Buck—The Settlement of Oklahoma. 
347 
deputy-marshals, railroad men and their friends, several hun¬ 
dred acres of town-site had been staked out, and a few * 1 tents 
erected near the land office to hold the claim. But the people 
from the train soon grasped the situation, and no attention was 
paid to the rights and privileges of the deputy marshals and 
their friends. The passengers made their exit from the ears 
through the windows or any other convenient openings and 
scrambled pell-mell up the hillside in the wild race for town lots. 
Everything was in confusion, no one seemed to know where the 
streets were going to run or where he wanted to drive his stakes. 
The race was not over when a lot was staked out, for improve^ 
ments had to he made in the shape of a little tent or wooden 
shanty. Many hired an enterprising man with a plow r , who 
appeared on the scene, to mark out their lots with a furrow, 
but as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so was it the 
price of a town-lot in Guthrie that day, and the surest way to 
prevent a claim from being jumped was to: guard it with a 
loaded revolver. 1 
At the close of the first day Guthrie was a city of nearly 
a thousand tents and several thousand inhabitants, but in a 
short time many of these tents were superseded by small frame 
structures and the city began to assume a more permanent asr 
pect. The first few days were largely spent in wrangling over 
lots and in contentions between the different town-site com¬ 
panies. The representatives of the various companies finally 
got together and appointed a committee to adjust matters, and 
this committee went around from lot to lot taking evidence and 
pronouncing judgment as to the rightful possessor of the 
lot. Although their decisions were not always accepted, it 
quieted matters somewhat, and before the city was a week old 
the savage and ferocious “boomer” with knives and pistols 
sticking out all over him had quietly tucked his revolver away 
in his satchel and appeared as a plain, ordinary, everyday 
grocer, butcher, or real estate man. 2 The organization of a 
and these lots, with certain reservations excepted, are then open to 
homestead settlement. 
1 Cosmopolitan , vol. 7, p. 461. 
2 Ibid. 
