April 22nd, 1889. The day broke early, with a little sunshine, breakfast and dinner packed in boxes, others were cooking biscuits over open fires in pans of tin, butter wrapped in cloth, coffee pots planted on top of these small fires, and so much packed into the wagons and hardscrabble cases that brought the permanence of the day to a reality.
If pulled back, one would see that there were wagons pulled by two or four horses. Single horses tied to the side of these wagons, enough cold left in the day early to make it a highlighted place with a highlighted set of circumstances.
The echo of those whose voices broke the morning, with wagons and saddle gear tied down, fifty thousand of these of these men and women and children all stretched around the starting line, side by side by side by side, awaiting the noon gun with apprehension, that starting hammer for each to move forward from stop to breakneck speed to claim their land, their home, to work and build houses, cattle barns, sheep shires, and know that the land was free to them who earned it that day.
Two million acres, waiting to be picked, laid out for them to walk the curves and the hills of one hundred sixty acres, a new place to call home or a new home to call money, if only; they lived on that land, built barns, a house and took a modicum of living from five years of their own labor and watched the world move round about them.
With gunfire they all took off, some hats were lost, some baggage from the wagons, a horse may have stumbled, but the majority of the thousands spread across the cool and morning wet lands, and by evening, both their backs and their hands were sore, men walked back and forth along their lines set with cotton ropes and colored flags, giving each one what they had come for, and the Oklahoma Territory had blossomed with this new beginning.
Ralph E Peck
Photo by Ralph E Peck
Paul Moore Artist
Oklahoma Centennial Land in OKC
Land Run Of 1889
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