USA > Oklahoma > Oklahoma County > Oklahoma City > The story of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma : "the biggest little city in the world" > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
An eavesdropping moon peeped reticently out of the Pot- tawotomie Country. The colors of sunset melted into the last faint glow of a departing luminary. A coyote cried plain- tively in the dusky distance. Hand in hand the lovers walked slowly along the narrow path to the ranch house.
For a long time a sort of impersonal friendship existed between Mary and Louis. She had spent only part of each year on the ranch, the remainder attending school in Massa- chusetts. Her graduation was an event of the previous spring and she was now entering an autunm of respite, a part of which she expected to devote to assembling material for a book. Teachers, students and other friends in the East during the past four years through numberless queries about her life in the West had inspired her to write the tales she told them.
But her plans were maturing reluctantly. Louis Mason, her father's ranch boss, had come dominantly into her life these last few months. Not Louis Mason of the saddle and spurs and not the handsome young chief of the roundup. but an invisible Louis Mason. The influence came to her unbidden. It was a friendship that came not from intimate association. Mason conceived that his employer had better things in mind for his daughter than marrying her to a halfbreed boss of a few happy-go-lucky cowpunchers. Nor did Mary Lake venture more overtures than a pair of pretty talkative blue eyes. She had never accompanied him on the roundup nor dined with him at the chuck wagon far over toward the Co- manche Country. She appropriated all the best elements of frontier life without emulating ranch girls of atmospheric western books. Horseback riding was neither a diversion nor a hobby. Rather was she given to making flower beds and cultivating plants.
Their meeting in the wood was not prearranged: it was purely accidental. They chanced to meet as she walked for pleasure and as he inspected the back fence of the small horse pasture. Inevitably a few things theretofore unspoken slipped
.
41-42
ORIGINAL SITE OF OKLAHOMA CITY
₱
43
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
over two pairs of unsteady lips. There were no equivocations when the ice was broken. They talked frankly and freely and unrandomly, and when it was all told and words were scarce and intervals of silence grew steadily longer and more im- pressive, Louis asked her to become his wife.
It was the day after the next that Mary abandoned con- vention. At sunrise she climbed blithely into the seat of the buckboard with Mason and they set off for Shawnee Town, where Lonis was to dicker for a herd of Texas longhorns. Shawnee Town was a village of the Pottawotomie Country adjoining the Unassigned Territory on the east. The pair of sportive bay steeds, sleek and fat and trimly curried, leaped eagerly to the collars and bounded out into the pasture road.
Robert Lake waved them an adios from the doorstep and returned to the dining room to finish his breakfast.
"Whatever can have happened?" asked Mrs. Lake. "Mary has never done things like that. Do you think ranch life is making a tomboy out of her ?"
"I don't know what has happened," answered her liuis- band, his amusement unconcealed, "but the girl's acting like a regular fellow. It pleases me a lot, too, for I feared that she'd find the life monotonous and want to go away to the friends she's been accustomed to in the East."
"Well, Louis will take good care of her, we can count onl that," said Mrs. Lake. "He is an excellent young man and must have come from a very superior Indian family. I'd as leave trust her with Louis as with her own brother."
They lingered at the table. The feeding season had not vet begun, for the pastures of luxuriant grass were vet pala- table. Contracts had been negotiated for a winter's supply of cottonseed meal, which came from settlements in the Chick- asaw Country and the rich black land cotton belt of North- eastern Texas, and the labor of repairing windbreaks and fences in advance of the first chilling "norther" of the season was well under way.
Robert Lake, a grey-haired man of fifty, whom the tonic of the frontier had kept physically superb during twenty-five years of his life upon it, faced the gravest problem of his business career. Singularly for one of his kind, his con- cern was less over the possibility of a financial loss than the
44
THIE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
virtual certainty of his surrendering a business for which he was specially talented, to which he had devoted a quarter century of his maturity, and in which he found pleasure, to his own way of thinking, incomparable in any other avocation of the West.
