The Sooner

The word sooner is a cheat word. It refers to the people who entered the Unassigned Lands before the starting gun on April twenty-second, eighteen eighty-nine, slipping in ahead of the legal Land Run to stake their claims early. The U.S. government officially called them illegal settlers. Oklahoma called them its name.

The Unassigned Lands, the two million acres at the center of Indian Territory that no tribe had been assigned to hold, were opened to settlement after years of lobbying by what were called the Boomers, land-hungry settlers who had been sneaking into the territory and getting evicted by federal troops for years. When President Benjamin Harrison finally authorized the run, roughly fifty thousand people lined up along the borders. At noon on April twenty-second, the signal was given.

The legal settlers, the ones who followed the rules, rode horses and ran on foot and drove wagons from the borders toward the center, staking their claims on whatever unoccupied land they could reach first. The Sooners had gotten there faster by getting there earlier, some hiding in creek beds or ravines since the night before, waiting for the flood of legal settlers to wash over them so they could emerge and claim to have just arrived.

The two new cities that materialized from nothing that afternoon, Guthrie and Oklahoma City, each showed up in the census the following year with populations in the thousands. People arrived with nothing and left that day with a deed.

The word sooner eventually shed its original dishonor. The University of Oklahoma adopted it as a mascot. The state's license plates read the Sooner State. What began as a pejorative for rule-breaking became the governing mythology: Oklahomans as people who do not wait for permission, who move before the signal, who get there first. It is not an entirely flattering origin story, but it is an honest one.