Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 5
Boomer Town
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
“Miles of wagons; a welter of horsemen; random shots fired in the air … from the four corners of that land besieged by settlers one cry goes up, ‘Oklahoma! Oklahoma!’” wrote the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, who was on hand to see the first Oklahoma land rush just over a century ago. Although most of the downtown area’s nineteenth-century buildings still line the wide streets, it’s difficult to imagine Guthrie as the capital city during those frenzied times, for the pace and purpose of the town have changed so dramatically. Guthrie is chiefly remembered today as one of those towns that sprang to life overnight not because of oil or gold but because of the free land the federal government offered in one of five Oklahoma land runs a century ago.
During the 1880s, a group of Boomers—as the farmers and the developers thirsting for new land were then known—pressed Congress to open the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. When they finally did get access to nearly two million acres, the last large block of Western land available under the Homestead Act, the Boomers dashed in (a good many of them jumped the gun, sneaked in illegally, and became known as Sooners, thereby giving Oklahoma a nickname that has stuck to this day).
The exuberant false fronts on Guthrie’s brick Victorian buildings suggest the residents’ confidence that their community would become the center of politics and culture for the new state. Indeed, Guthrie was named the territorial capital in 1889, but in 1910, after a hard-fought battle, the capital shifted to Oklahoma City, and Guthrie settled into its new existence as a small town—and an excellent example of turn-of-the-century prairie life.
Still, Guthrie was founded by speculators and entrepreneurs, and even now the visitor can feel some of that same energy being brought to bear as the town struggles to revitalize and restore itself.
Although Guthrie residents were bitterly disappointed by the loss of their capital status, today the town draws tourists who come to see current musical comedies and plays at the Pollard Theater and crowd the Saturday-night rodeos at the Lazy E Arena ten minutes outside town. But none of these modern distractions diminishes the sense of the old Guthrie that burst into being a century ago “like a lump of self-raising dough,” as O. Henry put it.
Guthrie lies 30 miles north of the present capital, along the Cottonwood Creek near its confluence with the Cimarron River. Driving toward town along Route 77, you pass acres of scrub trees and the Southwestern red marrow of the vibrant clay that was used to create most of the buildings in the town.
Many Oklahoma settlers came from Kansas, Texas, and Missouri, where they had been hard hit by the droughts of the early 1880s. Most of the roughly fifty thousand land seekers arrived by train, bringing their goods with them over relatively short distances and often hopping off when they saw a good