Tilghman took the pragmatic view. While serving as marshal of Dodge City, he had watched the Indians fight what was clearly a losing battle. At the forefront of the struggle was Captain David Payne. A drifter and ne’er-do-well, Payne had served briefly in the Kansas militia and the territorial legislature. Yet he was a zealot of sorts, and in the settlement of Indian lands he had at last found his cause.
Advertising widely, Payne made fiery speeches exhorting the people to action, and gradually organized a colony of settlers. Every six months or so he’d led his scruffy band of fanatics into the Unassigned Lands, and just as regularly, the army ejected them. After several such invasions, each of which was a spectacular failure, Payne’s followers had become known as the Boomers. They were said to be booming the settlement of Indian Territory.
Though saner men deplored his tactics, Payne wasn’t alone in the fight. Railroads and politicians and merchant princes, all with their own axes to grind, had rallied to the cause. That they were using the Boomers to their own ends was patently obvious. But Payne and his rabble scarcely seemed to care. Frustrated martyrs in a holy quest, they would have joined hands with the devil himself to break the deadlock.
Tilghman’s woolgathering was broken by the sound of curses and shouts. Several camps down, where a fire blazed beside an overloaded wagon, two men squared off with knives. A crowd had formed a circle around them, goading the men on with guttural murmurs. Fights were common, fueled by liquor and building tension as the day for the land rush approached. But thus far no one had resorted to weapons.
No longer a lawman, Tilghman nonetheless reacted out of ingrained instinct. He hurried forward, Sutton only a step behind, as the two men slashed at one another, the steel of their knives glinting in the firelight. Shoving through the crowd, he swept his coat aside, drew a Colt Peacemaker from the holster on his hip, and thunked the nearest man over the head. The man went down as though struck by a sledgehammer.
The crowd was stunned into silence. But the other man instantly turned on Tilghman with his knife. His eyes were bloodshot from too much whiskey, his face contorted in an expression of rage. He advanced, flicking the blade with a drunken leer.
“C’mon ahead,” he said in a surly voice. “Just as soon cut you as him.”
Tilghman was tall, broad through the shoulders, hard as spring-steel. The firelight reflected off his cold blue eyes, showering his chestnut hair and brushy mustache with a touch of orange. He thumbed the hammer on his Colt, the metallic sound somehow deadlier in the stillness.
“Drop the knife,” he said quietly. “Otherwise you won’t be making the run tomorrow.”
“Kiss my rusty ass!” the drunk snarled. “You got no call buttin’ in on a private fight.”
Tilghman stared at him. “Let’s just say I made it my business. Do yourself a favor—don’t push it.”
“Gawddammit to hell anyway!”
The man tossed his knife on the ground. He whirled around, bulling his way through the crowd, and stormed off into the night. Tilghman slowly lowered the hammer and holstered his pistol. He turned, nodding to Sutton, and walked back toward their camp. Sutton whistled softly under his breath.
“Jumpin’ Jesus, Bill! You could’ve got yourself killed.”
“Not much chance of that, Fred. Those boys were blind drunk.”
“Yeah, but you’re not wearin’ a badge anymore—remember?”
“I reckon old habits die hard. No sense letting them carve on one another.”
Tilghman’s tone ended the discussion. At the campsite, he poured coffee into a galvanized cup and resumed staring into the night. Sutton, who understood the solitary nature of his friend, squatted down by the fire. He idly wondered if Tilghman had done the right thing by resigning as a lawman.
For his part, Tilghman dismissed from mind the knife fight. During his years in Dodge City, he had buffaloed countless drunken cowhands, whacking them upside the head with a pistol barrel. In the overall scheme of things, one more troublemaker hardly seemed to matter. His thoughts returned to tomorrow, the land rush, a new life. Oklahoma Territory.
Never had there been anything like it. President Benjamin Harrison’s proclamation opening the Unassigned Lands to settlement had created a sensation. Newspapers across the nation carried stories of the “great run” and what was described as the “Garden Spot of the World.” America turned its eye to Oklahoma Territory, drawn by the prospect of free land. The scintillating prose of journalists brought them hurrying westward by the tens of thousands.
Unstated in these news stories was the tale of intrigue and political skulduggery which lay behind the opening of Indian Lands. The Boomers’ squalling demands, though loud and impressive, were merely window dressing. Instead, it was the railroads—and their free-spending lobbyists—who brought unremitting pressure to bear on Congress. The first step had been to declare the right of eminent domain in Indian Territory.
By 1888 four railroads had laid track through the Nations, the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes. This cleared the way for settlement, and shortly after his inauguration, President Harrison decreed that the Unassigned Lands would be opened to homesteading at high noon on April 22, 1889. But it would be on a first-come-first-served basis, a race of sorts with millions of acres of virgin prairie as the prize.
The land-hungry multitudes cared little for whose ultimate benefit it had been organized. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were pouring into America each year, and they were concerned not so much with the land of the free as with free land. Here was something for nothing, and they flooded westward to share in the spoils.
Nearly one hundred thousand strong, they gathered north and
