Inlaws, Outlaws, And State Formation In Nineteenth-Century Oklahoma

While much of the federal Department of Justice's policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation's history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in the Indian Territories, as well as an analysis of media coverage of Oklahoma crime, this article shows that this explosion of state-building was due, in part, to the ways in which kinship rules in Oklahoma allowed racially ambiguous inhabitants to be castigated as "outlaws." This, in turn, opened up space for the federal marshal apparatus-which was primarily white-to expand its role as the purveyors of local law and order in a manner that had never been possible in the South.