It was certainly a matter of only a few years until the cattlemen occupying the Unassigned Territory of what men were now calling Oklahoma would have to move out. Fer- tility of the soil had been discovered. That it was more val- uable for agricultural than grazing purposes had been im- pressed upon officials in Washington. And not the least consequential of those who everlastingly stressed the fact were officials of the two railroads that had been permitted to enter the Indian Territory. The railroads maintained a powerful lobby in the capital. A lobby of almost equal influence was maintained there also by an organization of cattlemen whose herds ranged over the Cherokee Outlet, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe and the Kiowa and Comanche reservations. It was evident that eventually the cattlemen would lose. Boomers were attempting to colonize the territory. Time and again their little bands had been driven out by Government officials and regulars of the United States army, and each time Washing- ton was more nearly convinced that the territory should be divided into homesteads and sold to farmers.
As a matter of fact. Robert Lake himself had settled here with a view of acquiring a fortune out of the cattle industry and enjoying it in later years as a resident of a modern commu- nity. The lands he grazed were leased from Indian nations and he paid for grazing rights by the head rather than by the number of acres covered by the herds. But he had be- come enamored of the business. The abstract thing of the business itself was not represented by the thousands of dol- lars, net and clean, that lay to his credit in banks of the States. The life of the ranch was the life for Robert Lake. Sugges- tions of a revival of the purpose for which he came originally were unwelcome. These suggestions were coming more fre- quently now and Lake found it imperative that he begin mak- ing plans for an entirely different sort of a life.
"We are here by every right of law, " said Lake. "and by honest effort we have built up a little fortune. But talk of
45
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
ejection is becoming general in Kansas and Texas. An order to move is likely to come any day now. Do you recall the big swarthy stranger from Texas that came up the Arbuckle Trail last spring and camped in the pasture down on Lightning Creek ? He was an emissary of the enemies of the cattlemen, in faet a personal representative of Colonel Carpenter."
"Colonel Carpenter ?" exclaimed Mrs. Lake. "Why, I thought Carpenter was put in jail, that we had heard the last of the man."
"Not in jail," replied her husband, "but at liberty and again very active. Using the same tactics that he used in the Black Hills colonization scheme."
It was Col. C. C. Carpenter who induced Lake to enter the cattle business in the Unassigned Territory. They had inet as very young men in Chicago, while Lake was vet a student in the University of Illinois, and Lake had promised to make the adventure after graduation. They met frequently during the succeeding few years but whatever of friendship they formed Lake severed when he learned of the character of Carpenter.
"Here's the latest about Carpenter," said Lake. He re- turned to the breakfast table with a late copy of a St. Louis newspaper. It contained excerpts from an Indian service inspector's report to Washington, and was written in Coffey- ville, Kan.
"Carpenter is here, " wrote the inspector. "He is the same bragging, lying nuisance that I knew him to be seventeen years ago, when he infested Fremont's quarters. He will not put his head in danger by entering the Territory. It is a pity that the law could not hold him as a conspirator against the public peace. #
# He came to Independence, some twenty miles from here, at the end of a little spur of the rail- road. The merchants agreed to give him $500 when his first party came and $1,000 more when 1,000 emigrants had been moved into the Territory by him. He could not satisfy the parties that he had a party at all. They refused to pay the first instalment and he left that place for this, saying the Independence people had gone back on him."
"And last week, " continued Lake, "I was again reminded of the insecurity of our position by the presence on the range
.
46
THIE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
of a party of men, women and children, who traveled out here by ox wagon from the Kickapoo Country. They made camp on Deep Fork and when I asked them their mission a spokes- man replied that they had come to select homesteads and do some farming. I reported their presence to Washington and President Hayes issued a proclamation warning all persons to desist from intruding on Indian lands. But they swore they had come to stay when I told them of the proclamation, and added that others of their kind were to follow.
"This Oklahoma War Chief also is causing embarrassment to the cattlemen. It is a little newspaper that insists upon the country being opened to settlement by farmers."
He read from a recent number of the War Chief: "The Secretary of the Interior complains to the President of the United States that 'intruders' and 'trespassers' are settling on Indian lands. The President thereupon (without inquiry as to whether such alleged settlement be within the limits of a regularly established Indian reservation or merely on the un- appropriated public domain) orders the Secretary of the In- terior to use the army in removing intruders. * Cat- * * tlemen can pass unmolested, but settlers are all removed. Im-
plements are destroyed, provisions confiscated, men sometimes
* temporarily placed under arrest, but never tried. = No question was ever asked as to the propriety of such policy. The President relies implicitly on representations of the See- retary of the Interior, and the Secretary of War has no choice but to carry out instructions of constituted authority. * The suffering settlers have no redress."
