Buck—The Settlement of Oklahoma. 345 
gather on the borders. Those on the north stopped at Arkan¬ 
sas City or Caldwell or camped along the border. Each of 
these places had its population increased many fold by this 
great influx of transients, while on the 1 southern border a veri¬ 
table metropolis sprang up where before was nothing but a rail¬ 
road station and a water tank. This was. at Purcell in the 
Chickasaw district, just across the Canadian river from Oklar 
homa. 1 A week before the opening, there were about fifteen 
hundred prospective settlers at each of the northern cities, and 
the number grewi at a rapidly increasing rate as the time drew 
near. Together with those at smaller camps and on the south¬ 
ern line, there were on the twenty-second of April at least 
twenty thousand people waiting for the sound of the bugle 
which should let them into' the coveted territory. 
As those on the 1 north would otherwise have been at a serious 
disadvantage compared to their southern rivals, the authori¬ 
ties decided to permit them to cross 1 the Cherokee Strip 
after the eighteenth. Consequently most of the outfits moved 
down from the cities to the line on the seventeenth to get an 
early start the next day. At a signal blast from a bugle in 
the morning, the procession started across the strip. Before 
noon five hundred wagons had crossed the border of the ex¬ 
temporized road near Arkansas 1 City, and more were on the 
way, and still the city was overflowing. 2 Trains came rolling 
in every hour filled with prospective settlers from all parts of the 
Union, and on the morning of the twenty-second most of these 
gathered around the depot and the five trains drawn up' on ad¬ 
jacent tracks ready to make the run, and speculated as; to which 
train would start first. But so great was the crowd that those 
were lucky who got a place on any of the trains. The plat¬ 
forms were overflowing, some clambered up on top of the 
coaches, and a few even rode on the car trucks in their anxiety 
to get there in good season. As the trains moved slowly across 
the strip, the passengers could see the endless procession of wag¬ 
ons still winding on toward the goal. When the Oklahoma 
border was reached, the “boomers” were found drawn up in a 
1 Tribune Extras, vol. 1, no. 7, pp. 21-9. 
2 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 
