Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/204

 that almost every dollar invested on the Little Crow had been doubled in a short time, and in many instances a hundred dollars soon grew to a thousand or more.

Practically all the lowest number holders had filed around Ritten, including numbers one and two. Ever since the opening of Oklahoma in 1901, when number one took a claim adjoining the city of Lawton, and the owner is said to have received thirty thousand dollars for it, the holder of number one in every opening of western land since has been a very conspicuous figure, and this was not lost on the holder of number one in Tipp county—who was a divorced woman. She took her claim adjoining the town of Ritten, which fact brought the town considerable attention. The lots in the town brought the highest price of any which had been sold in any town on the Little Crow, up to that time, several having sold for from one thousand, two hundred to one thousand, four hundred dollars and one as high as two thousand and fifty dollars.

The town of Amro, being surrounded by Indian allotments, had few settlers in its immediate vicinity. The Indians, profiting by their experience in Megory county, where they learned that good location meant increase in the value of their lands, had, in selecting allotments, taken nearly all the land just west of Amro, as they had taken practically all of the good land just west of Calias in the eastern part of Tipp county. The good land all over the county had been picked over and the Indians had selected much of the best, but Tipp county is a large one, and several hundred thousand acres of good land