The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

But as the sun comes up, one sees the remarkable growth of this city—remarkable not only for its extent in so short a period, but for the come-to-stay air about many of its buildings. There are stone banks and stores, and an opera-house, and rows of brick buildings with dwelling-rooms above, and in the part of the city where the people go to sleep hundreds of wooden houses, fashioned after the architecture of the sea-shore cottages of the Jersey coast; for the climate is mild the best part of the year. There are also churches of stone and brick and stained glass, and a flour-mill, and three or four newspapers, and courts of law, and boards of trade. But with all of these things, which show a steadily improving growth after the mushroom nature of its birth, Oklahoma City cannot or has not yet shaken off the attributes with which it was born, and which in a community founded by law and purchase would not exist. For speculation in land, whether in lots on the main street or in homestead holdings on the prairie, and the excitement of real-estate transfers, and the battle for rights in the courts, seem to be the prevailing and ruling passion of the place. Gambling in real estate is as much in the air as is the spirit of the Louisiana State Lottery in New Orleans. Every one in Oklahoma City seems to live, in part at least, by transferring real estate to some one else, and the lawyers and real-estate agents live by helping them to do it. It reminded me of that happy island in the Pacific seas where every one took in every one else’s washing. This may sound unfair, but it is not in the least exaggerated. The town swarms with lawyers, and is overrun with real-estate offices. The men you meet and the men you pass in the street are not discussing the weather or the crops or the news of the outside world, but you hear them say: “I’ll appeal it, by God!” “I’ll spend every cent I’ve got, sir!” “They’re a lot of ‘sooners,’ and I can prove it!” or, “Ted Hillman’s lot on Prairie Avenue, that he sold for two hundred dollars, rose to three hundred in one week, and Abner Brown says he won’t take six hundred for it now.”

This is only the natural and fitting outcome of the bungling, incomplete bill which, rushed through at the hot, hurried end of a session, authorized the opening of this territory. The President might with equal judgment have proclaimed that “The silver vaults of the United States Treasury will be opened on the 22d of April, when citizens can enter in and take away one hundred and sixty silver dollars each,” without providing laws to prevent or punish those who entered before that date, or those who snatched more than their share. One would think that some distinction might have been made, in opening this new land, between those who came with family and money and stock, meaning to settle permanently, and those who took the morning train from Kansas in order to rush in and snatch a holding, only to sell it again in three hours and to return to their homes that night; between those who brought capital, and desperadoes and “boot-leggers” who came to make capital out of others. If the land was worth giving away, it was worth giving to those who would make the best use of it, and worth surrounding with at least as much order as that which distinguishes the fight of the Harvard Seniors for the flowers on Class day. They are going to open still more territory this spring, and in all probability the same confusion will arise and continue, and it is also probable that many persons in the East may be attracted by the announcements and advertisements of the “boomers” to this new land.

The West is always full of hope to the old man as well as to the young one, and the temptation to “own your own home” and to gain land for the asking is very great. But the Eastern man should consider the question very carefully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the New York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on which some philanthropist has painted “Go East, Young Man, Go East.” One might write pages and not tell more than that sign does, when one considers where it is placed and for what purpose it is placed there.

A man in Oklahoma City when the day’s work is done has before him a prospect of broad red clayey streets, muddy after rain, bristling with dust after a drought, with the sun setting at one end of them into the prairie. He can go to his cottage, or to “The Turf,” where he can lose some money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real estate to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate there. Once or twice a week a “show” makes a one-night stand at the opera-house. The schools are not good for his children as yet, and the society that he is willing his wife should enjoy is limited. On Sunday he goes to church, and eats a large dinner in the middle of the day, and walks up to the top of the hill to look over the prairie where he and many others would like to build, but which must remain empty until the twelve different disputants for each holding have stopped appealing to higher courts. This is actually the case, and the reason the city has not spread as others around it have done. As the Romans shortened their swords to extend their boundaries, so the people of Oklahoma City might cut down some of their higher courts and increase theirs.

I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed itself on me, because I think any man who can afford a hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities.

OKLAHOMA CITY TO-DAY—MAIN BROADWAY

And the men who are at the head of affairs, who rose out of the six thousand in a week, and who have kept at the head ever since, if they had exerted the same energy, and showed the same executive ability and the same cleverness in a real city, would be real mayors, real merchants, and real “prominent citizens.” They are now as men playing with children’s toys or building houses of cards. Every now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes out of the South and West, and among these politicians and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men who only need a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what they can do. There are as many of these as there are uncouth “Sockless” Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is pathetic and exasperating to see men who would excel in a great metropolis, and who could live where they could educate their children and themselves, and be in touch with the world moving about them, even though they were not of it, wasting their energies in a desert of wooden houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, where their point of view is bounded by the railroad tank and a barb-wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for nothing else, and it is just as well they should be satisfied with the unsettled existence around them; but it would be better for these others to be small men in a big city than big men on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their art gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where the rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morning and goes to bed with them at night.

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RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS

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RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS