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

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The cars overflowed with excited, sweating, chattering humanity, with people sitting and standing both inside and on the platforms, or clinging to the handholds on the outside corners of the cars. One fortunate Englishman, hanging on to the running gear beneath the press car, was rescued by some reporters and rode the rest of the way in style, plied with drink and made the subject of news stories on their way to papers all over the country.

At last the moment came. Along the boundary at Arkansas City, young Lieutenant Henry Waite of D Troop, 5th Cavalry, sat his horse calmly in front of the line of troopers holding back the milling mob. In his hand the officer held his watch while the eager throng of rushers watched their own timepieces, most of which had earlier been set to agree with the Lieutenant’s.

As the hands of the officer’s watch closed on noon, he signaled to his buglers, and the clear notes of, of all things, ‘mess call,’ echoed over the green prairie. The rush was on.

In a colossal cloud of red dust, the torrent of shouting riders and frightened horses, clattering buggies and bouncing, ponderous wagons, flowed over the boundary, fanning out across the new country…The rumbling of wagons and carts, and the yelling of the crowd, sounded to one rusher ‘like ten thousand head of cattle on a stampede.’

The fast horsemen were quickly far in front, bent over their mounts’ necks. In their hands they clutched claim-stakes about two feet long, their initials carved or painted on the top, ready to drive into the waiting soil of Oklahoma. Each quarter-section had been surveyed, and its corners marked with stones, but the markers were often difficult or impossible to find. There was much guesswork, and every rusher had to hope he or she had not staked one of the sections reserved for public schools.

Some rushers had been into the new country before, however illegally, and headed directly for specific parcels. Others took the first unoccupied 160 acres they came upon. For still others, where they settled depended on where their horses’ strength gave out.

Quickly the prairie became spotted with wrecked wagons and buggies, as the ravines and buffalo wallows took their toll. Horses, galloped too hard too long, fell and could not rise again. One rider went down with his horse, and became the first casualty of the race, dead of a broken neck. Another died when struck by a shot fired by another rusher to speed up his horses.

The fastest riders made the mile-and-a-half into the stage-relay station, Kingfisher, in about four minutes, dashing through the town on frantic, lathered horses. Many had already fallen trying to cross a deep ravine west of the little town. Behind them was a long line of 40 stages, crammed with people inside and on top.

The Sooners were already there before them, hiding in thickets and ravines, hurrying to claim the best parcels. Some even lathered their horses with soap, pretending they had entered legally and simply outdistanced their competition. Ugly confrontations festered between regular rushers and Sooners, between legitimate claimants and late-coming claim jumpers. One woman rusher, staking her claim near the railroad, was shot by a claim-jumping Santa Fe engineer, but managed both to survive the bullet and to hold onto her claim.

Two men on fast horses were astonished to come upon an old man already settled deep in the center of the new country. When they arrived, he had already plowed a field with his ox-team, and in his garden onions stood three or four inches high.

Why, of course there was an explanation, the old man said. He was no Sooner, not at all. It was just that his oxen were the fastest in the world, and the soil was so rich that his onions had grown that high in only 15 minutes.

Wisps of smoke began to rise into the dean blue sky as rusher camps popped up all across the prairie. On Big Turkey Creek, fertile, virgin prairie, lush with grass six to eight inches high that morning, was by evening turn into wagon-ruts a foot deep.

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

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