The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

IV
A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY

IV
A THREE-YEAR-OLD CITY

THE only interest which the East can take in Oklahoma City for some time to come must be the same as that with which one regards a portrait finished by a lightning crayon artist, “with frame complete,” in ten minutes. We may have seen better portraits and more perfect coloring, but we have never watched one completed, as it were, “while you wait.” People long ago crowded to see Master Betty act, not because there were no better actors in those days, but because he was so very young to do it so very well. It was as a freak of nature, a Josef Hoffman of the drama, that they considered him, and Oklahoma City must content itself with being only of interest as yet as a freak of our civilization.

After it has decided which of the half-dozen claimants to each of its town sites is the only one, and the others have stopped appealing to higher and higher courts, and have left the law alone and have reduced their attention strictly to business, and the city has been burned down once or twice, and had its Treasurer default and its Mayor impeached, and has been admitted to the National Baseball League, it may hope to be regarded as a full-grown rival city; but at present, as far as it concerns the far East, it is interesting chiefly as a city that grew up overnight, and did in three years or less what other towns have accomplished only after half a century.

OKLAHOMA CITY ON THE DAY OF THE OPENING

The history of its pioneers and their invasion of their undiscovered country not only shows how far the West is from the East, but how much we have changed our ways of doing things from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers to those of the modern pilgrims, the “boomers” and “sooners” of the end of the century. We have seen pictures in our school-books, and pictures which Mr. Boughton has made for us, of the Mayflower’s people kneeling on the shore, the long, anxious voyage behind them, and the “rock-bound coast” of their new home before them, with the Indians looking on doubtfully from behind the pine-trees. It makes a very interesting picture—those stern-faced pilgrims in their knickerbockers and broad white collars; each man strong in the consciousness that he has resisted persecution and overcome the perils of the sea, and is ready to meet the perils of an unknown land. I should like you to place in contrast with this the opening of Oklahoma Territory to the new white settlers three years ago. These modern pilgrims stand in rows twenty deep, separated from the promised land not by an ocean, but by a line scratched in the earth with the point of a soldier’s bayonet. The long row toeing this line are bending forward, panting with excitement, and looking with greedy eyes towards the new Canaan, the women with their dresses tucked up to their knees, the men stripped of coats and waistcoats for the coming race. And then, a trumpet call, answered by a thousand hungry yells from all along the line, and hundreds of men and women on foot and on horseback break away across the prairie, the stronger pushing down the weak, and those on horseback riding over and in some cases killing those on foot, in a mad, unseemly race for something which they are getting for nothing. These pilgrims do not drop on one knee to give thanks decorously, as did Columbus according to the twenty-dollar bills, but fall on both knees, and hammer stakes into the ground and pull them up again, and drive them down somewhere else, at a place which they hope will eventually become a corner lot facing the post-office, and drag up the next man’s stake, and threaten him with a Winchester because he is on their land, which they have owned for the last three minutes. And there are no Indians in this scene. They have been paid one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre for the land, which is worth five dollars an acre as it lies, before a spade has been driven into it or a bit of timber cut, and they are safely out of the way.

Oklahoma Territory, which lies in the most fertile part of the Indian Territory, equally distant from Kansas and Texas, was thrown open to white settlers at noon on the 22d of April, 1889. To appreciate the Oklahoma City of this day, it is necessary to go back to the Oklahoma of three years ago. The city at that time consisted of a railroad station, a section-house and water-tank, the home of the railroad agent, and four other small buildings. The rest was prairie-land, with low curving hills covered with high grass and bunches of thick timber; this as far as the eye could see, and nothing else. This land, which is rich and black and soft, and looks like chocolate where the plough has turned the sod, was thrown open by the proclamation of the President to white settlers, who could on such a day, at such an hour, “enter and occupy it” for homestead holdings. A homestead holding is one hundred and sixty acres of land. The proclamation said nothing about town sites, or of the division of town sites into “lots” for stores, or of streets and cross-streets. But several bodies of men in different parts of Kansas prepared plans long before the opening, for a town to be laid out around the station, the water-tank, and the other buildings where Oklahoma City now stands, and had their surveyors and their blue prints hidden away in readiness for the 22d of April. All of those who intended to enter this open-to-all-comers race for land knew that the prairie around the station would be laid out into lots. Hence that station and other stations which in time would become cities were the goals for which over forty thousand people raced from the borders of the new Territory. So many of these “beat the pistol” on the start and reached the goal first that, in consequence, the efforts ever since to run this race over again through the law courts has kept Oklahoma City from growing with even more marvellous rapidity than it already has done.