Seth King Humphrey

“ Horsemen, buggies, buck-boards, wagons, as far either way as one can see—and prairie schooners, too, lumbering and pitching in the rear. Away over the rolling prairie they speed, disappearing finally on the distant hills like a lot of scared jackrabbits, now well strung out. Suddenly a trained race-horse goes down—he has learned his first lesson in badger holes. A bullet from his master's gun ends the animal's suffering, and with him goes his master's last chance. ”

“ Some, already drunk with the anticipated excitement, care more for the game than for the stakes to be won or lost, but to many a man in that line who has staked his last dollar on the one chance to win more than he can ever earn, those last minutes are a long, hot agony of suspense. Suddenly a revolver is accidentally discharged; a middle-aged man, in the frenzy of the moment, mistakes it for the starting gun, and with a bound his horse shoots over the line. ”

“ With a Government at its beck and call, pledged to execute the expressed will of the people, it was not in human nature for these people to wait long. New bargains were made with the Indians, and cessions of land secured—always their best land, and at one-half to one-tenth of its real value. Reservations were diminished or done away with altogether, and tribes consolidated, and once more there was public land—not land in the wilds, to be earned by the subduing of it, but good land, and well within the boundaries of civilization. ”

“ But suppose there is another flag, and another claimant? Well, each man has a little gun, and if he can convince his unwelcome neighbor by argument that he is the better shot, there need be no bloodshed.
It lacks fifteen minutes of twelve o'clock. The tension of the supreme moment brings silence to the trembling line, save only low mutterings over the final adjustment for places. Men who have never seen a hundred dollars at one time in their lives now see thousands in their grasp if only they can place themselves among the winners; and there are five men to every prize. ”

“ Some—good sports, good losers—laugh at their own folly, and thank Heaven for returning sanity. Others stare into the face of ruin—they had burned their bridges behind them, and are stranded, perhaps with families, in a strange land. ”

“ Go nearer, and a man hangs from one of the limbs. A slip of paper is pinned to the coat: "Too Soon" Nothing more; a brief but comprehensive epitaph.
A determined boomer plants his flag on a tract of fine bottom land—the prettiest quarter section in sight, he notes exultingly. A young tenderfoot from "back East" unwittingly plants his flag on the same tract. He thinks he is first, and perhaps he is. He approaches the boomer to expostulate, and the boomer draws, but the tenderfoot is not familiar with that line of argument. ”

“ Others head for the land office, farther south, to file their claims, and many flock to the towns which have sprung up over night along the railroad. A mushroom town is a jolly thing to see—and then to get away from. All through the night freight-wagons and the railroad have been bringing merchandise and material to the town-site, and the stuff is piled everywhere. Already the lucky winners of town lots have put up tents, braced against the howling wind, and a few have begun work on their cheap frame buildings. ”

“ A young fellow has run thirteen miles in the front rank of the line, and locates a beautiful tract, but he comes upon a man calmly smoking, while his horse grazes peacefully near, with not a hair turned. "Sooner!" angrily charges the young man; then he suddenly looks down the barrel of the sooner's gun. It is a wicked little black hole; the young man sees the point of the argument, and gallops on. ”

“ With the taking of the last of the really good public lands, the wave of restless humanity which constitutes the cutting edge of civilization turned back to the Indian reservations—generally large, fertile tracts, adjacent to well-developed country. ”

“ The shrewd ones have been waiting no more than a day or two; they and their horses are fresh for the rush. Twelve o'clock is the hour set for the opening, and on the last morning of the long wait a deep, suppressed excitement possesses the motley crowd, growing more intense as the forenoon wears away. ”

“ The evils and abuses attending the "rush" system reached their culmination at the opening of the Cherokee Strip, on the northern border of the Indian Territory, in September, 1893. The reader cannot better comprehend this method of dividing the spoils than by attending, in retrospect, this most grotesque event.
A hundred thousand men stand in line on land in Kansas and Oklahoma worth from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars an acre, gazing upon land to be offered at the crack of a gun for one dollar and a half and two dollars and a half an acre. ”

“ The military parades across the tract to keep it clear of "sooners"—an expressive term applied to boomers who enter the promised land sooner than they ought; on the day of the opening, soldiers with loaded rifles are posted in front of the hungry horde, with orders to shoot if the line is overstepped—and they have shot, too, with telling effect; adventurers take the place of bonâ fide settlers, and alluring Chance supercedes reasonable expectation of reward for labor. ”

“ A tented restaurant springs from the ground; only black coffee and biscuit, but the coffee is hot—what a relief from cold grub and warm water! Business is rushing, and long arms are reaching over the crowd in front. ”

“ A bedraggled, unwashed, sand-biting human creature like the rest of us, but a female withal; she may be the forlorn wife of some boomer, or she may be the remnant of a trim maiden schoolma'am from "back East." ”

“ His friends gaze down the line of thousands and turn apprehensively away; they have seen the same dangerous light in too many eyes that morning.
Each man has a little flag to thrust into the ground as soon as he thinks he has reached a square half-mile of land without a claimant. ”

“ They begin to form for the great race. The cowboys in front with their hardy prairie horses, ready to swear to each other's "time" before the land office officials—for after the race each must prove the time of his arrival if several enter claims for the same tract. ”

“ But there is chivalry for you, put to the severest test and not found wanting. Plenty of men in that crowd who will fight, and shoot if necessary, for a prize in Uncle Sam's great lottery, but a respectable woman is safer there than on many a city street. ”

“ But word comes along the line that the fire has caught a schooner in the tall grass of a ravine,—and there is one less family to people the new country.
The boomers are continually dropping off to plant their little flags—some one will get this land, and why not they? Here a man finds himself in a wide stretch with no one near ”

“ He borrows a cow for her "keep" and increase, then rents a farm "on shares"; the owner furnishes the seed, and rewards himself liberally in the lease for doing so. The winter passes somehow, with odd jobs ”

“ The inequalities of value inherent to any country were enormously increased in these reservations by the proximity of towns on their borders, and by railroads often running directly through the ceded lands. ”