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The Allotments
Under Alsuma
Sixteen quarter-sections meet at what is now East 51st Street and South Mingo Road in Tulsa. Hastain’s 1910 plats name every person who was given that ground — and record what the Dawes Commission classified them as.
Transcribed from Hastain’s Township Plats of the Creek Nation (Muskogee: Model Printing Co., 1910), pp. 184–185 and 208–209. Internet Archive scan hastainstownship00hast_0, leaves 190–191 and 214–215.
quarter-sections at the crossroads were allotted to Creek Freedmen. Only two — Katie Cowans and Henry Morrison — were allotted to Creek citizens by blood. The town platted here as Welcome in 1905 was built on Freedman land. That is not background to the settlement’s history; it is its origin.
The crossroads, quarter by quarter
Mingo Road runs down the range line between R13E and R14E. Fifty-first Street runs along the section line. Four sections touch at that corner, and each divides into four 160-acre allotments. Click any section heading to see the hand-lettered plat the transcription came from.
The dashed diagonal marks the MK&T (“Katy”) right-of-way, drawn on the plats and labelled “R.” Its line here is schematic — traced by eye from the scans, not surveyed. One reading remains unresolved: Henry Morrison’s roll number sits under an ink blot and does not appear in the footnote key. Katie Cowans’s number, crossed by the rail line on the plat, was recovered as C1320 from the footnotes on p. 310.
What the plats show
Hand-lettered, section by section. The allottee’s name runs across the quarter, the Dawes classification and roll number below it, and a circled H marks the homestead 40. Each of the four is one click away, from its own place in the diagram above.
A Freedman land base
Fourteen of sixteen quarters carry F. Under the 1902 Creek Supplemental Agreement, Freedmen received the same 160 acres as citizens by blood — unusual among the Five Tribes, and the reason a Black settlement could take root on this ground at all.
Families, not individuals
Fisher and Mackey in Section 25 and 36. Morrison in 31. McIntosh in 30 and 32. Prince in 29 and 30. Luster on both sides of Mingo — Lottie west, Willie east. These are kinship networks holding contiguous land.
The railroad is already drawn
The Katy right-of-way cuts northwest to southeast across Sections 25, 30, 31 and 32. This is the line that would later divide Alsuma into its Black and white halves. Its position relative to each allotment is recoverable directly from the plat.
One parcel breaks the pattern
The southeast quarter of Section 31 is the only one of the sixteen subdivided into narrow strip lots rather than held whole. That is the signature of a town footprint. It is the next thing to transcribe.
The footnote key
The last ten printed pages of Hastain (pp. 308–317) are not an alphabetical name index, as the volume’s structure might suggest. They are a footnote key to subdivided parcels, arranged by township and range, then by section. The heading 19-14 on p. 310 opens the block for T19N R14E; the entry 23-2 Katie Cowans C1320 means section 23, subdivision 2.
This is the volume’s cross-check. Where a roll number on a plat is obscured by ink, a rail line, or the gutter, the footnote key often carries the same allottee legibly — which is how Katie Cowans’s number was recovered. The key is also fully OCR’d in the Internet Archive text derivative, so it is searchable without touching the page images.
Caution: the OCR mangles the block headings. 19-14 is transcribed as 10-14, and F is frequently read as P. Confirm any heading against the page image before citing it.
23-2 is the entry that resolved Katie Cowans as C1320, alongside her siblings Austin (C1319) and Thompson (C1318).