At least the Sioux were left more or less where they were—albeit much diminished, much cheated, ill served. But at least they remained in the prairies, where their ancestors had lived and hunted for generations. Many other Indian tribes were not so fortunate, suffering from the cruel and haphazard policies generally known as Indian removal—whereby Native Americans, regarded by whites as greatly inconvenient to their own ambitions, were requested, demanded, and then ordered to move, away, out of sight, and like dust, to be swept under the rug. All too few tribes today live on the lands they originally settled: the Mohicans of eastern New York, for example, have since 1824 lived a thousand miles away on a reservation in Wisconsin; the Ojibwe of Michigan were forced by government agents to walk hundreds of miles to a new site in Minnesota, where they were cheated of their promised food and money and walked back through the woods in the dead of winter, five hundred of them starving to death. And most infamously of all: in the late 1830s a hundred thousand eastern woodland Indians—members of the tribes of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were brutally compelled to walk at gunpoint across the mountains and plains to settle anew in the unfamiliar expanses of what is now Oklahoma. Their cruelly coerced westward passage is infamous today as the Trail of Tears; there were many such trails, much less known, all bent on separating native peoples from their traditional lands, all indelible blots on the American escutcheon.

  And westward was invariably the direction of their journeying. For this was the direction in which white men moved to fulfil their promised destiny. Westward to the ever shifting frontier, with the Indians moved ahead and into the unknown, beyond their own Pales of Settlement, and to places where, in the white men’s eyes, they could do no harm except to their savage and miserable selves.

  There were many architects of the removal plan. Thomas Jefferson, most particularly, and, in 1803, very early on in the American story, proposed the idea of offering tracts of government land to the Cherokee—a tribe then living in the west of the Carolinas and Georgia as well as in Tennessee—if only they would shift themselves west of the Mississippi. Each family would get a full section—640 acres of virgin territory—if they would agree to move. Other presidents had similar ideas—James Monroe and John Quincy Adams offered incentives for the Indian to move voluntarily. But then, and most notoriously, came the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who would have no further truck with an evidently recalcitrant aggregation of Indian feeling in the fertile settler country of the American southeast. He wanted all to go—particularly those acknowledged to be advanced, settled, and self-governing, and condescendingly known as the Five Civilized Tribes. These were the aforesaid Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole. They were told—or at first politely asked, since the removals were theoretically voluntary—to head out, to pack up their belongings, to go along through the woodland roads they had built themselves and head for freedom, as they supposed, in what was designated officially by the government as Indian Territory.

  President Jackson—derided in more modern times as the “exterminator of the Indians,” and considered possibly even guilty of a genocide—tried to adopt a public tone of kindly persuasion, though read today his famous address to the Creek leaders seems oleaginous at best, and ponderously shifty:

  Friends and Brothers—By permission of the Great Spirit above, and the voice of the people, I have been made President of the United States, and now speak to you as your Father and friend and request you to listen. Your warriors have known me long. You know I love my white and red children, and always speak with a straight, and not with a forked tongue; that I have always told you the truth. . . . Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace. Your game is destroyed, and many of your people will not work and till the earth. Beyond the great River Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your Father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever. For the improvements in the country where you now live, and for all the stock which you cannot take with you, your Father will pay you a fair price. . . .

  In their thousands, beginning in 1830 when twenty thousand Choctaw* set out from their home villages in Alabama, the walkers and shufflers, staggerers and swaggerers, striders and limpers set out on the trail. They took weeks, months, to complete the journeys, and thousands died en route. Soldiers escorted them, along with government agents from the newly established Bureau of Indian Affairs, mainly to ensure none escaped, backtracked, or tried to sidle off and settle on such tempting pastures as they might glimpse while passing by, and which they would naturally be forbidden to enjoy.

  Diaries of the escort soldiers tell of the collective misery. One, a Lieutenant Jefferson van Horne, writes of having loaded scores of Indians “and negroes” onto a boat to cross the Mississippi in December 1832.* On the December 4, after noting, laconically, “one birth,” he writes that his party of 634 souls had covered twelve miles before camping. Next morning

  all the captains called on me in a body and desired me to wait until the cart of their head man Etotahoma (which broke down last evening and was unable to get to camp) should be brought up. I had sent back more than once and had much trouble to get this old man and his cart along. His oxen were poor and worn out, and his cart badly constructed. But he was looked to and beloved by the whole party. He would not part with his cart, and though it might have been policy to go on and leave the wretched old establishment, I found it impossible to get his people along without him. He was old, lame and captious and gave me more trouble than all the rest of the party. Proceeded at half past nine o’clock and crossed the Fournois. As the weather was cold and the water deep and swift, the teams, horses and young men forded, and the women, children and old men crossed in the boat. Etotahoma’s cart was brought up and repaired. Encamped at about 4 o’clock. 9½ miles.

