The Promised Land

Linda Burton posting from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma –Rome wasn’t built in a day, they say, but Oklahoma City almost was. And Guthrie too, Oklahoma’s first capital city. At high noon on April 22, 1889, the resident population of Guthrie was nothing; before sundown it was at least 10,000. In that time streets were laid out, town lots staked off, and steps taken toward the formation of a municipal government. The same thing was happening in Oklahoma City, which would later become the capital. Within a month of its beginnings, Oklahoma City had five banks and six newspapers. This phenomenal development is known as The Land Run, or, as some called it back then, Harrison’s Horserace. You see, President Benjamin Harrison announced on March 3 of that momentous year that almost two million acres of “unassigned lands” in Indian Territory would be opened for settlement on April 22. With only seven weeks to prepare, land-hungry Americans quickly began to gather. By the appointed day more than 50,000 hopefuls were living in tent cities on all four sides of the territory, waiting for the signal to claim their land. Precisely at noon in one of the most dramatized and chaotic episodes in western history, the cannons were fired. » read more