Lake was not comforted by military movements or repeated pronouncements of policy from Washington. He could fore- see dismemberment of this empire much more clearly than any man who simply theorized on abstract principles of right or justice or policy.
Through the Lake ranch, sometimes known as the Circle Bar, the North Canadian River made a crooked thread. Over the western prairies it ent a relatively even course, but when it touched the ontposts of a cross-timbers region, which rimmed the western slope of the great antielinal Pennsylvania structure, it wriggled itself into knots and zigzagged its chan- nel, thereby creating irregularly arched sections of valleys.
47-48
D
-
A GROUP OF PIONEERS
Top Row- Henry Overholser, J. M. Owen, I. A. Stewart. Fred Dobbin. F. M. Riley. Bottom Row-C. G. Jones, Henry Will. T. M. Richardson, Sidney Clarke
49
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
In one of these sections Robert Lake had established his branding pen. Back of the pen and fringing the red bank of the stream thrived a little forest of small ash, oak, cottonwood and elm. In the early years of his occupation of the ranch Robert Lake often imagined it a place of retreat for the chil- dren and the weary of a great city. If thirty years later he had returned, the joyous offspring of a new population doubt- less would have proffered granddad a slide for life down the incline of a shoot-the-shoots that had been dedicated to juve- nile recreation in this identical little wood by the river.
On the upper side of the cross-timbers pasture and about four miles north of the ranch house three small streams with insignificant sources somewhere out in the old buffalo lands came into confluence, and a few hundred feet east of this point Lake had constructed a small dam. Upstream was a long and narrow excavation made to receive and retain waters equal to the ability of the dam to hold in check. These streams fur- nished clear water that was quite superior to the muddy liquid of the Canadian, and here the horses and the young spring calves quenched their thirst. Robert Lake pictured land- scaping possibilities here-a great lake with long, narrow, meandering inlets, furnishing shady retreats and picturesque nooks and little wooded islands created by canals eut from one inlet to another. Could he have returned a quarter of a con- tury later and looked upon this Belle Isle, perhaps he would have sincerely repented that his once genuine devotion to prog- ress departed with the passing years.
On this ranch the last buffalo of the midlands of the West was slain. The animal had strayed away from a herd driven out of the Wichita Mountains and sought refuge in the Keechi Hills. A cowboy dressed the hide and it became a rug in the big living room of the Lake home.
Rainfall was regular and of sufficient quantity to make vegetation in glorious abundance. In midsummer sage grass in the valleys and the lower slopes of the rolling hills grew nearly as high as the knee of a man in the saddle. On prairie eminenees and in shallower soil mesquite grass thrived. Wild flowers of a hundred shades and forms smiled in early spring. splashing the hillsides with a million fragrant bouquets. Out- Vol. 1-4
50
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
spread landscapes of trees and streams and hills and valleys and grass and flowers were clothed with beauty into the dim blue of the distant horizon. Westward from the ranch house the eye detected no sign or symbol of artificiality. It looked upon the big outdoors of God's country, a land of perpetual splendor, sufficiently varied in topography to furnish inspira- tion to the elect of the painters' craft. No suggestion of the desert, so illustrative of the West. East of the land of the cactus and the haggard, drouth-blighted mesquite. East of the monotony of unending levels. Backward from the re- gions of gyp, backward into the everlasting sources of crystal pure water.
"It's a wonderful country," said Robert Lake.
"And it's our country," spoke his wife. She loved this West. She entered it protesting as a bride. But it wood her into adoration. The flowers and the hills were hers, the trees and the rippling water, the mellow sunsets and even the spec- tacularly dramatic electrical storms of April and November. She was unforgiving of intruders. Their motives she inter- preted as ulterior. An idea of the greater good she could not entertain with this deep-seated prejudice against them.
"Not our country but God's country, " her husband mildly corrected her. They had sat long in thought and discussion. Mid morning slipped quickly upon them.
