Camp Augur in today’s Tillman County, Oklahoma was founded in 1871 to protect the tribes impacted by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The camp never became a permanent post. Its role was to ensure that the peaceful bands of the Comanches and Apaches stayed safe from hostile Texans, and that peaceful Texans were safe from hostile Comanche and Apache bands.
Much of the hostility perpetrated by Texans stemmed from land squatting – meaning, Texans entered Oklahoma Territory and tried to stake rights on lands that were designated for the Wichita, Kiowa, Comanche and Apache reservations. These actions became especially egregious in the mid 1880s, after the last of the tribe’s war bands were defeated in the Red River Wars in 1875. The “hostilities” by the bands included unauthorized hunting; it was considered illegal for Indians to hunt bison or even to own a gun.
Named after General Christopher Columbus Augur (1821-1898) while he served as the commandant of the Department of Texas during the Reconstruction Period, the camp closed by the late 1880s because by then, non-natives continued to encroach on the lands and enjoyed U.S. congressional backing. Congress authorized that over 2 million acres of reservation land be set aside for land sales (aka “land rushes”). The Kiowa tribe sued because in doing so, Congress had violated the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. In 1903, the Supreme Court sided with the non-natives in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock… writing that the U.S. Congress had the power to “abrogate provisions of any Indian treaty.”
Monumental historical impacts and far-reaching consequences can be discerned just by reading maps.
