The Invasion of Oklahoma

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Seldom has such a remarkable race been witnessed in any part of the world. The principal town sites were on the line of the Santa Fe Railroad, and those who were seeking town lots crowded the trains, which were not allowed to enter Oklahoma until noon. All available rolling stock was brought into requisition for the occasion, and provision was made for hauling thousands of home-seekers to the towns of Guthrie and Oklahoma City, as well as to intervening points. Before daylight on the morning of the opening, the approaches of the railway station at Arkansas City were blocked with masses of humanity, and every train was thronged with town boomers, or with people in search of free land or town lots.

Oklahoma City is founded, illustration in

Harper's Weekly, May, 1889.

The night brought additional terrors. There was no danger of wild animals or of snakes, for the stampede of the previous day had probably driven every living thing miles away, with the solitary exception of ants, which, in armies ten thousand strong, attacked the trespassers. By morning several houses had been erected, and the arrival of freight trains loaded with provisions not only enabled thoughtful caterers to make small fortunes, but also relieved the newcomers of much of the distress they had been suffering. Within a week the streets were well defined, and houses were being built in every direction, and within six months there were several brick buildings erected and occupied for business and banking purposes.

Guthrie Land Office, illustration in

Harper's Weekly, May, 1889.

The process of building up was one of the quickest on record, and Guthrie, like its neighbor on the south, Oklahoma City, is today a large, substantial business and financial center. Those of our readers who crossed Oklahoma by rail, even as lately as the winter of 1888, will remember that they saw nothing but open prairie, with occasional belts of timber. There was not so much as a post to mark the location of either of these two large cities, nor was there a plow line to define their limits.

In no other country in the world could results such as these have been accomplished. The amount of courage required to invest time and money in a prospective town in a country hitherto closed against white citizens is enormous, and it takes an American, born and bred, to make the venture.

The Oklahoma cities are not boom towns, laid out on paper and advertised as future railroad and business centers; from the first moment of their existence they have been practical, useful trading centers, and every particle of growth they have made has been of a permanent and lasting character.

But if the race to the Oklahoma town sites was interesting, the race to the homesteads was sensational and bewildering. All around the coveted land, anxious, determined men were waiting for the word "Go," in order to rush forward and select a future home. In some instances the race was made in the wagons, but in many cases a solitary horseman acted as pioneer and galloped ahead, in order to secure prior claim to a coveted, well-watered quarter-section. Shortly before the hour of noon, a number of boomers on the northern frontier made an effort to advance in spite of the protests of the soldiers on guard. These latter were outnumbered ten to one, and could not attempt to hold back the home-seekers by force. Seeing this fact, the young Lieutenant in charge addressed a few pointed sentences to the would-be violators of the law. He knew most of the men personally, and was aware that several of them were old soldiers. Addressing these especially, he appealed to their patriotism, and asked whether it was logical for men who had borne arms for their country to combine to break the laws, which they themselves had risked their lives to uphold. This appeal to the loyalty of the veterans had the desired effect, and what threatened to be a dangerous conflict resulted in a series of hearty hand-shakes.

A mighty shout went up at noon, and the deer, rabbits and birds, which for years had held undisputed possession of the promised land, were treated to a surprise of the first water. Horses which had never been asked to run before, were now compelled to assume a gait hitherto unknown to them. Wagons were upset, horses thrown down, and all sorts of accidents happened. One man, who had set his heart on locating on the Canadian River near the Old Payne Colony, rode his horse in that direction, and urged the beast on to further exertions, until it could scarcely keep on its feet. Finally he reached one of the creeks running into the river. The jaded animal just managed to drag its rider up the steep bank of the creek, and it then fell dead. Its rider had no time for regrets. He had still four or five miles to cover, and he commenced to run as fast as his legs would carry him. His over-estimate of his horse's powers of endurance, and his under-estimate of the distance to be covered, lost him his coveted home; for when he arrived a large colony had got in ahead of him from the western border, and there were two or three claimants to every homestead.

In other cases there were neck and neck races for favored locations, and sometimes it would have puzzled an experienced referee to have determined which was really the winner of the race. Compromises were occasionally agreed to, and although there was a good deal of bad temper and recrimination, there was very little violence, and the men whose patience had been sorely taxed, behaved themselves admirably, earning the respect of the soldiers who were on guard to preserve order. The excitement and uproar was kept up long after night-fall. In their feverish anxiety to retain possession of the homes for which they had waited and raced, hundreds of men stayed up all night to continue the work of hut building, knowing that nothing would help them so much in pressing their claims for a title as evidence of work on bona fide improvements. They kept on day after day, and, late in the season as it was, many of the newcomers raised a good crop that year.

The opening of other sections of the old Indian Territory, now included in Oklahoma, took place two or three years later, when the scenes we have briefly described were repeated. Today, Oklahoma extends right up to the southern Kansas line, and the Cherokee Strip, on whose rich blue grass hundreds of thousands of cattle have been fattened, is now a settled country, with at least four families to every square mile, and with a number of thriving towns and even large cities. At the present time the question of Statehood for the youngest of our Territories is being actively debated. No one disputes the fact that the population and wealth is large enough to justify the step, and the only question at issue is whether the whole of the Indian Territory should be included in the new State, or whether the lands of the so-called civilized tribes should be excluded.

The lawlessness which has prevailed in some portions of the Indian Territory is held to be a strong argument in favor of opening up all the lands for settlement. At present the Indians own immense tracts of land under very peculiar conditions. A large number of white men, many of them respectable citizens, and many of them outlaws and refugees from justice, have married fair Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek girls, and these men, while not recognized by the heads of the tribes, are able to draw from the Government, in the names of their wives, the large sums of money from time to time distributed. Advocates of Statehood favor the allotment to each Indian of his share of the land, and the purchase by the Government of the immense residue, which could then be opened for settlement.

Until this question is settled, the anomaly will continue of civilization and the reverse existing side by side. Some of the Indians have assumed the manners, dress, virtues and vices of their white neighbors, in which case they have generally dropped their old names and assumed something reasonable in their place. But many of the red men who adhere to tradition, and who object to innovation, still stick to the names given them in their boyhood. Thus, in traveling across the Indian Territory, Indians with such names as "Hears-Something-Everywhere," "Knows-Where-He-Walks," "Bear-in-the-Cloud," "Goose-Over-the-Hill," "Shell-on-the-Neck," "Sorrel Horse," "White Fox," "Strikes-on-the-Top-of-the-Head," and other equally far-fetched and ridiculous terms and cognomens.

Every one has heard of Chief Rain-in-the-Face, a characteristic Indian, whose virtues and vices have both been greatly exaggerated from time to time. A picture is given of this representative of a rapidly decaying race, and of the favorite pony upon which he has ridden thousands of miles, and which in its early years possessed powers of endurance far beyond what any one who has resided in countries removed from Indian settlements can have any idea or conception of.

By James Cox, 1903

Notes: The Invasion of Oklahoma, written by James Cox, was a chapter in his book My Native Land, published in 1903 and now in the public domain. Cox wrote a number of other books around this same time.

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