The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

FIVE DAYS AFTER THE OPENING

The Sunday before the 22d was a warm bright day, and promised well for the morrow. Soldiers and deputy marshals were the only living beings in sight around the station, and those who tried to descend from passing trains were pushed back again at the point of the bayonet. The course was being kept clear for the coming race. But freight cars loaded with raw lumber and furniture and all manner of household goods, as well as houses themselves, ready to be put together like the joints of a trout rod, were allowed free entry, and stood for a mile along the side-track awaiting their owners, who were hugging the border lines from fifteen to thirty miles away. Captain D. F. Stiles, of the Tenth Infantry, who had been made provost marshal of the new Territory, and whose soldiers guarded the land before and maintained peace after the invasion, raised his telescope at two minutes to twelve on the eventful 22d of April, and saw nothing from the station to the horizon but an empty green prairie of high waving grass. It would take the first horse (so he and General Merritt and his staff in their private car on the side-track decided) at least one hour and a quarter to cover the fifteen miles from the nearest border. They accordingly expected to catch the first glimpse of the leaders in the race with their glasses in about half an hour. The signal on the border was a trumpet call given by a cavalryman on a white horse, which he rode in a circle in order that those who were too far away to hear the trumpet might see that it had been sounded. A like signal was given at the station; but before it had died away, and not half an hour later, five hundred men sprang from the long grass, dropped from the branches of trees, crawled from under freight cars and out of cañons and ditches, and the blank prairie became alive with men running and racing about like a pack of beagles that have suddenly lost a hot trail.

Fifteen minutes after twelve the men of the Seminole Land and Town Company were dragging steel chains up the street on a run, the red and white barber poles and the transits were in place all over the prairie, and neat little rows of stakes stretched out in regular lines to mark where they hoped the town might be. At twenty minutes after twelve over forty tents were in position, and the land around them marked out by wooden pegs. This was the work of the “sooners,” as those men were called who came into the Territory too soon, not for their own interests, but for the interests of other people. At a quarter past one the Rev. James Murray and a Mr. Kincaid, who represented the Oklahoma Colony, stopped a sweating horse and creaking buggy and hammered in their first stakes. They had left the border line exactly at noon, and had made the fifteen miles at the rate of five minutes per mile. Four minutes later J. H. McCortney and Colonel Harrison, of Kansas, arrived from the Canadian River, having whipped their horses for fifteen miles, and the mud from the river was over the hubs of the wheels. The first train from the south reached the station at five minutes past two, and unloaded twenty-five hundred people. They scattered like a stampeded herd over the prairie, driving in their little stakes, and changing their minds about it and driving them in again at some other point. There were already, even at this early period of the city’s history, over three different men on each lot of ground, each sitting by the stake bearing his name, and each calling the other a “sooner,” and therefore one ineligible to hold land, and many other names of more ancient usage.

FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE OPENING

But there was no blood shed even during the greatest excitement of that feverish afternoon. This was in great part due to the fact that the provost marshal confiscated all the arms he saw. At three o’clock the train from the north arrived with hundreds more hanging from the steps and crowding the aisles. The sight of so many others who had beaten them in the race seemed to drive these late-comers almost frantic, and they fell over one another in their haste, and their race for the choicest lots was like a run on a bank when no one knows exactly where the bank is. One young woman was in such haste to alight that she crawled out of the car window, and as soon as she reached the solid earth beneath, drove in her stake and claimed all the land around it. This was part of the military reservation, and the soldiers explained this to her, or tried to, but she was suspicious of every one, and remained seated by her wooden peg until nightfall. She could just as profitably have driven it into the centre of Union Square. Another woman stuck up a sign bearing the words, “A Soldier’s Widow’s Land,” and was quite confident that the chivalry of the crowd would respect that title. Captain Stiles told her that he thought it would not, and showed her a lot of ground still unclaimed that she could have, but she refused to move. The lot he showed her is now on the main street, in the centre of the town, and the lot she was finally forced to take is three miles out of the city in the prairie. Another woman drove her stake between the railroad ties, and said it would take a locomotive and a train of cars to move her. One man put his stake in the very centre of the lot sites laid out by the surveyors, and claimed the one hundred and sixty acres around for his homestead holding. They explained to him that he could only have as much land as would make a lot in the town site, and that if he wanted one hundred and sixty acres, must locate it outside of the city limits. He replied that the proclamation said nothing about town sites.

“But, of course,” he went on, “if you people want to build a city around my farm, I have no objections. I don’t care for city life myself, and I am going to turn this into a vegetable garden. Maybe, though, if you want it very bad, I might sell it.”

He and the city fought it out for months, and, for all I know, are at it still. At three o’clock, just three hours after the Territory was invaded, the Oklahoma Colony declared the polls open, and voting began for Mayor and City Clerk. About four hundred people voted. Other land companies at once held public meetings and protested against this election. Each land company was mapping out and surveying the city to suit its own interests, and every man and woman was more or less of a land company to himself or herself, and the lines and boundaries and streets were intersecting and crossing like the lines of a dress pattern. Night came on and put a temporary hush to this bedlam, and six thousand people went to sleep in the open air, the greater part of them without shelter. There was but one well in the city, and word was brought to Captain Stiles about noon of the next day that the water from this was being sold by a speculative gentleman at five cents per pint, and that those who had no money were suffering. Captain Stiles found the well guarded by a faro-dealer with a revolver. He had a tin basin between his knees filled with nickels. He argued that he owned the lot on which the water stood, and had as much private right to the well as to a shaft that led down to a silver or an iron mine. Captain Stiles threw him and his basin out at some distance on to the prairie, and detailed a corporal’s guard to see that every one should get as much water as he wanted.

CAPTAIN D. F. STILES