"We won't leave it," he concluded. "Whatever happens, we'll stay. If it is opened to settlers we'll bid them welcome and divide the sunshine and the flowers with them. We'll be big-hearted, liberal-handed-and, Georgiana, don't you think we'd enjoy having some neighbors again ?"
Georgiana Lake refound her girlhood and the good and loyal friends of other years. She suddenly recollected that she had been lonesome many, many times, that she had en- dured adversities, that she had surrendered many of the finer things of life to live this string of years in the West with the man she loved. So she found some joy in tears and she wept them unabashed. And Memory was her pensive Ruth that went "gleaning the silent fields of childhood" to find the "shat- tered grain still golden and the morning sunlight frosh and fair."
.
51
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
Shawnee Town, Louis and Mary found a scene of unusual activity. Its sandy little streets were trod by men of foreign habitation. They were strong men, with sunbrowned faces and bared forearms. They wore wide-rimmed hats, such as most men wore in Arkansas, and stoggy crashing boots with pantaloons erammed inside, as was the fashion in the black- lands of Texas. They carried murderous looking revolvers in scabbards at their hips and the stocks of long peppery whips in their hands. They came out of wagons covered with sheets that were weather stained and muddy and that wilted like soiled linens over the saggy bows at the rear. Their wagons were drawn by oxen. Some most heavily loaded were hitched to two or three teams of oxen. In the wagons were all manner of beds and boxes and implements, and above them, their bonneted heads protruding into the sunshine, scores of tired-looking women and dirty-faced children.
Fifty such outfits were halted in the sandy streets of old Shawnee Town. They had halted for provisions, to rest the teams, to get directions for traveling, to find a convenient camping place, and to give the men an opportunity to recon- noiter.
The faces of the men were not displeasing, yet one could easily imagine they carried a distrustful cast of sternness. Undoubtedly they were purposeful faces. But they were not the purposeful faces, for instance, of marshals of the Terri- tory who traveled in groups with like firearms and carried Winchesters on their saddles. They were not pleasure-seek- ers; they were movers. Their equipment differed decidedly from that of the average covered wagon of that day, which carried summer tourists who had laid by erops and were bound for the home of dad or to visit "wife's kinfolks."
"Like as not they're goin' to take the old man's ranch." the trading-post proprietor said in answer to Lonis' interroga- tion. "They're headed for Oklahoma or bust, they tell me. They say there's a million acres of gov'ment land out there and that it belongs to the people of the country and not to a few cattle kings."
"That's a big country," said Mason. "Did they indicate where they calculated to stop ?"
"They have had a scout over the country and he picked
.
52
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
'em a likely place. This scout met 'em here, and one of 'em said he told 'em about some fine land on the Canadian River near the Lake ranch."
"Damnation!" exploded Louis Mason. "Who's the cap- tain of the bunch ?"
The merchant indicated the man to whom the scout had reported.
"You wait here in the store, dear, " he said to Mary. "I'll see what these galoots are up to."
"So you're the messenger of the cattle kings, are you ?" smiled a big bullyragging sort of an Arkansan after Ma- son had introduced himself. "I 'lowed as how the sharks'd be sendin' a delegation out to meet ns."
"No delegation at all," Mason hastened to assure him. "We didn't know you were coming, or we'd have killed the fatted calf."
Mason know their kind. He spoke their language on occa- sion. He knew their manner of living. their habits. They were not greatly unlike the whites and halfbreeds of his own nation, for the whites of his nation had come principally from the land of red apples, sassafras tea, and lumber camps.
"We didn't expect no reception this fur out," big Bill Bryant laughed in return, "and neither did we look fur a Injun to head the reception committee. But now that we have met, what can we do fur you, how are all the folks and what's the chance to get a gallon o' moonshine ?"
"Where do you expect to stop in Oklahoma ?" Mason asked, driving at once to the issue. 7
"That depends on the grass and water and the lay of the land," answered Bryant. "You see we are advised by our lawyers that the whole country is subject to settlement and that the early birds may have their choice. We calculate to take the best we can find."
"I fear your legal advice is unsound," argued Mason, good naturedly, "but that's not here nor there. Other people in Oklahoma have rights that must be respected. You certainly do not expect to trespass upon lands occupied by others, for if you have rights, they undoubtedly have the same rights."
