By morning, once the cooking fires were lit and with the ham-and-eggs and coffee smells of breakfast wafting over the site, someone rode a horse northward, between one line of tents, and suggesting as he did so the making of the first road in town: Division Street, he shouted out its name. This would delineate the halfway point, with all streets to its west to be named thus, all to the east named otherwise. And the first of these boulevards to be named was Oklahoma Street—born with its north–south cousin in late April 1889 and crossing at right angles then as it still does today, a century and more later.

  A writer named Hamilton Wicks was up early. He wrote an essay for the September issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, then a rather different journal from today.

  I strolled up on the eminence near the land office, and surveyed the wonder cyclorama spread out before me on all sides. Ten thousand people had “squatted” upon a square mile of virgin prairie that first afternoon, and as the myriad of white tents suddenly appeared on the face of the country, it was though a vast flock of huge white-winged birds had just settled down upon the hillsides and in the valley.

  The speed of the city’s transformation beggars belief. At dawn on that first Monday the settled population of Guthrie was precisely zero. By ten that evening the population was not the ten thousand that Mr. Wicks had suggested, but by some estimates more like fifteen thousand. Even allowing for families, it can fairly be said that one settler every three seconds would lay claims to land in Guthrie, Oklahoma, that April day. No other city in America would ever grow so fast.

  Twenty days later, the ramshackle tented community that the settlers had established had transformed itself into a proper town, with a telegraph connection to the outside world, with fully assembled buildings (some still standing today), a chamber of commerce, and no fewer than three competing daily newspapers. Inside two months, Guthrie had piped running water; eight weeks after that, some of its houses, offices, and unpaved streets were lit with electricity. By the end of the year Guthrie was a full-fledged community, briefly destined to be the capital of the state, once statehood was declared in 1907.

  This last was a dream soon extinguished by the ambitions of Oklahoma City thirty miles to the south. But Guthrie had its brief moment in the sun—there would be a struggle over the forcible removal of the Great Seal of Oklahoma from the bank safe in Guthrie to the new government headquarters in Oklahoma City. Lawsuits, court orders, and the threat of police force would all be involved in wresting that huge device from the hands of the proud burghers of Guthrie.

  Since its decapitation the city has been somewhat sidelined—it has a bluegrass festival and a steer roping rodeo, and one of the largest Scottish Rite Masonic Temples in the country. But its real gems are its first buildings—a cluster of some two thousand highly anachronistic structures* that rise where otherwise grain elevators and undistinguished suburban tract housing should normally appear. The city is a mausoleum of the American land saga, a memorial to Victorian pioneer history, a somewhat melancholy reminder of the lengths to which many brand-new Americans would go, in order to acquire that most precious of commodities, that which, to paraphrase Margaret Mitchell, is seen as worth fighting, dying, working, and living for, because of its enduring qualities, because it lasts.

  The town of Guthrie lays claim to being the fastest-growing city in America—no one lived there on the morning of the twenty-second of April, but by sundown, it had a population of fifteen thousand. And soon, a cluster of impressive Victorian buildings.

  The Native Americans whose lands these once were have not forgotten, nor probably ever will. But such anger as they might justly feel has long ago ebbed, and it just simmers in the far background. The notion that the United States could ever have had the effrontery to call these acres “unassigned,” when in truth the republic never possessed the moral authority either to assign or unassign them, here or anywhere else, is mostly forgotten today. The world has moved on, even if in the small microclimate that is Guthrie, Oklahoma, the world appears on the surface to be very little different from the days just after the Oklahoma Land Run was completed.

  4

  The Land and the Gentry

  And then there are those whose acquisition of land they believe to have come about through ancient right.

  These are by and large Europeans and, most egregiously, they comprise a large number of Britons—English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh—who occupy a special place in society, wielding legislative, economic and social power still, to a degree that many quite reasonable onlookers currently think of as anachronistic and improper.

  These few hundred men and women are the landed gentry, and, together with the dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts and barons and assorted lesser titled British subjects, they currently own impressively large chunks of the British realm. Fully a third of the English countryside, for instance—13 million acres of the 37 million that make up the totality of the surface land area of England and Wales—belong to private firms or land-rich families of often great antiquity. Of Scotland’s twenty million acres, almost half are controlled by some eleven hundred wealthy landowners. Between them the country’s twenty-four non-royal dukes own more than a million acres. Much the same degree of individual abundance obtains in Northern Ireland’s six counties. Whether such a disproportionate amassment of land in the hands of so very few is right or justified or prudent, wise or sensible, is a matter for a later chapter.

