SCOURGE OF THE SOONERS
The history of this one day will forever be memorable in frontier annals and will leave behind a heritage of litigation which will be fruitful to land sharks and claim attorneys but be destructive to the claims of poor and honest settlers—The St. Louis Republic, April 23, 1889
Shortly after noon on April 22, 1889, Edward W. Osburn stood atop a wagon along a ridge in Oklahoma Country to behold a surreal spectacle on the vast prairie below. The Kansas farmer saw “probably 2,000 wagons—trains 5 to 8 miles in length” and “hundreds of horsemen in a dead run.” He documented the historic moment in his journal, later hastily adding in pencil, “Carts, buggies, light wagons. Everything at breakneck speed.”
Osburn was among the estimated 50,000 people who joined the epic race that day in hopes of staking a 160-acre claim. A month earlier, on March 23, President Benjamin Harrison had signed a proclamation that opened 2 million acres of Oklahoma Country known officially as the Unassigned Lands to non-Indian settlement. Homesteaders had long considered the acreage among the richest unoccupied sections of public land in the United States, and the proclamation had formally carved it away from Indian Territory.
It also sparked a land rush of unprecedented proportions. From penniless farmers and restless cowboys to tradesmen and carpetbaggers, tens of thousands of Americans from across the nation flooded the four corners of Oklahoma Country for
