I can’t help myself. Forty years as an English teacher—it’s instinct, I guess. Forgive me for playing the teacher.
One of the most famous lines of poetry from Emily Dickenson goes like this:
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all.
At twelve o'clock on Monday, April 22nd, 1893, Guthrie, Oklahoma had no streetlights, no streets, no citizenry--no trees for that matter, and therefore likely few birds. But somewhere soon after sundown, ten thousand people lived there. City streets had been laid out, lots portioned off, and, at least unofficially, some citizenry working to establish a government. Guthrie, Oklahoma was built in a day.
In 1883, two million acres of land, formerly set aside for Indian relocation, was, as of April 22nd, open for homesteading. Some—no, many!—considered a chunk of free land on “the Cherokee strip” the finest ground left on the Plains. And, it was free. Hope is the thing with feathers.
When the deadline approached, thousands of people—think of it!—from all the states in the union and all social and economic classes assembled.
It was the great Oklahoma Land Rush. Thousands of dreamers living out of their covered wagons or in makeshift tents or dugouts on the Kansas state line, all of them waiting, not patiently either, to fly across the line to find their great American dream. “A thing with feathers/that perches in the soul.”
For some, that signal didn’t come fast enough. Hundreds, maybe thousands snuck across and put some miles in before anyone could know, the “illegal immigrants” of the time. People called those early birds “Sooners” because they’d “sooner” not wait for something as trifling as the law.
Often as not, the Sooners were dragged back to Kansas. But no prison bars. No jail time. They were trespassers and became “boomers” when finally, gun shots started the land rush of dreamers flying across the line to land that once belonged, by treaty, to the Cherokee.
Here's the rub. The Oklahoma land rush, like its blood brother the California gold rush, was a glorious boom to some and a damned bust to others. Just a few days after the shotgun send-off, tons of boomers winged their teams back north.
The land-rush highway ran two ways--there and back, winners and losers----just like the Gold Rush. One woman, remembering meeting a train of folks returning empty handed from worthless California gold fields said, “most of it was humbug.” Get smart!” one woman told them. “Turn the wagons around and go back east!”
When she and her family had finally reached the place they long had sought, it was “just like those returning miners had said.”
“Hope is the thing with feathers/ that perches in the soul,” wrote Emily Dickenson 200+ years ago. She had it right.
We’re dreamers. You can tell both those stories with a single line of a poem.
Class dismissed.
