Darlington, Indian Territory newspaper

With Oklahoma Territory being opened to settlement in Apr 1889 I am always surprised to see records predating that date. However, all of Oklahoma was Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma Territory being established. And the US government had military posts and forts scattered throughout the Territory. One Indian agency was the Cheyene/Arapahoe Agency at Darlington IT.

This Agency published a newspaper called The Cheyenne Transporter. Copies have been scanned and are available for research at the Library of Congress' site "Chronicling America".

I searched separately for 12 key words/phrases related to deaths (death, died, murdered, suicide, etc.). In issued from 1880 through 1886 I was able to find 119 recordings of deaths in the bounds of current Oklahoma. These have now been added to the Pre1920 Oklahoma Death Index. The one thing that bothers me about extracting these records is that it takes so long. To get these 119 records, I spent approximately 20 hours of research time over a 10 day period.

One must realize that I skipped over about the same number of obits/death notices for people who died outside of Oklahoma and who had never lived in Oklahoma. Many were residents of southern Kansas and western Missouri, relatives of residents of Darlington IT.

Currently, I'm working on the Tulsa Star, a Black/Colored/Negro/Afro-American newspaper. Scanned issues are available at Chronicling America from 1913-1922.

Chronicling America

The National Archives has available on-line digitized images of may newspapers from across the country. In cooperation with the Oklahoma Historical Society, several Oklahoma newspapers were included in the project. I have searched some of these papers for pre-1920 deaths. Papers searched so far are from Anadarko, Beaver and Durant. Today I added 325 deaths recorded in The Farmers' Champion of Elgin, Comanche Co. OK.

These newspaper images will be invaluable to researchers. So much history AND genealogy is recorded in their pages. Currently I am extracting deaths from the Cheyenne Transporter of Darlington IT. This paper was published at the Cheyenne/Arapahoe Agency at Darlington, north of Fort Reno in what is now Canadian County. The time period of 25 Aug 1880 to 12 Aug 1886 is covered. I have found 50 "Oklahoma" deaths in the first two years of the paper.

Of course I have to do several searches. Key words I search by include died, death, burial, cemetery, obituary, along with several others. This is a very slow process, what with multiple searches, checking for duplicates, and slow loading pages. So my progress will slow down on additions to the database.



I am currently working on these sources:

• The Cheyenne Transporter of Darlington IT 1882-1886
• Choctaw County Obituaries from the Choctaw County OK Genweb
• Cemetery Records of Okmulgee County OK ©1974 v1&2
• The Beaver Herald of Beaver OK 1895-1919
• Sexton's records of Fairlawn Cemetery in Oklahoma City OK