  The land to which they were going—the so-called Indian Territory—would in due course come to be called Oklahoma, the land of the Red People. In the early nineteenth century, it was in effect the federal government’s Indian dumping ground—immense and unpeopled expanse of billiard-table-flat prairie, lush green pasture in the east, dun-colored rough grazing in the west, the land basically surveyed and mapped, and now held in trust, in the eyes of the government, for the American people as a whole. It was the natural place, in Washington’s view, for the reestablishment of the westward-trekking tribe-nations of the southeast. Therefore, in the late 1830s, certain massive sections within the territory became organized and settled as the Cherokee Nation or the Creek Nation or the Land of the Seminole. Other, smaller tribes were settled there from smaller—though equally tearful—trails of expulsion, and so there were lands devoted to the Kickapoo, the Potawatomie, the Ponca, the Iowa, the Sac, and the Fox.

  But then in the late 1870s, once the territory had settled itself into some sort of pan-Indian Elysium, a Cherokee lawyer named Colonel Elias Cornelius Boudinot noticed something. There were two million acres of land sandwiched in an irregular T-shape—bounded on the east by the Kickapoo country, on the west by those square miles reserved for the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, and sandwiched between a part of the Cherokee country to the north, and the South Canadian River and the Chickasaw people to the south—that had been quite improvidently left “unassigned.” No Indian tribe, nation or band had thus far been settled there, nor were there any plans for their doing so. The land was empty, still belonging to the people at large, in theory held for them in trust by a blissfully unaware government fifteen hundred miles away. It was a stunning discovery. Not surprisingly, once the news was out that two million acres of prime American real estate was there for the asking, every hopeful white man—in America and beyond—who was wanting land for himself, his family, and his future suddenly sat up and paid attention.

  Two million acres of prairie land had been left unassigned to any Indian tribe by the planners back in Washington. They were free to be settled to anyone who might care to stake a claim—after winning a race to do so.

  The idea of the land run of 1889 was born. A cry went up in the press across the country: “On to Oklahoma!” To the government in Washington, having no more Indians to round up and send away and stuff into the territory, it seemed an eminently reasonable idea—and moreover, the encouragement of migration of still more white people into the midst of an erstwhile Indian-dominated territory would, in the view of the capital, be no bad thing.

  It was then agreed: a rider was inserted* into the 1889 version of the Indian Appropriations Act—a piece of boilerplate legislation that dealt from time to time with Indian reservations and the like—allowing that at high noon on April 22 of that year, the Unassigned Lands, the T-shaped wedge of land buried deep within the Indian Territory, would be open for settlement. The basic terms of President Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act would apply: for merely a registration fee anyone who staked a claim could have a quarter section, 160 acres of virgin land and, after working it for five years, could win title deed to it to have and hold for always.

  Like thunderheads on a humid Oklahoma afternoon, the crowds began to rise up and gather immediately. By late April they had gathered in their thousands, most of them when awake set to gazing hopefully across the cavalry-guarded boundary line and into the Unassigned Lands—gently undulating prairie grass country, with patches of April flowers: Johnny-jump-ups, little bluets, and spring beauties. The petals were so richly strewn on the ground that one writer suggested that the gods had left confetti.

  One group of would-be settlers had left Kansas behind some days before the deadline and were now camped out with permission on Cherokee land, planning to ride south and, for want of good compasses, to follow the new railroad tracks and cross into the Unassigned Lands. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line to Texas had been completed just a year before, filling the growing need to transport cattle and hogs between the packing houses of Chicago and Gulf of Mexico ports, principally Galveston. Just south of the Cimarron River was the first train stop built inside the Unassigned Lands, a hastily thrown up way station called Deer Creek, which consisted of a single wooden platform alongside a water tower that could be hand-filled from the rivulet. In mid-April, anticipating the settlers’ interest, the federal government had built two small structures close by: an army tent with the words U.S. Post Office burned onto a board suspended at the entrance, run by an Irish migrant named Dennis Flynn; and a rather larger, more solid-looking wooden structure that housed the U.S. Land Office. Meanwhile, the railroad bosses peremptorily changed the name of this station to honor their line’s former chief attorney, John Guthrie, who was currently a judge in Topeka. So, by that designated Monday morning, a freshly painted sign proclaimed this otherwise deserted spot on the prairie to be the future site of Guthrie, Oklahoma. The crowds beyond the borderline were already familiar with the name: ask anyone where they might be found once the gun had sounded, and they’d reply with a roar: We’re going to Guthrie.

  All morning the post office and land office officials waited, drumming their fingers, twiddling their thumbs, in the warming April sun. It was quiet, with just a faint breeze as well as the occasional sighting of a grouse, a quail, or a black-tailed ground squirrel (known locally as a prairie dog), and every so often the chirp of an unseen bird. On all sides the prairie stretched out to the horizon, slightly undulating in parts, with shallow valleys marking limpid clearwater streams fringed with black oak and cottonwood trees.

  There was no town, yet. But its borders were all set out, however, scrupulously measured and marked according to the various land ordnances by which the country had been mapped over the previous hundred years. The township and range lines were all known and speedily drawn onto plats, large-scale wall maps that had been brought across by train from Washington and were now hung up on the Land Office walls. The all-too-familiar grid system—conceived as American Public Land Survey System, established in 1785, more than a century before—applied here in the Unassigned Lands, just as it had in Ohio, Alabama, Illinois, and virtually everywhere west of the Appalachian ridges.

