The Big Pasture was 488,000 acres (1,975 km2) of prairie land, in what is now southwestern Oklahoma. The land had been reserved for grazing use by the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes after their reserve was opened for settlement by a lottery conducted during June through August 1901. The tribes, however, leased most of the land out to large ranchers and it became known as Big Pasture. The Big Pasture was maintained for grazing until June 5, 1906, when Congress passed an act (Chapter 2580, 34 Stat. 213) requiring that it be disposed of by allotting 160 acres (0.6 km2), in severalty, to each child born into the tribes after the act of 1900. The remaining land was sold by sealed bid in December 1906 and the proceeds placed in the U.S. Treasurey for the tribes. This was the last large tract of land opened for settlement in Oklahoma Territory.
Famous quotes containing the words big and/or pasture:
“On our streets it is the sight of a totally unknown face or figure which arrests the attention, rather than, as in big cities, the strangeness of occasionally seeing someone you know.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)