  As to how such families might have acquired that land, the stories are generally befuddled by antiquity and legend and have acquired a patina of long forgotten mythology. The finer gradations of the British class system, which despite all efforts at meritocratic evolution has still not yet wholly vanished, and certainly not in the farther reaches of the countryside, recognize that the gentry—whose male members are literal gentlemen, a term of much subtlety little known beyond England—stand both at the very summit of society, and act as the great pillars that support the national establishment. These are the “old” families of England, the landowning classes, gentlefolk untouched by titular reward, generally unwilling to be involved in such vulgar matters as politics or—heaven forbid—trade, which might taint their social sanctity. In times past—when landownership gave one the exclusive right to vote—these were the ruling elite of Britain, those who by great good fortune or by the courtesy of kings had managed to amass what in Britain is still the most stable and most respected form of wealth, acreage. They own land; their offspring—in most families, the oldest male inheriting the land and sufficient of a fortune to run it, of course—becoming in descending order of birth members of Parliament, soldiers, diplomats, barristers, and, in the case of the youngest or most dim, parsons in the Church of England. Or, longer ago, functionaries sent out to run the more distant reaches of the empire.

  Matters are changing, though. Change and decay have taken their toll. Few enough these days enjoy the life of, as an example, the country gentleman encountered some while ago near the border village of Caledon, County Tyrone, in a currently defiantly British corner of Northern Ireland. He lived in a castle, modest by the granite extravagance of most Scottish standards, but comfortably situated in some 29,000 acres of lush meadowland on the banks of the River Blackwater. An eighteenth-century ancestor returning from an evidently moneymaking venture in Bengal purchased the estate for £9000 in 1772, anticipating an annual income from rents of some £7000—an ample enough sum to guarantee his becoming one of the country’s leisured few. The family’s effortlessly untroubled lifestyle evidently continued for at least the subsequent two centuries, for when over breakfast one day it was asked what he did on an average day, this Caledon gentleman chortled with amusement. “Do?” he thundered. “Do? What on earth do you mean?”

  He then explained that he did as little as possible because, as he spluttered, “Nothing in my life is ever urgent.” On being pressed he allowed, after thinking for several minutes, that on that particular day he might perhaps venture into the village to order a case of sherry to send to his mother across in London; and then recalled that on one of his many farms there was said to be a new child, whom he might visit, if the weather was clement. Otherwise, “the nice thing about owning a great deal of land, and having tenants who farm it, is that everything more or less looks after itself. There really is very little that I have actually to do.” And with that he snapped open the latest copy of Country Life and began reading an article about some rare breed of pig.

  However serenely enjoyable such a life may be, the gentry is today not exclusively of the rentier class. Anyone who sits on enough land is likely, thanks to the providence of geology, to have something of value underneath. And though in the past the landed gentlefolk have been generally disdainful of allowing the extraction of minerals from beneath their acres, some today do, and make spectacular supplementary fortunes. Matt Ridley, a prominent newspaper columnist who inherited a title and an estate of 15,000 acres in the northeast of England, happily allows the opencast mining of his parkland, providing that the dragline operators—whose clanking work can be vaguely heard through the thick walls of Blagdon Hall—clean up after themselves and pay him both a rent and a share in the revenue from the sale of the coal. A neighbor member of the gentry living in a vast country seat just to the north of the Scottish border is also fortunate to have had underground mines on his estate—and memorializes the profits they once brought by having a piece of antique silver mounted on an enormous plinth carved from a single two-ton block of coal.

  John Maynard Keynes remarked critically of such people, guaranteed as they were an eternal income simply because land itself was finite and scarce and the populations requiring it becoming ever more numerous. He cared little for the gentry’s argument that they were custodians of the land and creators of the landscape that was, in Britain at least, so uniquely and transcendentally beautiful—a landowner planting oaks that he would never live to see mature, but content that by doing so he would be helping to continue the charming aspect of the view. Keynes retorted only that he thought euthanasia the best solution for the gentry, the country all the better for getting rid of them.

  Though time and taxation may be doing as he wished, slowly winnowing away the gentry’s numbers and diluting their influence, the matter of how the land was apportioned in the first place intrigues. The Caledon family’s Irish land was acquired mainly by simple purchase, the money made in eighteenth-century Bengal having been used to buy acreage that the local bishop, in need of cash to shore up his creaking old cathedral, thought surplus to his pastoral needs. But purchase was not invariably the way in which the ancient landed families acquired their territories. Other tracts came into the hands of members of the gentry by more convoluted means, and in many cases so long ago that no one could be entirely certain by what right their ownership originally commenced.

  The most comprehensive compendium of long-ago ownership in England is, most famously, Domesday Book. This is in fact an elegant pair of volumes: Little Domesday, a summary of 475 vellum leaves, and Great Domesday, the more finished product with a more tightly written 413 vellum pages. Both volumes are kept today under formidable security in Britain’s National Archives. They comprise in essence the published result of the first-ever inventory, painstakingly written in one medieval scribe’s Latin hand, of England’s landholdings and landownership almost a thousand years ago.

