We Were There at the Oklahoma Land Run
Copyright© 2024 by Jim Kjelgaard
Chapter 12: Plains City
Pete and Jed were asleep in the wagon. Completely enchanted by the night, Alec and Cindy sat outside.
A big round moon hung so low in the sky that it seemed to roll like a wagon wheel right across the tops of the hillocks. There couldn’t possibly be such a moon anywhere except in Oklahoma. It shed so much light that Cindy thought she could count every hair on the picketed horses and mules. She could see the grass plainly, and had she had a book, she would have been able to read it.
But, though it was almost as light as day, it was wholly different. The moon’s was a ghost light, and it was easy to imagine that witches and elves were abroad in it. Cindy shivered and hugged her knees.
“Do you know what I’d do if we weren’t going to Plains City tomorrow?” she asked Alec.
“What would you do?”
“I’d go on a ghost hunt!” Cindy exclaimed.
“It would be fun,” Alec agreed, “but we are going, and we’d better get some sleep.”
“I couldn’t possibly sleep!”
But she slept the instant she drew the blanket around her, and when she woke the sun was shining and Pete was cooking breakfast. Plains City was only two miles away, it would take just a short time to record the claims, and there was no need to get up before daylight. Cindy jumped out of the wagon, and Alec grinned at her.
“Thought you couldn’t sleep?”
“Pooh!” Cindy made a face at her brother. “How do you know I did?”
“Maybe that was someone else snoring?”
“I don’t snore!”
“Better get some breakfast into you,” Pete said.
Everyone else had finished breakfast. While Cindy ate, Pete and Jed staked the work horses and mules in fresh grass and saddled Sunshine and the roan ponies. Alec started washing the dishes, and as soon as she was finished, Cindy handed him her plate.
“Hey!” he protested. “You might at least wash your own!”
“I have to pack a lunch.”
“Not today,” said her father, who had come back and overheard. “Everyone’s been working hard, and everyone deserves a rest. We’ll eat in a restaurant.”
When everything was ready, Pete mounted his roan pony and Jed swung up on Sunshine. After an argument, which Cindy won, about who was going to sit the saddle and hold the reins, Alec and Cindy rode double on Sparkle. The mules and horses had also worked hard, and they needed a rest.
They rode at a walk across the grasslands. Everywhere, in what only a short time ago had been such a lonely place, were sod houses and gardens. Not all the homesteads had men on them, but nearly all had grazing horses, mules, or oxen, and there were a few cattle. Then they mounted a hillock, looked down on Plains City, and halted in astonishment.
“Ooh!” squealed Cindy.
Alec said, “Gosh!”
“Beats all!” Jed Simpson exclaimed.
“Sure does!” Pete seconded.
Instead of a town or village, they looked down upon a city. True, for the most part it was a city of tents. But there were some wooden buildings, well-planned streets, streams of wagons going in and coming out, and more people than any of them had ever before seen in one place. The sounds were those of hammering, sawing, shouting, creaking, everything that could possibly be connected with a city in the making.
A little overwhelmed because they’d expected a baby and found a giant, they rode slowly into the city. A man on a running mule careened crazily among the wagons, and a man driving a four-horse span hitched to a heavy wagon spoke to him in terms that are never heard in polite company.
“Cover your ears, Cindy,” Alec ordered.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Cindy said sweetly.
Her eyes were big and growing bigger. A wagon piled high with lumber picked up at the railroad swerved to where some men were working frantically on a wooden building. Two of the workers, Cindy saw, were the carefree young men who had camped close to the Simpson wagon on the border and had taken little interest in anything except fun. They’d probably thought that getting land in Oklahoma was a huge joke too, and as a result they hadn’t got any. Cindy supposed that most of the people who had no claims would either go back home or work for someone else.
Next to the building was a tent with “Poast Ofise” written on it in red paint. At least two hundred people who hoped to get mail stood in a long line outside it. Next was another tent with a sign, “J. C. Summers, Wholesale and Retail Grocer,” and next to that a wooden building whose sign proclaimed that it belonged to Caldwell and Hunter, dry-goods merchants.
Everybody, including those who stood in various lines, for there was much pushing and shoving, seemed in a great hurry.
“What are they all doing?” Alec inquired.
“They are,” his father said happily, “building Plains City.” He called to a man standing beside a building, “Where’s the livery stable?”
“Straight down!” The man waved his hand down the street.
“We’ll leave our horses and walk around awhile,” Mr. Simpson said. “It’s worth seeing.”
The livery stable, when they finally reached it, was merely a series of posts with ropes stretched between them. There were so many horses, mules, and ponies already tied to the ropes that there couldn’t possibly be room for more. But just as they rode up, four horsemen rode away.
“Any room?” Mr. Simpson asked the lank, tobacco-chewing man in charge of the livery.
“Yup.”
“How much?”
“Fifty cents a head.”
“That include hay and water?”
“Yup.”
“I looked from the top of a knoll,” said Mr. Simpson. “I thought that town sites could be no more than three hundred and twenty acres. Plains City seems almost three times that.”
“Plains City,” the livery man said, “is igzactly three hun’ert an’ twenty acres.”
Mr. Simpson grinned. “Who do you think you’re fooling?”
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