372 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts , and Letters. 
during the sixty days fell fifteen hundred below the estimated 
number of quarter-sections, it seems that nearly all the desir¬ 
able farms were taken, and what may have been left were im¬ 
mediately entered under the homestead laws when the sixty days 
limit had expired. Thus once more a large area, this time 
about two million acres, excluding the Indian grazing land, the 
military reservation and the Wichita forest reserve, was added 
to the jurisdiction of Oklahoma territory and settled within a 
year, with a population of nearly seventy-five thousand people. 
The system under which the last great opening in Oklahoma 
was carried on evoked considerable criticism from the public 
press on account of its lottery aspects, and was branded by one 
writer as morally and economically wrong, 1 but when we con¬ 
sider the people who were most deeply interested, the applicants 
themselves, we find almost universal satisfaction and no com¬ 
plaint of unfairness or injustice. 2 Of course the fact that over 
ten times as many people were drawn to the opening as could get 
homesteads seems to be a defect in the system, but the disap¬ 
pointed ones calmly packed up and returned home or winded 
their way to western Oklahoma to try their luck in another lot¬ 
tery where the prize was not the land, but sufficient rainfall to 
make the land productive. Certainly this method of opening 
large tracts of land was far better than any previously employed, 
for it did away altogether with the “sooner” element and the 
litigation over conflicting claims. 3 
THE PEOPLE WHO SETTLED OKLAHOMA. 
A question which immediately presents itself in consider¬ 
ing the settlement of Oklahoma is, who are the people who 
have settled the territory and where did they come from? 
Although this question has been touched upon incidentally in 
other places, it will be well to consider it here by itself. The 
best source of information on the subject is of course the United 
States census for 1900, where we find that in that year the 
1 John G. Speed, Outlook, July 20, 1901. 
2 Sec. Int. Rept., 1901, p. cclxviii, 
* Ibid., p. Ixxvi. 1 
