Richard Harding Davis
Harper’s Weekly/April 23, 1892
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.
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 blueprints 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 marvelous rapidity than it already has done.
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.
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 everyone, 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 center 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 onto the prairie, and detailed a corporal’s guard to see that everyone should get as much water as he wanted.
During the morning there was an attempt made to induce the surveyors of the different land companies to combine and readjust their different plans, but without success. Finally, at three o clock, the people came together in desperation to decide what was to be done, and, after an amusing and exciting mass-meeting, fourteen unhappy and prominent citizens were selected to agree upon an entirely new site. The choosing of this luckless fourteen was accomplished by general nomination, each nominee having first to stand upon a box that he might be seen and considered by the crowd. They had to submit to such embarrassing queries as, “Where are you from, and why did you have to leave?” “Where did you get that hat?” “What is your excuse for living?” “Do you live with your folks, or does your wife support you?” “What was your other name before you came here?” The work of this committee began on the morrow, and as they slowly proceeded along the new boundary lines which they had mapped out, they were followed by all of those of the population, which now amounted to ten thousand souls, who thought it safe to leave their claims. As a rule, they found three men on each lot, and it was their pleasant duty to decide to which of these the lot belonged. They did this on the evidence of those who had lots nearby. In many cases, each member of each family had selected a lot for himself, and this complicated matters still farther. The crowd at last became so importunate and noisy that the committee asked for a military guard, which was given them, and the crowd after that was at least kept off the lot they were considering. The committee met with no real opposition until it reached Main Street on Saturday, the fifth day of the city’s life, where those who had settled along the lines laid down by the Seminole Land Company pulled up the stakes of the citizens’ committee as soon as they were driven down. For a time it looked very much as though the record of peace was about to be broken along with other things, but a committee of five men from each side of the street decided the matter at a meeting held that afternoon. At this same public meeting articles of confederation were adopted, and a temporary Mayor, Recorder, Police Judge, and other city officials were appointed, who were to receive one dollar for their services. This meeting closed with cheers and with the singing of the doxology.
The next day was Sunday, and was more or less observed. Captain Stiles visited the gamblers, who swarmed about the place in great numbers, and asked them to close their tables, which they did, although he had no power to stop them if they had not wished to do so. In the afternoon two separate religious services were held, to which the people were called by a trumpeter from the infantry camp.
This is, in brief, the history of the first week of this new city. There were, considering the circumstances, but few disturbances, and there was no drunkenness. This is disappointing, but true. Both came later. But at the first no one cared to shoot the gentleman on the other end of his lot, lest the man on the next lot might prove to be a relative of his, and begin to shoot too. Later on, when everybody became better acquainted, the shooting was more general. They could not easily get anything to drink, as Captain Stiles seized all the liquor, and when it came in vessels of unmanageable size that could not be stored away, spilled it over the prairie. In two weeks over one thousand buildings were enclosed, and there would have been more if there had been more lumber.
It would be interesting to follow the course of this sky-rocket among cities up to the present day, and tell how laws were evolved and courts established, and the complexities of the situation disentangled; but that is work for one of the many bright young men who write monographs on economic subjects at the Johns Hopkins University. It is just the sort of work in which they delight, and which they do well, and they will find many “oldest inhabitants” of this three-year-old city to take equal delight in telling them of these early days, and in explaining the rights and wrongs of their individual lawsuits against their city and their neighbors.
It is impossible, in considering the founding of Oklahoma, to overrate the services of Captain Stiles. Seldom has the case of the right man in the right place been so happily demonstrated. He was particularly fitted to the work, although I doubt if the Government knew of it before he was sent there, so apt is it to get the square peg in the round hole, unless the square peg’s uncle is a Senator. But Captain Stiles, when he was a lieutenant, had ruled at Waco, Texas, during the reconstruction period, and the questions and difficulties that arose after the war in that raw community fitted him to deal with similar ones in the construction of Oklahoma. He was and is intensely unpopular with the worst element in Oklahoma, and the better element call him blessed, and have presented him with a three-hundred-dollar gold cane, which is much too fine for him to carry except in clear weather. This is the way public sentiment should be adjusted. Personal bravery had, I think, as much to do with his success as the readiness with which he met the difficulties he had to solve at a moment’s consideration. Several times he walked up to the muzzles of revolvers with which desperadoes covered him and wrenched them out of their owners’ hands. He never interfered between the people and the civil law, and resisted the temptation of misusing his authority in a situation where a weaker man would have lost his head and abused his power. He was constantly appealed to to settle disputes, and his invariable answer was, “I am not here to decide which of you owns that lot, but to keep peace between you until it is decided.” In September of 1889 a number of disaffected citizens announced an election which was to overthrow those then in power, and Captain Stiles was instructed by his superior officers to prevent its taking place. This he did with a small force of men in the face of threats from the most dangerous element in the community of dynamite bombs and of a body of men armed with Winchesters who were to shoot him first and his men later. But in spite of this he visited and broke all the voting booths, wrested a Winchester from the hands of the man who pointed it at his heart through one of the windows of the polling-place, and finally charged the mob of five hundred men with twenty-five soldiers and his fighting surgeon, young Dr. Ives, and dispersed them utterly. I heard these stories of him on every side, and I was rejoiced to think how well off our army must be in majors, that the people at Washington can allow one who has served through the war and on the border and in this unsettled Territory, and whose hair has grown white in the service, to still wear two bars on his shoulder-strap.
It is much more pleasant to write of these early days of Oklahoma City than of the Oklahoma City of the present, although one of its citizens would not find it so, for he regards his adopted home with a fierce local pride and jealousy almost equal to a Chicagoan’s love for Chicago, which is saying a very great deal. But to the transient visitor Oklahoma City of today, after he has recovered from the shock its extent and solidity give him, is dispiriting and unprofitable to a degree. This may partly be accounted for by the circumstance that his only means of entering it from the south by train is, or was at the time I visited it, at four o’clock in the morning. No one, after having been dragged out of his berth and dropped into a cold misty well of darkness, punctured only by the light from the brakeman’s lantern and a smoking omnibus lamp, is in a mood to grow enthusiastic over the city about him. And the fact that the hotel is crowded, and that he must sleep with the barkeeper, does not tend to raise his spirits. I can heartily recommend this method of discouraging immigration to the authorities of any already overcrowded city.
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. Everyone in Oklahoma City seems to live, in part at least, by transferring real estate to someone 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 everyone took in everyone 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.
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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