Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/270

Dividing the Spoils been equally bound in its manner of dividing the spoils.

What has always been the result?

Instead of the Government beckoning to civilization to people its wilderness, we find it announcing the day and hour set for the opening of its public land. The fixed price per acre is but a fraction of its value; Uncle Sam gives the Faithful the full benefit of his sharp bargains with the Indians. The military parades across the tract to keep it clear of "sooners"—an expressive term applied to boomers who enter the promised land sooner than they ought; on the day of the opening, soldiers with loaded rifles are posted in front of the hungry horde, with orders to shoot if the line is overstepped—and they have shot, too, with telling effect; adventurers take the place of bonâ fide settlers, and alluring Chance supercedes reasonable expectation of reward for labor.

The evils and abuses attending the "rush" system reached their culmination at the opening of the Cherokee Strip, on the northern border of the Indian Territory, in September, 1893. The reader cannot better comprehend this method of dividing the spoils than by attending, in retrospect, this most grotesque event.

A hundred thousand men stand in line on land in Kansas and Oklahoma worth from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars an acre, gazing upon land to be offered at the crack of a gun for one dollar and a 249