The Land Run

The race for free land began at noon on April 22, 1889, with an estimated 50,000 participants from all over the world. Mounted soldiers fired their guns and blew their bugles to signal the Run of 1889, and people began racing from the perimeter boundaries of the Unassigned Lands. At Oklahoma Station, Station Master A. W. Dunham, standing on a box car at noon, saw settlers almost immediately and realized that some had not started from the perimeter boundaries. Legal settlers began arriving by rail and horseback about 1:15, but those who had started from inside the boundaries, later dubbed sooners, had already staked the choicest claims. By the end of the day, nearly every townsite lot and homestead claim was occupied, some legally and some not. Without an officially sanctioned territorial government, settlers were left to make sense of the chaos on their own.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma · United States