"We don't allow as how we'll have to do any shootin', " the
.
.
53
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
brawny one replied, "but we come prepared. Wild Injans might be abroad, you know."
Bryant laughed coarsely. He was sagely if indelicately evasive. Mason perceived that he could make no progress in an exchange of provincial half-serious pleasantries. IIe wished Bryant and his crowd luck and turned toward the buckboard and the waiting girl with apparent good humor.
They drove hurriedly westward out of the village, Louis silent and thoughtful. Unmindful of the seriousness of events rapidly approaching and suppressing an alert curiosity, Mary permitted the silence to continue until Lonis ended it sud- denly as if a conclusion had been reached.
"We're going to have serious trouble," he told the girl.
"Trouble!" she exclaimed. "You don't mean that those movers are thieves or ontlaws?"
"Worse than that," he replied; "they are highwaymen who take your possessions in broad daylight."
Then he told her a story of the long fight by heads of colo- nization schemes and railroad lobbies against the cattlemen of the Unassigned Territory. He told of the powerful influ- ences brought to bear in Washington, of the building of a mountain of prejudice against grazing lessees, of expeditions of land seekers and their ejection by United States soldiers; in short, of a succession of events that had transpired during the recent few years on the frontier. This information the parents of Miss Lake had concealed from her.
"The days of the cattlemen are numbered," he concluded. "This gang at Shawnee Town probably will not trouble us, for I know how to deal with them peaceably; but the effort they make, which is likely to end in failure, will only add another link to the chain of events that eventually will induce Congress to let the farmers in."
Conversation on the return journey was hedgy. It had a tone of depression and was sporadic. Whatever there was of it interrupted the building of two castles in the air. Brown and gold veneered the shaggy timber. The winding narrow road, of red elay on the long slopes and brown-sugar sand in the endless succession of parallel depressions, unobstructed by fences, fringed by brown grasses and shaded here and there · by frowsy tree tops, was the principal highway between the
.
54
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes and the Unassigned Territory. It was a country fit to grow fruits and vegetables, peanuts and watermelons, and its wrinkled surface, the char- acter of its stone and the dip of its depressions indicated hid- den pools of natural gas.
Louis Mason reached the ranch without a definite light, for the gray haze of the future. Mary Lake, mindful of an increasing devotion to Louis, envisioned contentment beyond the horizon, but found only tangles of briars in the mental landscape of the day.
"We'll find a way, little girl," he whispered to her in the starlight by the yard gate. "I love you beyond words and that love shall be my guide, my inspiration, my comfort, until the storm clouds are passed and my joy and my life when the fair days come again."
"It's good to love, " breathed Mary. She snuggled momen- tarily in his arms and her rubieund lips welcomed the warm touch of his. "You'll find a way, Louis," she said. "Good night."
Events of the succeeding months are chapters of the dra- matic history of the Unassigned Territory just prior to the passage by congress of a bill providing for the opening of the Territory to homestead settlement. They included the migra- tion of the cattle kings, dispossession of the ranges, removal of property, stationing of soldiers along the borders, ejection of persons who were called "sooners," and eventually the firing of military guns that signaled the beginning of the greatest rush for land in all history.
Robert Lake was among the first to pull stake. He sold his cattle, delivered his home temporarily into possession of the Government and moved his family and household goods into the Pottawotomie Country.
"Whether in the future it may be called an honor or a dishonor for one to be known as a sooner, " he said, "we shall at least be immune from the charge of being obstructionists."
Louis Mason accompanied them, counting this the last service to his employer. And when they were settled in an Indian-country log-cabin at Shawnee Town and the morning of a third day was dawning. he rode away through the open forest in the direction of his Indian home.
55-56
...
TWO AND A BEAUTY SPOT
1
+T'
.
57
THE STORY OF OKLAHOMA CITY
Robert Lake participated in the run for lands, an event transpiring within a year after his departure from the ranch. He rode his swiftest horse and was equipped with camp para- phernalia and bisenits and bacon. Every day for three weeks before the run he had exercised himself and his horse in prep- aration for an endurance test that not even the most expe- rienced cow punchers ever had had to undergo.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.