had done for most of the nineteenth century, by the 1880s governments in Washington D.C. were seeking to ensure that the natives were provided with land in a manner which would be compatible with American legal practices and accepted forms of land tenure. The result was the Dawes Act of 1887, named after its sponsor, Senator Henry L. Dawes, which aimed to divide up the communally-owned lands of the Native Americans and allot them to individual natives as parcels of private property, just as had occurred with the enclosing of the commons in countries like in England back in the sixteenth century.[4]
Although the Dawes Act would have implications for Native American landholding practices across a huge part of the United States, the Dawes Rolls relate to the so-called ‘Five Civilized Tribes’. These were the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles. These five Native American groups had largely lived east of the River Mississippi in what are now Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and northern Florida in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Owing to westward US expansion in the 1810s and 1820s, the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830 to forcibly remove these tribes west of the River Mississippi, leading to the Trail of Tears of the 1830s. Hence, by the time the Dawes Commission came to working with them on landholding in the 1890s these tribes were living primarily in Oklahoma and some small parts of the surrounding states.[5]
The Dawes Commission was busiest between 1899 and 1907, during which time approximately a quarter of a million land claims were presented to it. Of these, just 40%, or 101,000, were accepted, the rest being largely adjudged to be false claimants who did not belong to the five tribes and who were opportunistically trying to claim some land. The names of the approximately 101,000 successful applicants were inscribed on documents known as the ‘Final Rolls’. It is these documents which are generally being referred to when speaking of the Dawes Rolls. The finalization of the work in Oklahoma allowed that state to belatedly join the Union as the 47th state in 1907. Years of land sales which exploited Native American lack of understanding of the new tenure system and outright criminality saw a huge transfer of land again in the post-1907 period.[6]
Where to find the Dawes Rolls
The Dawes Rolls are held today by the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, the agency broadly responsible for managing historical and governmental records in the US. They have been recognized as a source of particular value from legal, genealogical and cultural perspectives, and in recent times the information in them has been digitized and made searchable. Finding aids and other resources regarding the Rolls are available online on the website of the National Archives. Printed copies of the Final Rolls are available in the National Archives Building in Washington D.C. and microfilm and digital copies are held by many other libraries in the US. The Dawes Rolls records are available through MyHeritage. Additional information concerning the five tribes involved are held in a branch of the National Archives at Fort Worth, Texas.[7]
What can be found in the Dawes Rolls
The Rolls contain a lot of demographic information which can be of use for the study of family history. For each of the 100,000+ individuals listed in them, their names, gender and census card number were provided, along with a statement about their heritage to establish to what extent they qualified as being either Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw or Seminole. What’s more, the provision of the census card number means that any individual listed in the Rolls can then be traced through the US federal census records for 1910, where additional details of the person in question can be found. Where relevant they can also be linked to a census of the Cherokee people which was undertaken in 1880. Finally, additional information was often provided to the commissioners by individual applicants and included in the Rolls. The kinds of documents involved might include birth certificates and marriage licenses.[8]
See also
Explore more about the Dawes Rolls
- Oklahoma Dawes Rolls, 1898-1914 records collection on MyHeritage
- 1890 Oklahoma Territorial Census records collection on MyHeritage
- Oklahoma, Marriages, 1870-1930 records collection on MyHeritage
- 1910 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- Oklahoma, Unemployed Relief Census, 1933 records collection on MyHeritage
- Documenting Native American Families in 19th and 20th Century Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Cherokee, Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Records and Family Stories at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes/tutorial/intro.html
- ↑ J. R. Wordie, ‘The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914’, in The Economic History Review, Vol. 36, No. 4 (November, 1983), pp. 483–505.
- ↑ https://www.nonington.org.uk/gavelkind-a-kent-custom-free-socage-tenure-of-land/
- ↑ Paul Stuart, ‘United States Indian Policy: From the Dawes Act to the American Indian Policy Review Commission’, in Social Service Review, Vol. 51, No. 3 (September, 1977), pp. 451–463.
- ↑ https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-trail-of-tears-and-the-forced-relocation-of-the-cherokee-nation-teaching-with-historic-places.htm
- ↑ Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton, 2022).
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes/tutorial/intro.html