  All these rectilinear lines had their origins, their official point of beginning, at a granite monument on the banks of the Ohio River which still stands today, just outside the old broken-down pottery town of East Liverpool, Ohio. The obelisk identifies a nearby spot from which all of western America has been surveyed and measured ever since. Probably no one that day in Guthrie was even aware of the existence of East Liverpool; but those back in Washington who kept track of these things and who savored the true significance of East Liverpool knew well enough the transformative importance of the survey marks outside and inside the hitherto uninhabited settlement.

  And Guthrie was indeed about to be transformed.

  Anxious men checked the time. All of the Santa Fe workers would have their official railroad pocket watches, made by the Ball Watch Company of Cleveland. They looked at one another as noon struck. If guns had sounded up along the borderline, Guthrie was too far from everywhere for the officials there to have heard them. All was silent. An hour went by. Then, just before one thirty, two things happened.

  A low growl, a grumble and a clang of iron against iron, and then with a snort and a whistle and a screech of brakes and billowing gouts of smoke and steam, a southbound train pulled to a halt at Guthrie station. With the slamming of doors and much yelling and war whoops, hundreds of passengers poured out of the carriages, pulled their luggage out and onto the platform, and lugged those bags and themselves down onto the thick meadow grass.

  And at almost exactly the same moment, a thunder of hooves could be heard from the wilder grassland beyond: silhouetted against the northern sky like Zulu warriors breasting a gentle rise appeared rows upon rows of horses and swaying wagons, with hundreds and thousands more men and women, all who had ridden furiously down from the borderline. Most of the horsemen looked from a distance like medieval knights off to a joust: closer inspection revealed that they were carrying long sticks of willow, with white flags and pennants fixed to their upper end. Claim flags, ready at hand to be put to good use down in the red dirt.

  Thousands who had massed on the northern border of the Unassigned Lands rode off furiously once the noon signal had been sounded on April 22, 1889. Within hours they had staked claims, and on payment of a five-dollar fee, the land was theirs.

  Thus was prairie silence suddenly broken, the sigh of the wind replaced by a great growing rumble of noise, a roaring cacophony of hooves and cries and whip cracks—and gunshots—and the yells of enraptured excitement. Thousands of people were now milling around quite frantically, peering into the middle distance, eyes shaded against the sun, wheeling their horses and galloping off hither and yon, flagpoles at the ready, looking for suitable land to take and on which, in a trice and the blink of an eye, to settle

  You jumped from the horse, plunged your stake into the ground, maybe wrote your name on a board and built up a pile of bones and buffalo chips to leave the board on, confirming the claim and your name to it. You noted the survey number on the nearest marker post, if it could be glimpsed through grass that was often taller than your horse’s head. Next, with the location of your chosen lot, its coordinates, committed to memory—and it had to be a good memory, since a lot could be designated according to the survey rules just as, for example “the SE quarter of Section 8, T16N, R2W”—off you cantered to the Land Office. Here, after waiting in line with scores of others, you eventually completed a government form, Number 4—963, a “Homestead Affidavit, Sworn in Guthrie, O. T.,” in which you solemnly swore that you did not own 160 acres of land held in fee simple in any other state of the union, that you were either the head of the family or over twenty-one, that you were a native-born citizen or in the process of becoming a naturalized ditto, and that you had paid the necessary registration fee of five dollars.

  After which, in a heartbeat and with a stroke of a pen, the 160 acres of land at the South East corner of Section 8, Guthrie, O.T., hitherto the sovereign property of the republic, its recent purloining from the native inhabitants long forgotten in the heat of the moment, became indubitably and permanently or for as long as you wished, yours. You were now—providing no one sued you for jumping the claim or having an overlapping interest, which happened all too often, and understandably given the chaos of the day—the owner of a piece of the United States of America. It was but a tiny, near invisibly small fraction of the whole 37 billon acres that made up the continental republic, but nonetheless it was yours, to have and to hold, and on which to build a part of this brand-new city of Guthrie.

  And build it, did they ever! By late afternoon the prairie was an ocean of tents, the line at the Land Office half a mile long. The newcomers unloaded from their wagons their spouses, children, and servants; or if they had more heroically arrived by horse or by train, they took from their saddlebags or their attaché cases more frugally selected possessions: plates, jugs, spoons, boots, nails, pieces of wire. More trains arrived, disgorging still more people. By nightfall, and with a few glimmering candle lanterns in sputtering lines north and south, east and west, so the prairie suddenly had the appearance of a city in the making. There was little water, there was no coal, no toilet facilities. A few enterprising folks had erected larger hotel tents and trestle tables; they were selling food at exorbitant prices and offering shots of bad whisky to those who had not brought their own. Most settlers had guns, but so far as is known, there were no serious outbreaks of violence. There was a common recognition that the emptiness of the prairie—and not those others who were there to help build a city—was the common enemy that had to be overcome. As the dark enveloped the settlement and the stars shone down from the vast midwestern sky, so the City of Guthrie had been brought formally into being, its new inhabitants promptly falling into a bone-weary sleep.