  The survey was commissioned by King William I, William the Conqueror, who in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings had famously vanquished the very last of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, King Harold. His survey was conducted in 1085, and evidently quite swiftly, for the resulting book was first published only in 1086, with the presumed purpose of allowing the new king to calculate the taxes that would be due on the lands that were privately owned around the nation.

  The two Domesday Books, presenting a comprehensive handwritten inventory of all the land in eleventh-century England, are among the country’s most treasured possessions, and still have legal standing.

  The great Victorian parson-historian John Giles* made a popular translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which described in rather greater detail how the Domesday survey was performed, and of King William’s role in seeking to ascertain

  how the country was occupied, and by what sort of men. Then sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out “How many hundreds of hides [an ancient measure equivalent to some 120 acres, supposedly enough to sustain a household] were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.” Also he commissioned them to record in writing, “How much land his archbishops had, and his diocesan bishops, and his abbots, and his earls;” and though I may be prolix and tedious, “What, or how much, each man had, who was an occupier of land in England, either in land or in stock, and how much money it was worth.” So very narrowly, indeed, did he commission them to trace it out, that there was not one single hide, nor a yard of land, nay, moreover (it is shameful to tell, though he thought it no shame to do it), not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down in his writ. And all the recorded particulars were afterwards brought to him.

  The convulsive events of the Norman Conquest—Domesday being among its many legacies—profoundly changed the makeup of England: the rule of the Anglo-Saxons was ended forever, and the ground was steadily prepared—socially, legally, and linguistically—for the evolution and eventual creation of today’s society. And particularly so far as land was concerned. The Norman kings—there were three of them, eight if one counts all the confused gatherings of monarchs who ruled from London until the much more truly English Plantagenets firmly established themselves on the throne in 1216—were both extraordinarily rapacious in grabbing land and gaudily generous in offering it to their cronies.

  These fortunate figures, distant ancestors of many of the thousands who make up today’s gentry, were a tightly knit coterie of some two hundred of the most favored barons, courtiers, and members of the Catholic clergy, together with such knights as proved themselves willing to ride off to the European mainland to wage wars on the monarchs’ behalves. The beneficiaries of the kings’ largesse had good reason to be content. Less happy, however, were those from whom the lands had been taken. And yet these unhappy owners had themselves succeeded previous owners who were in turn victims of plunder and greed, and those too had taken land from still earlier owners, with a chain of land-related purloining proceeding ever backward into the dark depths of ancient English time.

  The Normans were tough and cunning fighters, and they took more or less as they pleased. For decades after the invasion, the Breton broadsword and the Norman longbow were employed to French advantage all across the acres of newly occupied England. One by one manors and domains and wapentakes and hides that hitherto had been owned by the Danes and Norwegians and Saxons fell into their hands.

  This antecedent Anglo-Saxon England had for its six hundred years of existence been a confused arrangement of petty kingdoms—Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and Kent among them—that were created after the departure of the Roman colonists in the fifth century. It was during this time that the country would become more organized and eventually united, under the name of England, to be ruled by a succession of English monarchs.

  During its prime, Anglo-Saxon England did, however, create a system of landownership, and it is fair to say that during the period leading up to the Norman invasion just about all the land in Old England was owned by someone. The word acre, so central to the concept of land and landownership, was born during these times, and it remains—along with bread and earl and half—one of the oldest recorded words in the language, indicating how important concepts relating to food, society, and arithmetic—and land—were to the earliest English.

  Formal concepts relating to land were adopted, with the various kings exercising the rights of ownership and their assistants, the thanes (or thegns, as they were first spelled) being given rights of tenure and in most cases actual written charters to allow these rights to be passed on to their descendants. It is believed that around four thousand thanes were tenants of kingly land—known as bookland if the thanes held a charter, folkland if not—in tenth-century England. Most of these or their successors would have then lost their holdings and their security once the Norman barons had vanquished their monarchs and stolen their tenanted parcels away.

  Go backward still further, and matters become somewhat more vague. Before the confusing times of the Saxons, and during the reigns of the Danes and the various interregnums and rules of other Scandinavian invaders whose encroachments on the British Isles made for so many decades of battling and mayhem, there were the Roman colonizers. Their four centuries’ rule of Britannia was at least disciplined and organized, if not exactly allowing for self-determination by the inhabitants. Scholars believe that the entirety of the conquered country—right up to Hadrian’s Wall, which had been built in the far north of England to keep the bellicose Picts at bay and to help preserve order even at the most distant reaches of the empire—was regarded as imperial property, but which could be and indeed was occasionally given out to some local tribe as either reward or inducement.