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

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Those who had the least trouble were bands of men who rode into the new land together and vowed to support and protect each other’s claims. One tired claimant found a pretty place and began to cut his initials into a tree to claim the land. He looked up to find a big, red-whiskered man watching him, armed with a rifle and two six-guns.

‘Thinking of staying?’ said the red-bearded man.

‘Well, it’s a pretty place,’ replied the newcomer, ‘but I’m just letting my horse rest a while.’

‘That would be all right,’ said the man with the Winchester. ‘But I wouldn’t stay long if I were you. Sixteen of us in here have an oath to stick together. It’s really quite an unhealthy place. There is lots of malaria, and some people even die of lead poisoning…’ And the newcomer promptly decided there was much better land farther along.

Along Big Turkey, two men faced with waves of envious latecomers dug four-foot rifle-pits, prepared to defend their new titles with hot lead. In the end, they did not have to fight. All the same, holding the land was tense, exhausting work. After backing down still another claim-jumper, one tired settler wearily remarked: ‘Hits sure hell to get things regulated in a new country.’

It was indeed, and nobody knew it better than the hard-riding, overworked U.S. Marshals. For inevitably there was killing. In a claim dispute west of Guthrie, a legitimate rusher died with three Sooner bullets in his body. The killer got away clean, well ahead of the pursuing marshals.

But when three claim-jumpers killed a Missouri pilgrim north of Guthrie, a local posse took the law into its own hands. Cornering one of the killers on the Cimarron River, they dealt with him without the sanction of the law. When he declined their generous summons to surrender, they ‘filled him with lead.’ It was simple Western justice, carried out without ceremony, loss of time or cost to the taxpayers.

Sometimes men competing for the same claim could solve their problem without fighting. There were incidents of real generosity, in which young, vigorous men gave up a claim to families, or older people in desperate need of a home. Sometimes one claimant would buy the other out on the spot.

But even willingness to compromise sometimes did not save the peaceful settler. At Alfred, a little station north of Guthrie, a Kansas rusher named Stevens tried to persuade two other claimants to share the land until the authorities could sort out its ownership. But lead outweighed reason, and Stevens died in his wife’s arms with a bullet through his lungs.

Legendary U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas, who already had arrested two murderers, galloped after Stevens’ killers, but they had left the territory at a high lope. And even as Thomas carried on his futile chase, another man died in Oklahoma City in a claim dispute. Again, the killer escaped.

Thomas and the rest of the handful of lawmen did their best, sweeping up herds of thieves, whiskey-sellers and other parasites for the federal courts at Muskogee and Paris, Texas. Their number was legion: the Muskogee docket for June 1889 listed 186 cases.

Some of the rushers claimed their land in spectacular fashion. Nanitta Daisey, a tiny, pistol-packing Kentuckian, left Edmond Station riding on the cowcatcher of a trainload of rushers. Nanitta, sometime reporter for the Dallas Morning News, jumped from the slow-moving train some two miles north of Edmond, ran to her chosen plot, planted her stakes and fired her pistol into the air in celebration. Then she scurried back to the train to the cheering of the passengers, to be pulled aboard the last car by a fellow News reporter.

The first trains disgorged great mobs of rushers, who scattered in all directions like ants from a smashed anthill, none of them having any idea which way or how far to go. Guthrie was a seething hive of people, who found some 500 of the best lots already claimed by Sooners. Nevertheless, many did find town lots, among them a Louisiana black man in his 60s, and two Arkansas City widows seeking a new life.

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

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