When the Bugle Sounded: Stampede for Oklahoma’s Unassigned Lands

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And by now the tide of westward movement and settlement was too strong for anyone to buck; finally the Congress would feel it, too, and on March 2, 1889, passed the annual Indian Appropriations Bill. It contained language placing the Unassigned Lands in the public domain, the first step toward opening them for public settlement. That opening would be left to a proclamation by President-elect Benjamin Harrison, due to take office two days later.

The news raced to the Boomer camps along the Kansas border, where it was greeted with bonfires and gleeful shots. It remained only for the President to make his proclamation, and on the 23rd of March it came: some 10,000 quarter-sections of the promised land would be open to settlement at noon on April 22. With the great news came a quiet warning. Nobody who jumped the gun before the ‘hour herein before fixed, will ever be permitted to enter any of the said lands, or to acquire any rights thereto…’

The government reserved two one-acre plots to itself. The first was on the Chisholm Trail, near an old stage relay station called Kingfisher. The other was near Guthrie station on the railroad. Here there would be land offices, for the registration of claims. There also were two sections per township reserved for public schools. And now the hopeful came from every corner of America, lured by the stories that appeared in newspapers all across the country. There were Mormons from Utah, miners from

Pennsylvania, blacks from Arkansas and North Carolina, three separate groups from Chicago. All of these rubbed elbows with men and women from Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, an Italian immigrant contingent from New York, and a party of 30 men from Terre Haute, all decked out in yellow slickers and carrying white valises.

And still they came, organized groups of old soldiers, immigrants from Scotland and Sweden and other places, whole groups organized to found towns and corner the market on town lots. There were tenderfeet in new city clothing, wives in calico and bonnets, and one skinny Missourian in overalls stamped with little American flags and trousers of red, white and blue. It is not recorded that anybody laughed at his original costume, perhaps because he also wore two monstrous Colt Navies, and a knife to boot.

Many of these people were well-equipped. Others, down on their luck, brought little but hope with them. Almost everybody, however, was armed–the waiting throng bristled with sixguns, rifles, shotguns and a variety of knives. Those hardy enough to try their whole future in an unsettled and unknown land were not shrinking violets; what they took they intended to hold, law or no law.

And the newspapers loved it. Correspondents descended on the Unassigned Lands from all directions, from papers in San Francisco and New York and Chicago and dozens of towns between. They wrote hundreds of thousands of words, filling their papers with stories of the rush to come, of all the things that happened, and of some that didn’t.

They wrote reams about the wonderful country to be opened and about the people who waited to take it. There were stories serious and funny. There was even a story, probably made up by the correspondent on a slow news day, of four Indiana men who waited, camped in the Antelope Hills, ready to descend on choice claims ahead of the competition–by balloon. And the news stories further fueled the fires of excitement about the opening. More and more people turned away from their old lives and headed for the Oklahoma Country.

The rushers waited impatiently in all the little towns just outside the new lands: Darlington, Buffalo Springs, Silver City and Purcell. Purcell was jammed with hopeful people from everywhere, 2,000 to 10,000 of them.

Armed to the teeth, they thronged the tiny raw town, without sidewalks or lights or any other convenience, where the gambling halls ran far into the night, and liquor ran freely, in spite of federal law banning alcohol from these Chickasaw lands. And still more came, by wagon and train and horseback and foot, eager and hopeful and ready to compete for land they could call home.

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Tags: Adventurers & Trail Blazers, Westward Expansion, Wild West

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