Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/226

 The crowds that flock to land openings, like other games of chance, are made up in a measure of speculators, people who journey to one of the registration points and make application for land, figuring that if they should draw an early number (that is, in the first five hundred) they would file, no thought of making a home, but simply to sell the relinquishment for the largest possible price.

When the filings were made, about sixty had dropped out of the first five hundred and even more out of the second five hundred, evidently thinking they were not likely to get enough for the relinquishment to pay them for their trouble and original investment, since it cost them a first payment of two hundred and six dollars on the purchase price of six dollars per acre and a locating fee of twenty-five dollars, and in some cases the first expense reached three hundred dollars. If the relinquishment was not sold before the six months allowed for establishing residence expired, it was necessary to establish residence making sufficient improvement for that purpose, or lose the money invested.

Out of the first four thousand numbers some two thousand had filed, and practically half of this number had contracted to sell their relinquishments. The buyers had deposited the amount to be paid in some bank to the credit of the claimant, to be turned over when the purchaser had secured filing on the land, the bank acting as agent between the parties to the transaction.

I shall long remember October 1, 190— in Megory—called the "Magic City," and claiming a population of three thousand, but probably not