Weaver also took up the issue of white settlement in Indian Territory. For several years, white settlers had been claiming homesteads in the Unassigned Lands in what is now Oklahoma. After the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes had been forced to cede their unused western lands to the federal government. The settlers, known as Boomers, believed that federal ownership made the lands open to settlement under the Homestead Acts. The federal government disagreed, as did the Cherokee Nation, which leased its neighboring Cherokee Outlet to Kansas cattle ranchers, and many Easterners, who believed the Boomers to be the tools of railroad interests. Weaver saw the issue as one between the landless poor homesteaders and wealthy cattlemen, and took the side of the former. He introduced a bill in December 1885 to organize Indian Territory and the neighboring Neutral Strip into a new Oklahoma Territory. The bill died in committee, but Weaver reintroduced it in February 1886 and gave a speech calling for the Indian reservations to be broken up into homesteads for individual Natives and the remaining land to be open to white settlement.