Poof! Instant City

Carnegie Library, Guthrie, Oklahoma

So today I’m back in Oklahoma, racing along the plain, scoping out the ‘available’ land and finally pitching my tent and staking a lot near the railroad tracks in Guthrie, Oklahoma.  It is April 11, 1889.  According to Benjamin Harrison’s land run plan, otherwise know as finders keepers, or first come, first serve, I am now a landowner and in Guthrie.  9,999 other adventurous settlers also arrived on that same afternoon.  A reporter for Harper’s Weekly wrote, “Unlike Rome, the city of Guthrie was built in a day.”

Before long the ambitious settlers moved out of their tents and started building a model city.  Within months Guthrie was know as the “queen of the prairie” and began the work that would result in a picture perfect Victorian downtown made up of smart stone and brick buildings and offered city water, electricity and even underground carriage parking - fancy.  Two years after the land run and tent city, Guthrie opened their own, rather elaborate, Carnegie Library.

The Old Carnegie Library still stands in Guthrie but has been re-purposed as the Oklahoma Territorial Museum.  The Carnegie Foundation was not all that impressed by the building’s fancy dome or ornamental fireplace - a little high and mighty, in their opinion, but Guthrie had an image to uphold and stuck to their fancy vision.  The legacy is a classically beautiful building that houses artifacts, paitings and photographs from Oklahoma’s wild and crazy past.

A year later Oklahoma became an official territory of the United States and Guthrie became the capital.  Guthrie grew and prospered for the next 16 years when Oklahoma became the 46th state and Guthrie served as its capital.  The first state governor was sworn in on the steps of the stately Carnegie Library.  Guthrie is now the largest urban historic district in the country and a National Historic Landmark, but only thanks to Oklahoma City.  

Oklahoma City usurped Guthrie as the state capital in 1910 in a stealthy midnight operation conducted by the governor. He actually grabbed the state seal and rode off in the night to Oklahoma City - when everyone woke up in the morning, presto - a new capital.  But here is the very cool thing about this unconventional change of government...because everyone started going to Oklahoma City, Guthrie was preserved, as a living time capsule.  It is probably because of the exodus to Oklahoma City that the Carnegie Library and the downtown center have not been demolished.  They left behind a lovely Victorian enclave that welcomes tourists and historians.

The dark underbelly of the story was the effect of settlement on the Native American Tribes in Oklahoma.   The National Park Service explains,  “In the tents and shanties that sheltered all the new citizens of Oklahoma,
that first night on their new lands must have been simply divine. For the American Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes - who thought they had a permanent home in Oklahoma - that same night must have been full of sadness, anger, and despair.”  A perfect example of win-lose thinking.

Oklahoma Land Run

Oklahoma Land Run 1889

Culture Shock Alert....we’re headed to Oklahoma.  After a week at the New York Public Library I was ready for a change so I made a big one and ended up in Guthrie, Oklahoma where the library is actually older than the state.  
Before we get to the library you have to know a little about Oklahoma’s, and Guthrie’s, quirky history (believe me, quirky is an understatement, I couldn’t even make this stuff up!).

After the Civil War the US was in a big hurry to get southern Indian tribes off their land so it could be used for farming and mining.  Not surprisingly the tribes (Chickasaw, Cherokee, Chocktaw, Creek and Seminole) weren’t that excited about leaving their ancestral homeland, so our government rounded them up and marched them off by force.  To make up for any bad feelings they promised the tribes that they would have their own territory  “for as long as the stars shall shine and the rivers may flow” (and sadly the Native Americans believed them - not like they had a lot of choices).  They were marched to the Indian Territory (later to be known as Oklahoma) because the administration figured that no one would ever want to settle way out in the middle of nowhere on land that was worthless.  (I guess they didn’t foresee the oil boom that would quickly lead to Oklahoma “becoming the largest oil producing entity in the world”.)
  
Before the government knew what was happening the country’s boundaries exploded and settlers were popping up across the nation, all the way to California.  Settlers were hungry for land, any land, and the chance to strike it rich.  Congress was starting to sweat under the pressure.  So they did what politicians do; they went back on their word and came up with a scheme to take the Indian Territory back from the Native Americans.  

Although the politics got pretty complicated, the short story is that the territory was divided into 160 acres land plots and each Indian “head of household” became a proud landowner of less land than they started with - once again the Native Americans were cheated and betrayed and all the “unassigned lands” that the government suddenly owned could be “improved” and paid for by eager settlers.

According to the National Park Service, before the Land Run of 1889, Guthrie was literally a railroad station and  a post office.  Guthrie sprang into existence in SIX hours on April 22,  when 10,000 new citizens swarmed into town, set up their tents and claimed their land, thanks to Benjamin Harrison.  A land run, to my amazement, was exactly that...50,000 settlers lined up on the border and at 12 noon, after the firing of a canon, they took off to stake their claim on land somewhere in the 2 million available acres of the territory - exactly like that terrifying moment when your toddler lines up at the beginning of an easter egg hunt surrounded by greedy hoards of big kids.  The runners ran into a lot of people that would later be called “sooners” who somehow had beaten them into the territory and already claimed choice parcels of land - which kept the local land offices very busy.

I know, there is no library in sight, I’m getting there, come back tomorrow and I’ll finish this unreal story.