hey were independent because the land was their own, their earnings
their own.

For many years the Public Land seemed inexhaustible; it was not until
the Civil War had been waged for two years, with the country disrupted
by conflict, and people looking--as they will in times of disaster--for
a place where they might be at peace, that they realized the desirable
land at the government's disposal was gone. But there remained the land
of the red men, and white settlers looked on it and found it good. They
raised a clamor for it, and the most determined staked out their claims
and lived on it regardless of treaty.

As a result, the government yielded to public pressure and took over the
land from the Indians, forcing them back once more. It wasn't quite as
simple as it sounds, of course; it took some twenty-five years and
nearly a thousand battles of one kind and another to do it. But at the
end of that time the land again had been absorbed by the people, settled
in accordance with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the demand continued.

The government then bought Oklahoma from the Indians in 1889. It was
impossible to satisfy all those who wanted homesteads and difficult to
choose those who should have them. A plan was therefore hit upon to give
everyone a chance. On the day of the Oklahoma Opening, throngs of white
settlers stood at the boundary and at a given signal rushed upon the
land, taking it by speed and strategy and trickery--and too often by
violence.

Within twenty-four hours the land was occupied; within a week there were
frame buildings over the prairie, and villages and towns followed at a
speed inconceivable to the foreign nations which looked on, breathless
and staggered at the energy of a people who measured the building of a
western empire not by generations but by seasons.

And the demand for land continued. There was a depression in the East
and jobs were hard to get; with the growth of factories many young men
and women had flocked from farms and villages to cities, and they were
not finding conditions to their liking. They wanted to return to the
life they knew best, the life of the farm. In the more populous sections
the price of land was rising and was already beyond the reach of many
pocketbooks. There remained only Public Land--land which was allotted to
the Indians.

The government, accordingly, began to withdraw from the Indian
Allotments great tracts, by further treaties and deals, slashing